What are residents of NYC opinion on Bloomberg? Is this reshaping good or worse for the city?
It seems that he won his most recent re-election but barely, from what i know he is a socially liberal, environmentally friendly, fiscal conservative.
It seems that he won his most recent re-election but barely, from what i know he is a socially liberal, environmentally friendly, fiscal conservative.
It isn't all roses. The poorer residents in Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant are being forced to move elsewhere as their neighborhood gentrifies. However, this is part of the typical cyclic trend: artists / poor people move into a cheap neighborhood, make it trendy, then get forced out when the rent goes up. The starving artists move to another more affordable neighborhood, and the cycle starts all over again. Trying to stop the cycle by preventing development is just delaying the inevitable. Bloomberg has simply accelerated the trend of creating more upscale neighborhoods. I can understand how someone in a less fortunate socioeconomic situation might feel differently, but it's hard to argue that the changes haven't been beneficial from an outsider's perspective.
I partly agree, but artists move to an area partly by choice. Poor people are often born there, and then forced to move because the area has become trendy underneath their feet.
it's hard to argue that the changes haven't been beneficial from an outsider's perspective.
The city might be better off in the aggregate, but the poor people presumably ended up in other places, which are slightly worse off.
Pretty sure even parts of Brooklyn have that type of rent, such as Williamsburg, DUMBO, maybe even Prospect Heights.
I mean, I understand the arguments. I just have a difficult time saying, "Yes, let's prevent these neighborhoods from being improved".
Bascially "we're going to make this a nice place to live, please gtfo".
It's not an argument against improving a space. It's one against improving a space at the expense of its residents.
In the beginning (or at least the beginning for me, I was pretty young during the Koch era) there was Dinkins, and the city was a crime ridden cesspool. You weren't supposed to take the subway at night, or go anywhere near a park. Parked cars routinely had their radios and sometimes tires stolen. There were very aggressive beggars all over the place. Whole parts of Manhattan, much less the outer boros, were no go zones.
Then came Giuliani. I think most people that lived in the city under Giuliani have very mixed feelings. The crime rate dropped, which was great, but there was very much a sense that a deal had been made with the devil. While to this day stop and frisk is a major issue for minority communities, back then there was a sense that the NYPD was killing and beating up people for no reason. Then there was the whiff of corruption (around Kerik and others), the messy personal life, fights with the unions, and the drama around the Senate race. I'll skip the post-9/11 apotheosis because it's not really relevant in the long run.
So that's when Bloomberg came in. He continued to preside over a drop in crime, but without as much visible divisiveness (though as mentioned above stop and frisk is still very much alive). Ditto with the public sector unions, they were still unhappy but there didn't seem to be the same sense of crises surrounding labor affairs. Meanwhile the finances of the city are very much improved, in spite of looming pension and health care problems the city is in very good financial shape as compared to any other large American city. No one thinks he's corrupt -- people think he's too rich to be corrupt. Then there's the nanny stuff, there's mixed opinions about that, but even smokers seem to be okay with having no smoking in bars. The biggest knock on him is that he only cares about Manhattan and the rich people that live there. That may be true from an emotional standpoint, but from a practical standpoint what he's done has benefited all layers of the city. The gentrification of Manhattan has generated a ton of revenue which is being plowed into services across the city. Honestly other than being better at feeling people's pain, I don't really see the argument.
If you want to find one group who completely and decisively hates Bloomberg though, just talk to cab drivers. The things that he did regarding new medallions and all of the bullshit with the TLC the last 8 years have made most old-timers quit. The mere mention of the guy's name will bring out some pretty big curse words.
The funny thing is though, most of the crime in the city peaked during the Koch era. He started some of the things that Giuliani and Bloomberg later got credit for. Dinkins gets saddled with a lot of the worst memories of it mostly because of how ineffective he was as Mayor.
Koch did some right dickish things to outerborough New Yorkers though. The closing of bike/pedestrian traffic on the Queensboro Bridge will always stick out in my memory. Caused a 3000+ bike protest down Park Avenue... and a couple years ago they named the fucking bridge after him. >_<
They literally went on strike to protest a pay increase.
Reported revenue increased 14% the following year.
The drivers have come around and admitted the credit card machines increased ridership and revenue drastically. There was a big switch from Black cars to taxis primarily because business travelers can now pay with corporate cards.
Also, when all the new medallions were issued and the GPS/credit system put in their cars, some of the companies passed the cost of install onto the drivers, taking more than the maximum lease rate (The current day rate is like $229, whether you're on the road or not).
