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Month in review: April, 2014: Part 2, Or what’s a hyperlink for?

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[Previous Months in Review available here: Mar 14, Feb 14, Jan 14]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.] 

By: David A. Smith 

Yesterday’s Part 1 of this two-part review of April’s posts noted that a blog can take the time and detail to dismantle a specious argument (and refute it with evidence), and it can delve in depth into a minor subject – but a blog can also go from the small to the large, and from the known to the unknown:

Shatner boldly go

Blogging is almost as awesome and bold as I am 

3. A blog can use a specific microcosm to illustrate the macrocosm

To justify its existence, a blog must add value – by selection, juxtaposition, research, or interpretation, among others – and when I start a post I’m seldom confident which it will be. So it was with a New York Times story that sought to blacken the name of Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver by tying him to what the Times thought a scandal of non-redevelopment, though

History of a plot: Part 1, The sixties:

They grew up in the same circles, and they came of age politically together. For almost four decades, they did favors for one another, because that is what friends do. Eventually, one of them, the youngest, the protege, went bad.

Along the way, did they stymie development for their own reasons? Instead of just being friends and political allies, were they conspirators?

Rapfogel silver

Friends or conspirators? William Rapfogel (left) and Sheldon Silver (right)

If you judged by the headline from this New York Times (March 23, 2014), you’d think so:

They Kept a Lower East Side Lot Vacant for Decades

When I read the headline and the opening paragraphs, I too thought this was a story of political capture and power corrupting. (And I might have liked that, as Mr. Silver had been a steadfast defender of New York City’s indefensible rent control and rent stabilization.) But writing this multi-part post changed my mind, especially as I kept adducing evidence from the story of four and a half decades of dramatic change in our conceptions of cities, neighborhoods, affordable housing, and community involvement (a slippery phrase) in deciding what can be built and where.

As cities become more interdependent (a consequence of them becoming more dense, and more technological), development of any parcel of land becomes a more convoluted process, and that makes it both more protracted and more political – all likely to the city’s detriment.

A primary focus of their alliance [Silver and Rapfogel – Ed.] had been a struggle to preserve the Jewish identity of the neighborhood they delivered for Mr. Koch all those years ago.

And that raises the second story: who owns a neighborhood? If the first story is about evolving ethnic politics, the second story is about evolving views of urban affordable housing.

Who owns a neighborhood? Four and a half decades ago, these young Jewish politicians were certain they knew.

Their battleground was some 20 barren acres along the southern side of Delancey Street, where, in 1967, the city leveled blocks of rundown apartment buildings.

Essex delancey parcel

The Essex Delancey parcel today

Because a written text exists in the eternal now, it’s easy for readers to jumble the time lines, so let me unjumble them.

As the above photo shows, the parcel has a tremendous location: adjacent to Delancey Street, scarcely steps from two subway stations (on the F, J, and M lines), in the heart of the Lower East Side. Today it’s a gold mine waiting to be dug up and developed: in 1967, by contrast, it was an imploding slum … or so it was seen by the political powers that be.

More than 1,800 low-income families,largely Puerto Rican, were sent packing and promised a chance to return to new apartments someday.

In 1967 the Delancey Street parcel was cleared (by people other than Silver and Rapfogel) and the Puerto Rican residents relocated (mostly into public housing).

This was the heyday of eminent domain for slum clearance and economic development, and as I’ve recently posted, Puerto Rico has long beenAmerica’s Caliban, with New York City being by far the largest recipient of Puerto Rican immigrants.

In 1977, Silver and Rapfogel campaigned for Koch. In 2013, the parcel was finally approved for redevelopment.

While the Times sought to make the story Manichaean, with development stymied by ethnically prejudiced ambitious officials, I couldn’t find evidence of that no matter how I looked:

Holmes holmes pipe

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

This story also shows how, over the course of a half century, a similar evolution has occurred in affordable housing: in what we envision it to be, its symbolic meaning, its meaning as a political code word, and its place in the twenty-first-century city.

In fact, as I worked my way through the subsequent parts, Part 2, Crossing Delancey, Part 3, Code words for ‘those people’, Part 4, Housing for whom?, Part 5, it’s not gentrification if it’s we who gentrify, and Part 6, You can’t go home again, the story became anything but a tale of personal corruption:

Sources used in this post 

New York Times (March 23, 2014): the story damning Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Silver

New York Times (September 25, 2013; green font): Mr. Rapfogel’s indictment

New York Times (September 17, 2013; blue font): Announcement of development

New York Times Letter to the Editor, November 29, 1989; red font); Local opposition

Mr. Rapfogel has been indicted, we note, for personal crimes that are not yet connected to any political machinations regarding real estate development.

