|
Edited on Sat Dec-06-08 09:44 AM by HamdenRice
I was walking around my neighborhood counting foreclosed and abandoned houses recently, and it struck me that New York is taking its first steps toward looking the way it did from about 1970 through the late 1980s -- blocks and blocks of abandoned and burned out buildings. But we still have a very long way to go.
Moreover, one thing that is striking is just how much more politicians and policy makers (at least Democratic politicians and policy makers) know about economic policy. It's possible they won't make the same mistakes, exacerbating an already bad economy.
Around 1985, I visited my father at his job. At the time, he was easing into retirement after a long career in the management of the New York subway system. After 10 years in a burnout position in mid town Manhattan, he had gotten a transfer to East New York, Brooklyn, at the time, a very desolate part of the subway system. He worked the swing shift and had the use of a white and blue Transit SUV that he used to drive around to various stations (because train service was so intermittent in that area at that time of night). I met him at his station and I accompanied him as he drove around the area.
At some point that night (it was maybe 10 pm) he pulled over at an intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and showed me the economic devastation of the area. We looked up the four directions of each street and for as far as the eye could see, there was not a single apartment building, brownstone or store front that was not abandoned.
I also remember the South Bronx. I rode the subway to high school in the Bronx and on warm, sunny spring days, my friends and I would (as kids did in those day) ride between the cars and watch the "scenery" pass by. The South Bronx was simply a wasteland of acres and acres and blocks and blocks of abandoned apartment buildings.
We often thought of the South Bronx as having experienced a slow decay, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, studies later showed that the South Bronx basically burned down and was abandoned within the space of a year or so. A perfect storm of bad circumstances and policies -- Robert Moses' determination to tear the guts out of the Bronx with a highway system, an influx of poor people, a rigid rent control (as opposed to rent stabilization) system, pro cyclical rather than counter cyclical property tax policies, insanely lax fire insurance and fire investigations -- caused thousands of landlords to burn down their buildings and collect their insurance money, while thousands of others simply walked away. In the 70s, there were plenty of stories in the newspapers about tenant families being given notices, like, "the fire will be at 10 pm Friday night," and the papers would publish pictures of the tenants lined up at the curb with their clothes and belongings already packed as the fires raged behind them.
We have a very long way to get to where we were in, say, 1973, when much of East New York, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, East Harlem, Bedford Stuyvascent, the South Bronx, Williamsburg, the East Village, Soho, Tribeca, Gowanus, Red Hook, Bushwick, and so many other neighborhoods (many of them now solidly middle class, or even wealthy and trendy) looked like pictures of Berlin after World War II.
Anyone else have recollections of bad times?
|