So I think we can all come to the consensus that fire destroyed a lot of neighborhoods in NYC and a lot of the blame can be put on the government and their poor approach to the combatting these fire cases. Rand’s Resource Allocation model was definitely incorrect in so many aspects. First of all, the model as well as the government’s approach to the fire problem was very much an outside-looking-in approach. It was unethical in that it basically created the most general model for fire response and it probably resulted in many deaths and destruction of communities.  At the time the city was not technologically advanced enough to be able to respond to fires quickly, the most efficient responses being from fire boxes and these boxes had a lot of false alarms coming form them. False alarms, poor communication and lack of resources made it hard for there to be good responses to fires. One of the strategies that the government used was suboptimization, which took resources from areas that were better off in order for it to match a lower average, saving resources.

I think that the two main problems that the government struggled with at the time was resources and overcrowding. Overcrowding increased the likelihood of fire and it is very difficult to ease overcrowding. Its not like the government can just expand a neighborhood and spread out the population like you would spread out excess cream cheese on a bagel with a knife. Plus, there is the additional problem that was mentioned previously about root -shock, people are unwilling to leave the areas that they have planted themselves in so its not very easy to resolve an problem that is causing another problem.

Discussion question: To what extent is outside-looking-in effective?

I decided on this discussion question because I was thinking about how a lot of the decisions by the government, ended up not really working for individual communities, a lot of the time, the approach is based off of an average idea of a neighborhood in the city. This relates to my group’s project of the Future of Flushing West in which development for vacant/warehouse specific land is to be rezoned for more retail and residential space. The rezoning is being contested because apparently the average low income statistics that the city has collected is higher than the actual low income in Flushing West. My problem with this that the city is being portrayed as sneaky by the MinKwon Center for Community Action, suggested by the article “Plan to Rezone Flushing West Flies Under the Radar” by Brandon Jordan, but the community is not exactly pure either. Yes, there are definitely those that make less than the average low income, but as a person that is from the area and knows more of Flushing’s dynamics, there are also plenty of people who take advantage of the system and lie about their income, wasting the city’s resources. It connects to false fire alarms that occurred at the time, they waste resources and makes real fire cases so hard to address.