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An Elegy for the Bowery
The Last Days of Loserville Once home to hustlers, drunks, and bohemians, America's slummiest street has turned into a new millionaire's row
by Joy Press March 1st, 2005 1:01 PM
….It's just a construction site now, girders and planks strewn on the floor. Instead of giant picture windows and balconies, there are unfinished walls and a sheer drop. But use your imagination: In a few months, this will be a glorious 16th-floor penthouse, complete with panoramic views, Sub-Zero fridge, and Italian bathroom fixtures. For $4.4 million, you can hover over all of downtown Manhattan like some kind of god, absorbing the sunlight that once flowed west down Spring Street. You can gaze down upon the crumbling tenements far below you, the lamp stores, the scrawny men who shuffle in and out of the flophouse next door. Your address is 195 Bowery and you are part of the transformation of a street once synonymous with bleak failure into a new millionaire's row….
See also the “The Endangered Garden” and “The Last of the Mohicans” articles in Loserville.
http://www.ij.org/private_pr
property_backgrounder.html
Coveting Thy Neighbor's Land in New London
……In early 1998, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that it would build a $270 million research facility in New London. [2] Pfizer bought the land along the Thames River from the State for $10 million. The company and other development groups associated with the project are slated to receive at least $118.2 million in federal and state subsidies over 13 years….
What you should remember NYC’s mayor Rudy Guliani’s policy of taking vagrants off the streets –which translates into our present high percentage of our jail population being the mentally disable –many term it as our American Gulag.
....Well, I was out there at my Hinsdale post office protesting the construction and debris incineration plant on this beautiful blue-sky morning. Again, I am wondering what the meaning of this is for all of NE –indeed for the nation. What economic and national political factors are driving this –what sector of the population benefits?
Many people think we are in an unsustainable economic bubble with housing shortages and unbelievable housing prices increasing –and just check out the construction materials (like plywood and cement) price spikes and shortage. We got record-breaking housing starts –and we got heavy turbulence for the middle and poor class with housing affordability. I guess the free market is broken here. You understand what I saying –you work hard and play by the rules –this doesn’t mean you are going to have an enriching life with adequate time for your family.
What you got is living further distances from your job, and we are all living more time in our cars because of inadequate investment in our educational and transportation infrastructures –and a higher risk of having a traffic accident. Let alone insurance prices are rising also… What we got here friends, is building Saddam Hussein like Mac-palaces for a segment of our population –and I might add, through there influences, they are removing human dignity to an enormous percentage of our population. We are building Hussein like palaces in the USA –instead of building schools, roads, and electrical infrastructure projects. You understand where this is going, is we are giving unprecedented tax and investments breaks to our higher incomes –and the results of this excess capital to the rich is undermining the dreams of our democracy to the middle and poor class. Do not kid yourself –the democrats are up to there neck with this corruption, as with the republicans.
According to the New York Times, metro New York City is seeing a historic building boom leading to a revolutionary change in the city’s skyline on the big buildings. Many areas in the city are seeing massive reconstruction of old buildings into new upscale housing. Check out the apartment and housing price increases in Bill Clinton’s Harlem in NYC. The middle class cannot afford any of this housing –they are seeing this throughout the big city NE. New Jersey is seeing a 30% increase in real-estate prices a year –what is the % rise of your raise this year?
So the question is what are the economic drivers of the increasing demand for the need of construction and debris removal industry. What is the magnitude of the increase in the future for this need? What are the percentage increases from all of the areas? Who profits most from the explosion of real-estate appreciation –who are the losers?
We are seeing a developing national slow motion catastrophe; where most of our young children will never be able to afford their own homes -let along afford a roof over their heads. Fundamentally, we are seeing a huge failure of our free market to provide a space for our young children within basic human rights to “be free” –we are enslaving the younger generation and the poor, in housing price and rental bondage. This is an unprecedented failure of the American dream for the next generation –and it is a direct threat to our national unity and structure.
I think what you will be seeing is huge run-up in housing prices driving construction materials price spikes –leading to a collapse in the housing sector, leading to mind numbing scandals and bankruptcies when the collapse comes. Are we already seeing that, with Fanny May and Freddy Mac, where our elites and CEO compensation with a lack of morality; the corruption and lying becomes the prime driver of our national cultural ethics and morality in the management of our nation’s housing needs and economic development? Is it all about an elite game of self interest that is undermining national cohesiveness?