Cab drivers aren't making that much money ultimately. It has always been bad but it's way worse now than it used to be (my mom drove a yellow from 1978-1992 before she became an RN).
The overwhelming majority of the money earned in a taxi cab goes to the medallion holders -- owning a medallion is basically a guaranteed 5% ROI because the fare price is fixed. Cab drivers are basically little more than modern sharecroppers. I don't disagree that they're full of shit though, I'm just saying it's a shitty life and a lot of them hate Bloomberg's guts.
Say what? No Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, South Street, Battery, etc., etc.? These are the best parts of Manhattan. No 25 cent trip on the Staten Island Ferry?
Just because they're some of the best parts of Manhattan doesn't mean that they were safe. The East Village certainly wasn't so. All of these areas were pretty damned sketchy and you had some reasonable chance of something bad happening to you. Not a strong likelihood but reasonable enough that you'd only go during the day and be aware of your surroundings.
If you were a gweilo in Chinatown you were pretty much only safe on Canal Street until the late-90s. I've seen with my own eyes people get robbed at gunpoint in the back of Chinatown Fair towards the end of this period and seen gangs beating on each other on Pell Street.
Heck, I saw gangs of kids fighting with chains and baseball bats in the East Village on Rivington as recently as 2007. I've even started seeing junkies back near Tompkins Square Park again. South Street Seaport was still a popular place to find a hooker at night until 9/11.
14th Street, in days past, was a famous dividing line for residents of the city, with many proudly claiming that they either didn't go below it or didn't go above it. I grew up in Midtown, but I still kind of went everywhere. It's only hindsight that gives me the perspective of just how dangerous some of the neighborhoods are, because in my youth I didn't really think about things like I mentioned above.
I grew up in a housing project just East of Chinatown, so I might be calibrated differently. Some people's "dangerous" is my normal.
On the other hand, my time was the '60s and '70s. I left for education in tame New England in '76. This was a high-crime era, but Chinatown and Little Italy were safe if you minded your own business, because organized crime did not tolerate street violence directed at tourists and civilians. This was before the phenomenon of Vietnamese gangs discussed in Fox Butterfield's article. Of course, when I say "Village" I don't mean East Village: Alphabet City was always considered bad.
That neighborhood has a really interesting cyclic history of crime dating all the way back 200 years. The history of Five Points is incredibly interesting to read about.
> Some people's "dangerous" is my normal.
Same here, but I tend to try and refer to things from (what I assume is) the reader's perspective. All of this stuff is pretty normal/safe to me. But I have to be careful and tell myself that it isn't so that I don't get nostalgic for something that was actually terrible.
It's hard for me to settle on a particular viewpoint of the city due to the time and place I grew up...coming from working middle class midtown, getting a private school education with upper-crust kids uptown and having my life and friendships all downtown. There really was sort of a classlessness where I could just fit in anywhere growing up and that feeling has totally disappeared in the last 15-20 years.
> Alphabet City was always considered bad.
Even though I saw Hell's Kitchen/The Deuce and (most of) Harlem transformed, still the strangest thing to me as a New Yorker was watching Alphabet City transform almost overnight. I know that it gentrified quietly over a long period of time but it was always really dangerous until suddenly it wasn't. I would keep going to bars in/around there and it was like a completely different neighborhood inside of three months. A thriving bar/club scene developed out of nothing and then died quickly when everyone moved over to 27th Street for their entertainment and bottle service took over Manhattan. For a short time, Bridge & Tunnels swarmed that place. Now all of the traffic seems to be between Houston & Delancey.
There are some problems though...Bloomberg started the policy of having a bed for every homeless person. Just to keep them off the street and out of the public eye. This is being paid for with taxpayer money and for more than $100/night. A lot of residential buildings on the upper west side have kicked out their tenants to convert exclusively to housing the homeless at high daily rates because of the money. This has contributed to a massive hike in rents across the city. Landlords are definitely the "rich" we're talking about here and Bloomberg has absolutely no problem with the practice.
http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2013/aug/12/homeless-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/for-some-landlord...
Giving the homeless singles a place to sleep seems like a good policy not a bad one, and I don't see why the NIMBYites of the upper west side shouldn't bear their share of the burden. Perhaps the city is overpaying, but $100/night is hardly as grotesque as your original $400/night. Finally, in a city with 1.5 million rental apartments, I very much doubt that a few hundred apartments leased by the city for the homeless on the upper west side has contributed to massive hikes in rent across the city.
If you want to blame anything for high market rents blame rent control and rent stabilization. I'd love if Bloomberg had gotten rid of them, but that's one of the third rails of city politics so I don't much hold it against him.
