In “Five Boroughs. One City. No Plan,” Jarrett Murphy talks about the immense amount of rezoning that has taken place under the Bloomberg administration. This rezoning poses a disturbance because it changes the regulations governing the way land is used, the style and height of buildings, the size of yards and the distance between houses. Although the rationale behind the rezoning is to make New York ready for a larger population to live in, I think that it can cause disturbances for the current residents and planners in New York City. I find it interesting that as a part of the rezoning initiatives, planners were giving incentives to build larger buildings as long as they were providing affordable housing. This makes sense since it would provide people with more living opportunities and would help the low-income families with finding an economic residence.

I think that it would make sense to develop the infrastructure near areas of public transportation so people would be inclined to settle there and it would also make traveling around the city more convenient. However, since all of the rezoning was not done at these transit locations, there were other economic goals that were more important for the city planners to consider, such as locating people to the waterfront. I also find it interesting that most upzoning projects were for the whiter and wealthier areas, which shows that the city planners had economic plans for their changes.

The fact that the zoning was being done to accomodate the developers’ visions of how the city should be growing seems very dangerous to me. If their visions do not come to fruition, then the results may be unexpected and can cause the city and the residents of the specific rezoned neighborhoods to suffer. This is another way in which rezoning can fail when estimations are made for future populations and lifestyles. I was surprised that New York started the trend of city-wide zoning regulations which describe what can be built on every square foot of the city. I thought that New York would have used another city that had a proven story of such a plan being effective before it took such a major step.

The transformation of the zoning regulations also shows some of the overall changes made across New York City itself. As it becomes more modern and holds more people, it needs to find a way to accomodate more residents while also looking like an urban oasis. It is also interesting that so many of the major cities across the nation have such different zoning regulations and what they limit or call for. For example, in Chicago’s zoning regulations, they laid out streets but also plotted where cultural facilities and parks should go, unlike New York’s original zoning regulation.

It is an interesting thought that Manhattan could have been less dense had the city made proper and more detailed zoning regulations. This would certainly have solved many issues plaguing the city today. Also, the possibility of the city having more of a balance of jobs would be a huge positive had such regulations been created. However, even though the past cannot be changed, planners are still not making amends to the city’s zoning regulations that would help the future of New York City be more sustainable for its growing population. I guess that Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC is the closest thing yet to a plan for a sustainable city. However, the plan is more of an agenda than a plan so the future of the city still remains uncertain as planners are yet to come up with a sustainable idea for the future of the city.

In “Building the Frontier Myth,” Neil Smith talks about the changing attitudes amongst New York City residents and how the thinking about certain neighborhoods has evolved over time. I find it to be very interesting that at one point in time, people had never thought about living on Ludlow Street. No one had heard of Ludlow Street and the residents hoped that this neighborhood would eventually grow up to be another Village in New York. The comparison of crossing Houston Street to pioneers crossing the Rockies showed how dramatic the transition must have been for so many people living in the city at the time.

Overall, this was a period of great change in the urban landscape. The new urban frontier motif not only was about the physical transformation of the built environment but also about a larger cultural change. People were starting to wear the fashion of the urban cowboys. This changing fashion sense in the urban environment in New York was centered in SoHo. In many ways, this part of Manhattan is still known for its new fashion styles and its transformational sense in culture. The residents tend to be artists looking for new inspiration and unique ideas.

In particular, I think that the “Americana West” store represents the sense of change that came across New York at the time. Its theme of a crossover cultural geography between city and desert is applicable to many neighborhoods in New York City today. There are many attempts to bring back styles and use inspiration from other cultures and traditions in New York. For example, Ralph Lauren introducing a collection centered on “the Safari women” to rediscover and reinvent their prominence in gentrification on earlier frontiers.

The use of non-endangered woods in this urban frontier show that although people wanted to bring western influence in the city landscape. This is a good aspect since they were not hurting the environment while they were trying to bring change to the city environment. I agree with the writer that today, the frontier ideology continues to displace social conflict into the realm of myth, and at the same time to reaffirm a set of class-specific and race-specific social norms.

I agree with the definition of gentrifying neighborhoods as bringing a civil class together with a uncivil class and classifying them to which extent civil or uncivil behavior dominates. This determines the extent to which the gentrification was effective and worked in improving the neighborhood. I do not agree with the idea that you need a civilized group to help the uncivilized by defining one as good or bad. I think that the “uncivilized” can be helped through programs and support from the people who are more “civilized.” People should not be labeled as being civil or uncivil because this just creates division in classes.

“In Re In Rem: Innovation and Expediency in New York’s Housing Policy” talks about the the huge amount of foreclosed housing that is owned and managed by the city. I find it very interesting that during a single year, New York City became the manager of nearly 40,000 occupied apartments, resulting in the second-largest public housing authority in the country. However, this expense became too much for the city to bear and contradicted what its progressive housing tradition tried to avoid.

I also find it interesting that many new public initiatives come about as a result of global tragedies, such as World War II in this case. Another example of such an event was the legislation passed after the Stock Market Crash in 1929. New York has and most likely will remain dependent on rental housing since it gives them less requirement to take care of the living space.

