These sorts of projects may contain little of the thrill of a tech boom, but they are “at least serving the real, immediate needs of residents,” says Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. The Bronx may look troubled when compared with Brooklyn or Manhattan, but comparison with a Rust Belt city is probably more appropriate. “It looks good in comparison with Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis,” says Kenneth T. Jackson, the renowned New York City historian. Indeed, the borough has recovered remarkably from the 1970s, when the buildings were famously burned, and it still fulfills a crucial role in the city’s economic cycle. It remains the place, Jackson says, where many ambitious immigrants can “get started on the ladder of life and success.”

So perhaps the Bronx shouldn’t try to become a more affordable Greenwich Village (like parts of Brooklyn) or an enclave of the young, hip and ambitious (like parts of Queens). For economic inspiration, Katz suggests, the Bronx should look outside New York. Pittsburgh lost its steel industry, but the city — home to Carnegie Mellon, Pitt and other research institutions — redefined itself as a solid second-tier educational and research center. The Bronx, Katz says, is also strong in the highly coveted “eds and meds” sector. “It boggles the mind,” he says, how much hospitals and universities spend. As a result, they offer extensive potentially valuable service jobs without degree requirements.

Unlike former industrial cities that are struggling to find a new economic logic, the Bronx also happens to be a short train ride away from the financial capital of the world. And that might just be the borough’s real challenge. Manhattan is filled with so many clever businesspeople that it can suck up any great value created in its proximity. Can the Bronx somehow take advantage of its presence in the Manhattan economic orbit without being lost in it?

I thought of this as I talked to Theodore Livingston, better known as Grandwizzard Theodore, the creator of “scratching” and master of the needle drop. As a kid in the 1970s, he and a small group of friends pioneered hip-hop in the South Bronx. It was a movement, he says, that could have been born only in that natural incubator. In the South Bronx, Grandwizzard says, there was a mix of James Brown’s political songs, conga-beat drumming and the lyrical music played by new immigrants from Jamaica. “We all lived in the same building,” he said. “We all intertwined.”

Hip-hop, of course, made billions of dollars worldwide, but not a lot of it stayed in the Bronx. Now Miguel Sanchez and his colleagues are hoping that the borough’s unique mix of diversity and low-cost real estate will again make it an entrepreneurial playground. Only this time they need to prevent Manhattan from swallowing up the profits.