« Dave Zirin in Slam: "residents see [Atlantic Yards] more like an exercise in ethnic cleansing" (um, that's a bit broad-brush) | Main | A foolish proposition »
June 28, 2011
Bloomberg's New York
Open City: Blogging Urban Change
by Jerome Chou
The administration also used zoning and incentives to encourage the development of new condominiums and public amenities like the High Line to attract and retain the highly-educated, highly-skilled people that elite businesses employ. The effects of this strategy are visible in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, but also in Harlem and Williamsburg, Flushing and Long Island City. “This is all about class,” [Julian] Brash states. “It’s really a city for the well-off.”
I spoke with Brash about Bloomberg’s New York, and the specific tools and strategies that people can use if they want to influence neighborhood change.
...You mention affordable housing. Bloomberg did launch a plan to create 165,000 units of low- and middle-income housing units, in parallel with his strategy to build luxury housing.
The administration was pushed to include affordable housing in a bunch of different development plans, like Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards. I think they realized after a few years that throwing a bone in that direction would circumvent a lot of political headaches. But I think affordable housing just runs at cross-purposes with the luxury city approach.
The city’s affordable housing policy right now is gentrification. People who don’t make a lot of money—people who are middle class or upper-working class—they can move into gentrifying neighborhoods like Sunset Park or Flatbush. That’s how people get affordable housing. And those people are conflicted and full of self-loathing because they know they’re gentrifiers. That’s been the case for twenty or thirty years.
Posted by eric at June 28, 2011 10:08 AM