One must be honest even with evil, there is no other good course”—Jorn the Apostle, in Cities in Flight¸ page 546. I just hope that with Mr. Rapfogel, unlike Michael McLaughlin, it is not falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus. (But I fear the worst for him.)

In announcing the new plan, the city said priority would be given to some of the mostly Puerto Rican families displaced four decades ago. Construction is expected to begin next year.

The redevelopment would tap into the past by giving priority to some of the 2,000, largely Puerto Rican families displaced four decades ago, and into the future by creating a neighborhood hub with badly needed housing, small-scale retail and office space for tech companies and budding entrepreneurs. 

Four and a half decades too late, the Puerto Ricans are acknowledged as equal denizens of the Lower East Side.

Was it all a political plot? Or was it the unintended demilitarized zone of a five-decade fight about cities and neighborhoods and ethnicity and income mixing, all personified by visions of housing alternatives?

Koch aged

Okay, so I’m dead … but how’m I doing? 

Though for all I know Mr. Silver may be a corrupt politician, and he is certainly one whom I would like to see defeated, that New York Times piece was a clumsy hatchet job. 

Carrie nation hatchet posed

There’s nothing wrong with a hatchet job … if it’s graceful 

4. A blog can analogize, provoke, and speculate

Many are the topics on which I’d like to post, if only to push ideas into the public domain, and for these some must wait until there’s a fortuitous combination of a suitable blog seed (public article or event) and time availability, such as occurred early in April when I was able to use the Economist and the Wall Street Journal to do the basic reportage allowing me to speculate on the present and future of Bitcoins, in Cosh and carry: Part 1, Money in the Newtonian political economy, and Part 2, Money for the Einsteinian political economy:

Consider the upside and downside of cash as a medium of exchange: 

Upside of using cash

1. Value can be realized independent of banks

2. Anonymous—two strangers can transact in cash (and often do, especially inthe Anonymous Activities)

3. Has no economic fingerprints – therefore suitable for ‘laundering money’

4. No taxes collected or collectible on the transaction

Anonymous activities

Whole families of activity encompassed in a single concept

Downside of cash

1. Can be counterfeited

2. Risk of robbery in transit

3. No recourse post-transaction (if the vendor gets away, you have nothing)

New york mugging 1857

Welcome to New York! 1857

Thus the NBER study is like Newtonian classical mechanics – applicable in the common case familiar to economist, namely the formal world (and a world, it should be noted, where government is benevolent, efficient, and obviously of value to citizens). Within that Newtonian economic universe, the NBER study’s findings are compelling.

Newton einstein

Well, who’s right here?

In slums, however, Einsteinian mechanics applies; the government is present only as an external force, often one that applies regulations and taxes, both of which are costs imposed on economic activity, and gives the slum dwellers far less in municipal benefitsthan they receive in those taxes and regulatory impositions.

How does electronic money compare with physical cash from the perspective of market participants?

Upside of electronic money

1. No larceny (breaking and entering homes, say)

2. No robbery (theft via violence)

3. Automatic receipts and proof of payment

4. Intermediary stop-loss protection (credit cards, banks)

5. Globally accessible

6. Instantly transferable

 

Downside of electronic money

1. Requires reliable access to high-speed broadband

Neither the authors nor the journalists remarked on this presumption, because to them, living deep in the formal world, ubiquitous reliable instantaneous internet connectivity is a given. If you’re poor, not on the Web, lack a laptop (or even a reliable cell phone), or have no credit cards and possibly no bank account, these are significant barriers to entering the system. And each of those physical goods that you need to enter the electronic information network are themselves subject to theft, larceny, and robbery. Cash has none of those entry barriers.

2. Regulatory requirements

3. Inescapability of taxation

4. Post-closing warranty/ liability risk

5. Theft by hacking

6. Intermediaries part of the tax or legal liability chain (FIRPTA, FCPA, AML)

Throughout all of this a blog is nothing if it does not entertain. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.

Bartles and jaymes

And we thank you for your support


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