More than 59 percent of children coming of age in Hunts Point live in poverty, a rate that has increased since 2008; more than 75 percent are living in single-parent families; on the Upper East Side, 14 percent are. Among 16- to 19-year-olds, 21.5 percent are neither in school nor working. This figure, known as the “teen idleness” rate, compared with 3 percent in TriBeCa (where presumably some number of those teenagers officially doing nothing are spending a gap year between Dalton and Stanford, writing memoirs and screenplays).

In TriBeCa and Battery Park, which turn out to be the best places to be a child, the teenage birth rate is zero. In Hunts Point, it is 41.3 births per 1,000 teenage girls, one of the highest in the city. What the data indicate is that things are worsening in Hunts Point, compared with the rest of the city. Gentrification fantasies have long attached to Hunts Point and the rest of the South Bronx but never really materialized. Although the unemployment rate in the area decreased significantly from 2000 to 2012, it remained high at 16 percent. In the Hunts Point, Melrose, Mott Haven and Longwood sections, poverty stands at 46 percent, more than twice the citywide rate, according to data from New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

If anything, the dispiriting realities in the South Bronx call into question the religion of entrepreneurialism to which so many modern urbanists adhere, believing that the more seed capital we can come up with for creators of sharing-economy start-ups and makers of rustic breads, the better off the masses will be. Hunts Point is home to the century-old former American Banknote Company Building, where currency was once printed and is now chased. A gleaming renovation has left part of it the home for a city-sponsored business incubator where new media and networking outfits, for instance, have taken hold. The city’s Economic Development Corporation recently awarded a $100,000 grant to a nonprofit group in the South Bronx for its work helping immigrant restaurant owners.

While this is an entirely noble and likely to be a worthwhile gesture, underlying it is the sentiment palpable in so many cities across the country right now, that the food revolution can essentially do the work of urban revitalization. In Pittsburgh, chic restaurants occupy architecturally significant downtown buildings while others are empty and 40-year-old chain-smokers on street corners remain visibly unoccupied. In Philadelphia, for instance, a nonprofit group called Entrepreneur Works, funded in part by the state and the city, proclaims as one of its successes the story of a man and his cookie business. “Jason Mercado may be homeless,” the entry on the group’s website reads, “but he is also well on his way to becoming a successful entrepreneur.”

The report from the Citizens Committee for Children points to the deep investment needed in prenatal care, in educational intervention preceding the age of 4, in raising high school graduation rates and lowering rates of teenage pregnancy in specific communities where severe poverty has been intractable for years. These are problems that chocolate and capitalism and chefs’ hats cannot easily solve.