03/28

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28
Mar 14

Untitled

The essence of “planned shrinkage” is so fundamentally contrary to everything public service has come to represent. City services like fire protection and police patrols are meant as the means towards improving and ensuring the health and safety of a community. The departments were not intended to be used as leverage to target and exile poverty-stricken, minority populations. As the first “core value” of its mission statement, the New York City Fire Department proclaims: “The Department continues its unwavering call to protect and serve.” Apparently, the writers of the statement are guilty of lying by omission. In its entirety, the declaration should read: “The Department continues its unwavering call to protect and serve the best interests of whatever massive and corrupt corporation is currently “invested” in our city government.”

From a capitalist perspective the concept of “planned shrinkage” makes perfect sense. From a humane perspective it is simply mind-boggling. Though the copious amount of numbers and statistics did much to dull my response to the sheer cruelty implied by the public policy, at its core, “planned shrinkage” is repugnant.  It might as well be labeled “premeditated murder.” The sudden removal of fire patrols from the South Bronx, the neighborhood seemingly most desperately in need of the protection, appears like nothing more than a deliberate attempt to inflict as great a population loss as possible on the blighted community. As a city, you should probably recognize you’ve gone a bit off the deep end when your public policy most closely resembles that of a Batman villain. “Gotham’s time has come…It is beyond saving and must be allowed to die.”- Liam Neeson, Batman Begins

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28
Mar 14

Wallace’s Vicious Cycles

The poor and disadvantaged in America are blamed for their own misfortune, often advised to “get a job” or simply to “stop being poor” (no really, someone actually said that), while in reality, they have little control over their own environments and are given much fewer options than middle-class whites when it comes to jobs, housing, and education.  If a community is viewed by the public eye as “blighted”—whether that be due to racism, classism, or a mix of both and other elements—then they receive less services. Les services leads to more decay, leading to even more social disapproval, leading to more decay, etc. In this way a complex systems of government forces, public opinion and social bias, and private interest groups can create vicious cycles of poverty and neglect in urban communities, using minority groups as scapegoats for the problems that arise from systematized urban decay.  In America, minority groups are discriminated against and deal with intense social bias, leading to higher rates of poverty, and so “planned shrinkage” (aka urban decay) is encouraged through public policy (such as the racist redlining and denial of municipal services to South Bronx residents as discussed in this weeks reading) and is favorable to politicians who want the wealthiest tax base possible. Urban decay also benefits private interest groups and companies, such as lending companies that charged higher loan rates in “declining” areas in order to control who could afford to move into that area, or retail and restaurants that are often put in place of the old, deserted urban communities. Most of all, urban decay benefits institutionalized racism.  After all, it’s not really about poverty, because even if you are wealthy and a minority, chances are you will still be discriminated against and forced to make decisions with both hands tied. Just as we have been finding more and more factors that are involved in the contemporary, subtle, and systematic racism that exists in U.S. housing practices and government policies, this weeks reading by Wallace highlights several more factors that contribute to another facet of this racism: “planned shrinkage”. These factors include rates of HIV/AIDS, lack of provision of basic services leading to increases in crowding and fires, rates of drug use, and erosion of community.  The key to these policies and to Wallace’s report is that none of these factors and events are simple cause-and-effect relationships, but that each factor is an essential piece to a complicated puzzle, where each factor aggravates and is aggravated by another factor, leading to a destructive “positive feedback” loop that destroys urban areas so that they can be cleared out, bleached, and replaced with high end stores and high tax paying citizens. It looks like although the days of the “Corbu combine” might be fading, even more dangerous racist, classist policies threaten to take its place. Which do you think is worse, and why?

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28
Mar 14

The Boogie Burned Down

Being from the Bronx, I connected with the arguments presented in “A Synergism of Plagues: “Planned Shrinkage,” Contagious Housing Destruction, and AIDS in the Bronx.” The section of the Bronx labeled “South Bronx,” mentioned as barren, burned out wastelands effected by massive urban decay, I had always remembered as neighborhoods flooded with projects. My father had lived in the same apartment building I grew up in since the late 1970’s in midtown Bronx. He describes the neighborhood as being middle class-Jewish, but that quickly changed by the mid-1980s. One signifier I have to this movement towards northern parts of the Bronx is my mother’s decision to settle there in 1986. South-Central Bronx burnout between 1970-1980 redistributed populations that were once part of overcrowding and within direct causality of the rapid spread of AIDS among injection drug users. A slew of reasons were given within “planned shrinkage” for why this burnout occurred: Landlords seeking to collect insurance money, landlords seeking to get rid of their tenants and concurrently rid of rent-control, meanwhile people on welfare assistance programs who were “burned out” of their homes received a stipend to move, causing many intentional fires. This intention/ unintentional setting fire to the already crumbling housing in the South Bronx rapidly led to its decay.

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