The underlying theme of all three readings this week is most definitely the consequences that stem from greed. New York City is becoming a society that tends to the needs of the rich while neglecting the poor and middle class. The term “middle class” is being skewed since even those considered to be in the middle class may not even be able to afford “affordable housing.” Mayor de Blasio’s inclusionary zoning plan is a plan that is bound to fail, in the sense that it will fail to fulfill the needs of the majority of New York City’s population. However, the plan will succeed in becoming a driving force for gentrification.

A plan that is pleasing the rich while stealing from the poor is not a plan at all, but rather a ploy. The theoretical poetic goals of “inclusionary zoning” seem to be masking the realities that will ensue once the plan is implemented. In Stein’s article on de Blasio’s Doomed Plan, Tom Angotti’s statement speaks truths that go far beyond the present day plans for urban renewal. “In areas with high land values, the new inclusionary development will just feed the fire of gentrification.” (Stein 2014) The process of gentrification is very much like the creation of fire. First, you must have oxygen, which in this case is the vast land of New York City that is being taken up by low income earners. Second, you must have a spark to ignite the fire. The spark in this case takes shape in the form of the greedy private developers that see the land as an opportunity for their own monetary benefits. Lastly, in order to keep a fire going you have to have a situation in which people allow it to burn. Here, it is the wealthy elite of New York City that are being attracted to neighborhoods they would have never taken a second look at if the low wage earners were still living in them. To allow the fire of gentrification to burn, you must displace the poor and convince the wealthy to move into the neighborhoods that once belonged to low income New Yorkers. The fire of gentrification is only being fueled by de Blasio’s plan because it is truly allowing people to watch their once culturally rich communities vanish and transform into luxury estates for the elite.

The concerns of the the residents in the neighborhoods that will soon be gentrified are quite valid, for their voice is lost among those with fatter wallets. Private developers must be forced to allow for units to be priced below their expectations because in the world of business the greater good is ignored to achieve the highest monetary gain. In last week’s movie “Whose Barrio?” the actual ripples of gentrification were depicted by the very blunt statements of the residents in East Harlem. The crowd that is being targeted by private developers provide a stiff competition, for their wallets are much fatter than the current residents with low incomes. Thus, it is the power of fatter wallets that have succeeded in driving out the residents struggling to keep their homes from being sucked up into the fire of gentrification. Money talks, and when it does, it is heard. Despite the political and financial aspects of trying to create affordable housing, the race and class relations that come about in gentrifying neighborhoods must be considered. Even if there are affordable units in a luxury building, what are the chances that they will be filled with the residents that once lived on that land?

Discussion Question: Can housing ever become affordable in a society where the rich may not even want to mingle with the poor?

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?

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.