It questions corruption on a massive national scale; it questions all of our conscience with facilitating this inhumanity, seeing how the management of housing policies comes from “We the People”. This questions the basic human dignity needs of adequate housing for all of us -if even one human lack dignity on this planet, then we all our lacking in some dignity within ourselves. The few of us are bulldozering unconscionable profits at the expense of basic human rights.
This is becoming “bigger” a than an Enron style scandal, where the elites our gaming the rules of the electric grid and withholding the use of many power plants to increase electric prices –where all our politicians gain advantage from the housing shortage and increasing prices –where our housing policy and local rules are facilitating this unsustainable pyramid scheme.
Why don’t we just turn our Constitution into a money making endeavor –where everyone gets to purchase freedom through a set price –we would have the fairest democracy in the world, with setting a transparent price on human dignity?
So what is the real story with the increasing needs of the construction and debris incineration/dump industry telling us; what is the magnitude telling us?
My friends, though the incineration controversy in Hinsdale NH, we are watching the making of history on a breath taking national scale.
It just might indicate that human dignity is for sale through the action of our governmental housing policies and the powers of our elites to enslave the majority of us.
An Elegy for the Bowery:
· Noise on Music Central From minstrelsy to vaudeville and Monk to punk, never under-estimate urban ugliness By Robert Christgau
· Mose Is Back in Town By Toni Schlesinger
· The Endangered Garden AvalonBay makes concessions, but will Liz Christy's trees and plants survive? By Danial Adkison
· The Last of the Mohicans Searching for a place to flop on what was once skid row By Darren Reidy
http://www.ij.org/private_property/connecticut/con_
property_backgrounder.html
Coveting Thy Neighbor's Land in New London
……In early 1998, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that it would build a $270 million research facility in New London. [2] Pfizer bought the land along the Thames River from the State for $10 million. The company and other development groups associated with the project are slated to receive at least $118.2 million in federal and state subsidies over 13 years….
….But the New London City Council authorized the NLDC to use eminent domain to force Fort Trumbull residents to give up their homes and businesses. The NLDC remains unapologetic about the use of eminent domain to accomplish its redevelopment plan. As former NLDC President Claire Gaudiani, who initiated the destruction of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, said in a speech to higher education and civic leaders justifying the NLDC's actions in Fort Trumbull, "Anything that's working in our great nation is working because somebody left skin on the sidewalk."[1][5] Thus, according to Gaudiani, the home and business owners must be sacrificed for the supposed "greater good" of the community….
…….A notable exception to the NLDC's plan to clear-cut the neighborhood is the Italian Dramatic Club, a politically connected "social club" of Connecticut's political establishment, which is located in the very same neighborhood as all the homes targeted for destruction. Among the Italian Dramatic Club's patrons was former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who helped direct much of the State funding for the NLDC's work in New London and who resigned in June 2004 amid an ethics scandal. The club was informed in September 2000 that it could remain in the neighborhood.[2][6] The un-elected NLDC decision to preserve the politically powerful Italian Dramatic Club while demanding that New Londoners move out led Fort Trumbull homeowner Matt Dery to quip that the NLDC's actions in his neighborhood have been both shameful and shameless.…..
………Three of the property owners in the lawsuit have homes in so-called Parcel 3 of the redevelopment area. That parcel is slated for development as privately owned office space. Four of the property owners live in Parcel 4A of the project. Throughout much of the battle over Fort Trumbull, the NLDC had no specific plan or use for the site; it simply wanted to acquire the land, bulldoze the homes and businesses, and then sell it to developers. This led the Institute for Justice, which represents the property owners for free, to question, "How can you have a Ôpublic use' for taking someone's property, which the Constitution demands, when you don't know what that use will be?" (More recently the U.S. Coast Guard has made overtures to construct a museum on the site.)…….
Institute for Justice http://www.ij.org/
Lawsuit Challenging Eminent Domain Abuse in New London, Connecticut –some amazing information –check out the magnitude of the bulldozing throughout our nation….
Is it our nation tax policy that is at the root cause of our incineration and debris troubles?
http://www.ij.org/private_property/connecticut
Thanks,
mike mulligan
Hinsdale, NH
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