Before reading Samuel Stein’s article, I looked into his background, which turns out to be specifically grounded in labor and housing and the relationship between the two.  This helped me to understand where the article’s arguments were coming from and definitely contributed ethos appeal.  While reading the first two sections, despite the title of the article, I felt hopeful for the future of low-income affordable housing in the city being improved with Mayor De Blasio’s plan.  Stein made it seem as though De Blasio was taking a significantly different approach to inclusionary housing than Bloomberg did, specifically in that his is more wholehearted.  However, Stein brings this fantasy to the ground with unfortunate realism in the next section.  He describes it as extremely flawed – it seems that De Blasio’s plan simply fails to address the problem as well as it may believe.  Stein explains that inclusionary housing will in fact displace more poor people than it will save, and no one will mourn this displacement because the only visible results will be showcasing the few who gain housing.  Ultimately, what I gathered from this article is that the attempts of the rich to share their resources in a top-down fashion are doomed to fail.  What the city really needs to do is start from the bottom and build up, because so much of it is already devoted to those who have money that it will take a fresh, new frontier to serve solely the poor.

Not surprisingly, I found support of my claim in Larson’s chapters.  When discussing the narrative of threat, he explains that a popular method of pushing a development project forward involves arguing that it is vital and essential for the city.  But who in the city would these developments serve?  The answer is that they would likely serve those who have the power to put them in place and those who are already well off.  This argument relates to the De Blasio plan described in Stein’s article explaining that mass inclusionary housing would actually benefit those who have money and that rents in the low-income housing developments would eventually rise.  A project to provide housing for poor people needs to be shaped and focused entirely on them without any loopholes allowing the rich to slip in and reap the benefits.