Sharing similar sob stories

In Sunday’s New York Times, the writer and filmmaker Lee Grant wrote a letter to the editor about her neighborhood, the upper west side. The gist: her favorite local restaurants and shops, some of which have been in the neighborhood for years, have been forced to close up shop due to insane real estate prices. Chains have replaced them all.

In the news, we hear stories of the depressed real estate economy. In the Boston Globe, it was reported that Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke was hesitant to declare the economy on the mend precisely because of commercial real estate lag. But in New York City, this is hardly a reality. It may be that housing does not fly off the shelf quite as quickly as it used to, and it may be that a West Village apartment goes for half a million less than it had two years ago. But it still has a multi-million dollar price tag.

Everyone has an anecdotal story about New York prices. My smart and lovely neighbors for example are moving out of their TriBeCa apartment because their rent is too high and the job market too unfriendly. What’s infuriating about this is that my building had been rent control.

Under the Mitchell-Lama program, my landlord received major tax breaks for keeping rents affordable to middle-income people. And it worked beautifully. But no one was told my landlord would have the option to buy out of the program 25 years down the road. Well, he did just that, and as his decision to do so coincided with the city’s real estate boom, rent in my building rose from $1,000 a month to $5,000 a month. Many of my neighbors, who had worked so hard to make TriBeCa livable, left, and new 20-somethings moved in. The neighborhood became “hot” and our favorite restaurants like River Run on Franklin – best steak and potatoes in the world – closed because they, too, couldn’t pay the rent.

It’s not enough to sit by and let the market take its course. Too many people are getting screwed. We need more rent control. Free market capitalists and conservatives may be horrified at the thought but then ask yourself which laissez-fairest, which republican representative, ever had to struggle to pay the rent or had been forced to move because of a landlord’s decision to embrace market prices. Very few, I’d bet.

To Lee Grant: I hear your plea. It makes me sad, too.

West side story

Insane real estate demands that resulted from neighborhood development – in which developers “discover” areas to market for wealthier clients, areas usually made beautiful by the poor artists and gay residents who lived there years before – have forced Manhattan to assume the persona of a homogonous suburban strip mall. Bank chains, restaurant chains, luxury condominium chains, chain gangs of hipsters – it’s all lookin’ the same. This is an unfortunate consequence of the real estate market, considering it is the city’s diversity and cultural integration that are the very qualities that make it great.

When did this pattern start? The answer is, ever since the city was created. However, in the American context, there is one event in particular worth mentioning. It was the rise-to-power of Robert Moses. Moses’ grand plans changed New York City shorelines and skylines, redesigned transportation routes that subsequently altered the look of the outer-borough regions, and lay the ground-work for the way New York looks and feels today.

Moses developed an identity as a merciless developer. According to Mandi Isaacs Jackson, writer and researcher on urban history and social movements, Moses was “notoriously fond of bulldozers and ever anxious to clear away ‘slums’ and to replace them with new buildings. Frequently remarking that you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, he felt confident he was doing the right thing as he ran roughshod over neighborhoods that many residents felt were viable, safe, affordable and friendly.” Despite this image, Moses was seen as a sort of savior of the ailing city in government.

Let’s look at an example. Moses’ biggest slum clearance project in New York was the construction of Lincoln Center. Pre-Lincoln Center construction, the area was packed with tenements, most of which were in need of serious repair. Those living in the tenements: Puerto Ricans, mostly. These were the people who are most famously depicted as the Sharks in West Side Story. But there was also the Broadway theatre crowd, the middle class Jewish and white neighbors, and the super wealthy Central Park crowd. My grandfather served them all when he owned a supermarket in the neighborhood.

Post-Lincoln Center construction, they all left (all but the super-wealthy crowd and some of the middle class residents). No one knows the correct number of people displaced by the project, but Robert Caro estimates half a million. The result was devastating, but few people today know the history. Why? Because Lincoln Center is a success.

Among all the other city projects in the fifties through the eighties, the construction of Lincoln Center is a particularly important example because today, it is beloved, even by me. Enjoyed by students and patrons who attend Fordham University, Julliard, The New York City Ballet and Opera, or who visit the Metropolitan Opera, the center is a gem.

The point, then, is not solely to condemn what is built or torn down as a result of a development project, but how it is done so. Had the site been built in a less congested and under used area, or had it been dispersed over a few blocks, rather than clumped together into five huge superblocks, or had better and affordable housing been built alongside the project in order to accommodate the displaced people, thousands could have stayed in their neighborhood, and my grandfather might have kept his business. The center’s surrounding streets might have been saved from the perverse chains it is now forced to support.

Regardless of how New Yorkers feel about Lincoln Center today, low-income Puerto Rican New Yorkers should not have fallen casualty as a consequence of its construction. There is always another way. That’s true for the many development projects in New York City today. Neighborhoods should change, but change does not have to result in the obliteration of the old, or the affordable, or the non-white. What we need is better urban planning.

Cleaning up house

France suffered a severe housing and job shortage immediately following World War II. To combat this problem, the government came up with an appealing and surprisingly simple answer. In fact, they are recycling this 60-year-old solution in order to ease the current economic slump.

The French government adopted a Keynesian policy of intervention: they spent thousands of francs employing citizens to restore and maintain all of the old and beautiful buildings that line the famed Parisian boulevards.

Obama’s stimulus plan needs such a French twist. His proposal already addresses the need for infrastructure development, which includes bridge and road maintenance, but it should to be expanded to include real estate. Here is why:

The French method accomplished three important things: it established a labor niche which helped drag the county out of its depression, it preserved thousands of gorgeous structures that continue to draw people from all over the world – people who pay thousands of dollars for the privilege to see them – and it curtailed the post-war onslaught of commercial businesses from buying up and tearing down the country’s best buildings. (My brief analysis broadly skims over a much larger, more complicated problem that had plagued France. For a more in-depth understanding, check out “Housing Policy and Population Problems in France” by Cicely Watson, published in Population Studies).

Today, according to a New York Times article titled “France, Unlike U.S., Is Deep Into Work on Stimulus Project,” the French government is spending 100 million euros employing people to fix up cultural centers, touch up hundreds of chateaus, weed gardens, and secure railroads.

According to the article, France is deploying funds quickly and efficiently, knocking the theory of free-market proponents who believe big centralized governments are inefficient and static. Although France has to borrow millions of euros in order to fund the procedure, consider it a kind of cash-back plan, as preservation and revitalization are moneymaking sectors. For instance, they tend to cut costs as newer and more effective energy-conserving tools and appliances replace those that are wasteful. More importantly, it trains thousands of people in the many different fields of construction, an ever-present field.

Translate this into an American context: beautiful but depressed towns along the Hudson River, towns such as Troy or Fleischmanns, are haunted by structures of boom times past. And as foreclosures, abandoned residences, and unpredictable costs make gloomy the real estate market, a large-scale revitalization program makes sense.

It may ease unemployment. It will also make habitable homes for families in need, not to mention help with the plethora of impromptu ramshackle villages of recently homeless peoples that have sprung up all over the nation as a result of the economic downturn (there was a Times article about a particularly large one in Providence, Rhode Island that’s worth checking out). Subsequently, it would improve the attractiveness of towns and cities that could benefit from increased tourism.

If we accept the American ethic that home-ownership strengthens a nation, than the government, like France’s government, should help us protect them.

The Beautiful and the Damned