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May 30, 2007
Developmentalism in the Big Apple
Cost of living has skyrocketed in New York, but under fatcats Giuliani and Bloomberg, the working man’s wage has not
In These Times
By Steven Wishnia
NYC Mayor touts his program to build affordable housing, meanwhile more affordable units are leaving the system than are being built and real wages lag far behind.
Thirty years ago, you could easily find a one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in New York City for $150 a month. Today, it would cost more than $1,500—more than what Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, then baseball’s highest-paid player, paid in 1977. His Fifth Avenue apartment with a balcony overlooking Central Park cost $1,466 a month. And the minimum wage hasn’t gone up to $27.82 an hour.
How we got to this point is the subject of Kim Moody’s From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (The New Press). Moody analyzes how New York’s business elite exploited the ’70s fiscal crisis to destroy the city’s “social-democratic polity” and impose the neoliberal agenda that has dictated “restraint on social spending, privatization, deregulation, and most importantly, the reassertion of class power by the nation’s capitalist class.”
The result is a city where inequality has grown to extremes far beyond those in the rest of the country, where a small but growing cabal of the spectacularly rich uses government as a vending machine and lords it over a hollowed-out middle class and millions of low-paid, increasingly immigrant service workers.
Unlike many politicians, Moody hasn't fallen for the myth of "affordable" housing at Atlantic Yards:
Bloomberg has made some grand-sounding promises about building affordable housing, but Moody dissects the formulas used to determine what’s deemed “affordable.” Based on the median income for the metropolitan area, apartments that go for as much as $1,800 a month are classified as “middle income,” such as those in the planned Atlantic Yards sports arena/housing complex in Brooklyn.
Posted by lumi at May 30, 2007 7:41 AM