Flashback to late 1970s driving through the Bronx with my family - an annual ritual as most of the extended family was still in the NYC area while we had moved

Flashback to late 1970s driving through the Bronx with my family - an annual ritual as most of the extended family was still in the NYC area while we had moved to Rochester. We would pass blocks of empty high-rise apartments in the South Bronx. As a middle-middle-class suburban kid, I just couldn't conceive of how the wealthiest city on earth could have sections that looked like a bombed-out and evacuated European city following World War II. I asked my father what had happened here. He answer was "rent control".