Scott Larson’s fifth chapter on urban planning as a narrative is clearly relevant to the community board meeting shown in the film “Whose Barrio?” In the meeting, the planners and building developers were trying their best to convince the community that it would be beneficial for everyone to allow luxury apartments to be built in Harlem. However, the community members knew that the median income in that neighborhood was too low for anyone from the community to be able to live in the new apartments. This relates to Robert Moses and how he used the power of persuasion to shape the future of New York City because convincing the community to the tearing down and rebuilding of buildings is a significant aspect of urban planning. Moses’s method included delivering creative assumptions as facts (Larson, 2013). However, aggressive urban planning/ renewal is necessary to pull a city out of recession, such as the one in 1989 to 1992. Yaro and Hiss, the authors of “A Region at Risk” also agree that rebuilding the city to attract wealthier individuals is needed for economic growth and to engage in global competition. For example, the Third Regional Plan proposed by the Regional Plan Association (RPA) was based on the prediction that New York’s population would double to 20 million. Therefore, more parks, highways, and bridges should be constructed to accommodate the growing number of urban dwellers.

In relation to the previous chapters from Larson’s book, Jane Jacobs would have a huge problem with this boom of development because the city would become more commercialized and there would not be a focus on the people who were already living in the city. Along with the older generations being displaced, communities would be broken up. The RPA’s plan also has neoliberal ideals with a shift away from big government to a more laissez-faire economic system. This includes a smaller group of officials making the decisions of where to build the parks and public institutions, while offering the community incentives to promote less vandalism and better quality of life. Jacobs would argue that the culture of the communities would still be stripped away, especially through displacement and gentrification. Gentrification, through social policy of the Bloomberg administration, is an urban strategy aimed to push out people of lower income minority groups who have service jobs in order to make room for more elite consumers. This idea also connects to “Whose Barrio?” because foreign and domestic investors are buying out the building with lower rents and rebuilding them as luxury apartments, which are only ideal for wealthier individuals. It is unfair that landlords deliberately worsen the living conditions for the residents in Harlem to force them to leave on their own, in order to sell the buildings to be reconstructed. Larson mentions that a part of the strategy of gentrification includes having famous designers build the luxury apartments so that their status and aesthetic attracts more high-class people to move to poor neighborhoods. I think that the strategy has been working well for the goal that it aimed to accomplish, but at the cost of those of the lower class.

In chapter six of Larson’s book, he discusses how today’s society would side with Jane Jacobs instead of Robert Moses on how cities should be developed. However, Bloomberg focused on “Moses-scaled” planning through the use of zoning, which is meant to include the diversity of uses that Jacobs thought was lacking. The characteristic of neighborhoods would be preserved through downzoning while rezoning would produce new developments of large scales. New jobs that would be created would be in the rezoned “business districts,” and this is an issue for the homeless because if they are not educated enough to attain these occupations, then they would be forced to return to shelters even if affordable, permanent housing gives them the motivation to search for a job. We will have to discuss this problem in our project and conduct more research.

Bill de Blasio’s plan of inclusionary zoning consists of private developers buying a few units below market price and incorporate them with investments in luxury development in order to keep rent low for certain communities. However, the plan sounds too good to be true. Private developers may not feel that using a portion of their investment to accommodate people with lower incomes as an incentive, especially since gentrification has been such a useful strategy to attract the wealthy to different neighborhoods. Another problem is that the estimates of a community’s income are the median incomes, but medians are not very reflective of the income gap between the poorest person and the richest. Therefore, income should be evaluated and generalized by using other measures instead of the median.

Discussion Questions: Can a capitalist economy exist without a significant income gap? What are the economics behind wages, and why are minimum wages so low that people cannot afford “affordable” housing (under de Blasio’s plan) without working 139 hours a week?