Over the years I noticed a definite improvement in the city. Cars stopped being on fire for one. The Subway, while not exactly the nicest place, isn't bathed in spray paint, etc.
The last few years I started doing week long business trips up there two or three times a year and the city seemed absolutely transformed. Parks were being used by families after dark, streets were generally clean, people were out and about strolling around, biking or exercising. It wasn't Singapore clean, but the streets were generally cleaner, and you really had to get into hard areas to see graffiti. Bars on windows started coming down, and the city felt like it was opening up. I also noticed a huge police presence everywhere.
And people were generally friendlier. Most of that New York snarl was gone (both a positive and a negative).
On one trip I did some consulting work for the NYPD and got a chance to see some of the data the city collects and processes and uses to improve city services -- I believe this system was put in place by Bloomberg. To say it's impressive is an understatement. Noise complaints are correlated to nearby construction and crime, NLP was being brought online to process 911 call transcripts to look for crime trends, recently released prisoners were being cross checked against recent crime reports for recitivism. I think they're still on the edge of what's possible with what they're collecting, but it's being put to immediate and long-term city planning use. It's not quite what you see in the movies, but outside of the federal government, I've never seen anything at quite the scale and level of detail as what NYC collects.
I'll have to say that I do skip the outer boroughs, because they've been particularly unattractive to visitors, but I think in recent years some of the major new development work is starting to make me think again about that. There's lots of downsides to staying in an overpriced cramped hotel room in downtown Manhattan, such as finding a reasonably priced place to eat dinner without heading 20 minutes uptown or eat endless Chinese food. But staying across the river, closer to a residential area with good local eateries might be a better alternative in the future.
As an aside: I was watching a documentary about Giuliani (then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York) the other day. It was about how in the early 1980's he led a full-scale attack on the Mafia, by bugging the cars and houses of the heads of the five families and using the collected evidence along with the RICO Act to send them to prison. Apparently, after being indicted one of the bosses (Paul Castellano) was assassinated just a few blocks away from where my office was in Midtown. Today, that whole area is basically Disneyland. It is crazy how different New York is today than how it used to be. Last year, My wife used to stroll all over Manhattan with our daughter, often late at night waiting for me to get out of work, without any worry at all.
I am sure lots of entities public and private have contributed to and accelerated this situation, but we must also keep in mind the nationwide trends in violent crime in the last few decades. I think this sets the stage more than any particular mayor, police chief, development company etc. can do.
I think there are general trends but local policies (and lack of such) contribute to direction.
I think if Koch or Dinkins had been mayors for the times Giuliani and Bloomberg were mayors, crime stats would be noticeably different --less than mid 90s, but higher than today. Of course, that's just speculation.
Can you elaborate on that? Specifically in what policies Bloomberg supports that have led to gentrification.
I ask because often gentrification is an effect of making a city a nicer place to live. Better public transit, lower crime, better schools, etc. Rich people move in and outbid poor incumbent residents for their apartments. But tearing down historic houses is a signal in the other direction: the city is building new, bigger buildings to house all of those rich people moving in, thus taking price pressure off the incumbents and preventing gentrification. It's hard to simultaneously hold the ideas -- as "tons of people" apparently do -- of "I want to keep New York historic" and "I'm against gentrification" without also thinking, "I'm against making the city nicer". Unless, I guess, those are different people hating on Bloomberg from different directions? Or he's causing gentrification in some other way that I don't understand?
There are definitely buildings that have been torn down for new construction that debatably should have been preserved. A lot of the area around Astoria Park has been demolished for new highrise construction that has mostly not been completed due to market events. Not only are these a blight on the neighborhood but they tore down some absolutely fantastic sites to put them there. Specifically in Astoria Village.
The neighborhood, though mostly safe, has been in a shit state for decades due to neglect from the city and housing projects from the 60s.
[1] http://forgotten-ny.com/1999/05/astoria-village-part-1-queen...
[2] http://forgotten-ny.com/2005/06/astoria-village-part-2-queen...
[3] http://forgotten-ny.com/2007/12/astoria-village-part-3-queen...
I have no doubt that there are buildings that are of enough historical importance that they shouldn't be demolished to build high rises (i.e. that marginal bit of rent pressure is worth it). I also don't know if in this particular case -- especially given that they weren't completed due to a housing crash -- building high rises ended up being wise; sometimes developers are foolish or shit just happens. And perhaps those things really are all that happened in Astoria; I couldn't say. My point, though, still holds in the general case and certainly holds for something the size of NYC as a whole: preserving historical buildings is fundamentally in tension with preventing gentrification. It's a tradeoff.
(And it's a bit of an odd one too: the people who care and should care the most about the historic value of a neighborhood are the people who actually live there. But if constrained housing supply forces them to move, they won't be around to enjoy it anyway.)
This is a big issue for me because this exact conversation is happening in my neighborhood in Cambridge, MA, which keeps very strong control over new construction. Rent is skyrocketing with people like me moving in to a poorer minority neighborhood because it's nice and we like it. Developers see that as a market opportunity and the city should see it as a signal to allow more construction to reduce rents. But many (most?) of the residents oppose new construction on the grounds that it will change the neighborhood's feel and, incorrectly, that it will cause gentrification. It will certainly do the former, but it will help prevent the latter.
The justification was that it was historically important because generations of immigrants had moved through the area. Generations of immigrants had moved through the area, because at the time it was built it was high density housing, and so was affordable. So to honor that history we are going to keep in as a museum that no one can afford to live in. Brilliant!
I still get a chuckle at how the former Mars Bar's upstairs residents got such a sweet deal got their fancy new apartments for $10.
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2013/06/18/jupiter_21_launches...
I don't mind this though. That old bar was a f'in dump and the rest of the block with it.
I don't understand why people think they should be able to tell owners what to do with their property. Don't like it? Buy it yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/nyregion/what-new-yorkers-...
I think jobs and the economy matter most to people and since Bloomberg was mayor during the 2008 recession, that's going to make him seem worse than he might have though he may not have been able to affect the worst of the economical situation in any way.
In the story linked to above, it says less than half of surveyed think that crime has improved under BLoomberg. That is just plain absurd no matter how you look at the stats...Bloomberg's (arguably too strong) law policies have made the city safer than it was in 2002. IT just shows how hard it is for people to remember what things were like a decade ago, due to nostalgia, etc.
Also you say he won his re-election "just barely" but that's because he bent the term limit rules for what most people considered in an illegitimate way
Certain neighborhoods are still high crime. Yes, I would say that 99% of Manhattan is about as safe as Disneyland, but the policing has been especially disproportionate between the use and effectiveness of things like Stop & Frisks, constant & disruptive patrol car drills crosstown during rush hour, and "Show of Force" demonstrations of the ESU in full body armor and M4 rifles stationed outside popular tourist areas. Some see these things as safety and security and others see them as waste and symbols of a state abusing its power.
A lot of the revitalization efforts for areas of the city have been in the works since the 1950s (pay attention in NY to how much is named after or dedicated to Robert Moses). Case in point, the Times Square Redevelopment Project (though that was completed under Giuliani). When I was a child growing up in this neighborhood, there were porn theaters, street prostitutes, hustlers, con men and pickpockets everywhere. People got mugged in my elevator or at the payphone on my corner regularly.
Nearly 80% of the storefronts in Midtown were vacant. My mom was a corporate real estate broker in the 70s and had a listing on 57th street and 5th avenue going for $5/sqft (in what was later the Playboy Enterprises building). Let that figure sink in for a second.
I'm not nostalgic for those times, but back then we also had a bit more community than now. I actually knew by name the homeless people and the street hustlers in my neighborhood. My mom took care of most of them in her nursing work at St. Luke's Roosevelt. That sense is totally gone. Nightlife and entertainment in the city is _dead_ (we'll see how the Space nightclub does when it opens though). You used to regularly have people playing music on the street without too much bother. I remember a lot more people just being in the street and friendly (for NY standards) all the time. Everything is much more conservative and elitist than it used to be, but that's just as much times changing and culture moving on as Bloomberg is lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
I get really passionate about this topic and am being a bit rambly, but two years ago I left New York City. I'm likely returning next year, but I had to get away and it's no longer somewhere I could imagine living the rest of my life. It's just not that much fun a place to live anymore. Almost every NY-native I know in my age group either can't stand to live there anymore or has been priced out. Most of my friends have moved away or want to. We're going to places like Portland and New Orleans...or moving to Europe.
Samuel R. Delany wrote a really good book about this and his experiences called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Not a book to read if you are at all homophobic or squeamish reading about sex acts though.
Many, many references to Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
And it's not for a lack of space because there is tons of vacant commercial real estate in the city. Any time my company does a demo at a bank, we see rows and rows of empty desks.
In short, Bloomberg has favored unneeded commercial development and high end oligarch dwellings over supply that the even the top 3% of wage earners can afford.
You can buy a $100MM Penthouse at One West 57th and pay the same taxes as a $2MM apartment due to dubiously applied 421-A tax abatements.