Another factor that I found important was that operating costs were increasing for maintaining apartments in the city since heating oil prices increase drastically and overall operating costs of apartment buildings in New York City rose which did not make home ownership attractive. This also influenced the city to play a bigger role in the housing market and have a control of the rentals and pricing since it had a responsibility of fair but profitable housing.

The city owned buildings were not able to be well taken care of because they were not funded enough since the city did not have the resources for it. They had to provide affordable housing for low-income families so they were not able to ask for rents to raise funds to maintain the housing buildings. The city also would quickly realize that it would not be able to auction off its buildings to housing investors. This would force the city to continue to hold the apartment buildings that it was not able to make repairs to and fix up to make them better for its residents to live in.

Finally, I was also very interested by the effect of policy-generated homelessness and the increasing deepening of the culture of dependency. This culture has even become prominent in today’s New York City since people have become dependent on public housing and even financial aid. Some people give false information to take advantage of the city’s programs for social welfare. Although these programs have good intentions, they can be abused by people.

Our visit to the Museum of the City of New York was very interesting and informative in terms of the future housing in New York City. The museum had a very good representation of the past, present, and future of the city. I found it interesting to see the population density around the boroughs depending on the lifestyle of the occupants, such as married or single. Although most of the statistics for the neighborhoods in the city were predictable, there were some that were surprising. For example, I did not know that there were as many singles living in Queens as shown at the museum.

For the present, I feel like the museum did a good job showing the regulations and condition that people live in. Many of the regulations that were described during the tour seemed very strange and unheard of, such as the one about the square footage requirement for apartments to follow. I know that many of these regulations were passed because of the transformation that took place in the 20^th century led by journalist Jacob Riis. By showing the poor living conditions that many New Yorkers lived in, he and others exposed the necessity for having certain living condition requirements for safe and healthy measures.

The part of the museum that I found most interesting was of the future for New York City living spaces. The fact that people can be living in more aesthetically pleasing spaces while still maintaining the same costs and efficiency seems like a great idea. Rather than having all the apartments in a line look the same, having differences in them makes them unique and allows for more creativity on the part of the occupant. The models of the buildings helped in visualizing the buildings and the apartments inside.

I also found it very interesting to hear about the plan that Bloomberg is trying to push for the building near Baruch to be built. The fact that the apartments will be build elsewhere and brought to the site of the building seems like a very smart idea to me since it would increase efficiency and save time and energy. The competition that this idea was brought about from was certainly helping since it gave the idea to separate the apartments while making them affordable. This affordable housing will definitely make the building’s apartment availability very competitive and hard to find. During the tour of the museum, I recognized that many of the ideas that people had for future New York City living units were similar to those I’ve seen in pictures of Japan. Since the Japanese make many things compact and try to save space by building things around other things, we can certainly learn and implement some of their design ideas. I was surprised by the fact that a third of New York City’s occupants are single. However the more surprising thing for me was that there were many other major cities that had a higher percentage of singles. I think this is because I live in a family-oriented neighborhood so I tend to see more families, while there are many more people living alone in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The part of the exhibit that I liked best was the sample room that they had showing the future of New York CIty living. The ingenuity that the designers used to design that space was remarkable. The chair that turns into a ladder, bed that comes down from the wall, ottomans that go inside one another to save space, working station that folds down and becomes functional, refrigerator behind the television, expandable eating table, and even the foldable chairs. These are all some of the brilliant things that I found were very useful and saved a lot of space. In the future, as the population in New York City grows, I feel that we will need to become more compact and learn to live in closer living spaces. This sample apartment showed that a small space can be just as functional as a regular sized space. By hiding things in other things, we save space by making things multifunctional so that they can come in use for more than one purpose. For example, the chair can also fold over and become a ladder.

In “Crabgrass Frontier,” Kenneth T. Jackson discusses the influence that the government had on housing in the 1920s. He mentions how the government encourages businesses to abandon old structures before their useful life is at an end by permitting greater tax benefits for new construction than for the improvement of existing buildings. This is how the government was subsidizing the acceleration rate at which economic activity was spread to new locations. I find this method to be interesting because the modern government does the same thing with investments, such as taxing capital gains and dividend income less than the income tax rate so that more people would invest their money in the markets. This makes it seem like the government, both of the past and current, is able to manipulate the economy and living conditions through certain economic incentives to the public.

Another interesting point was that the first federal housing effort in the United States was to help in the war efforts in 1918. Rather than start as the result of a conscious effort to help the poor or to increase reform spirit, it was done to help provide industrial workers who produced weapons for the European conflict with homes. This makes it less surprising that Americans did not view government intervention in a positive light until the Great Depression in 1929.

Under President Roosevelt, there were several laws passed to help the condition of the American housing market that was in its worst condition in American history. Times like this in American history show when and how a government can be helpful to Americans when they really need it. For example, the Home Owners Loan Corporation introduced, perfected, and proved in practice the feasibility of the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage with equal payments spread over the term of the debt. This new development helped homebuyers get a fair loan that they can pay off over time.

The changes that took place, which allowed homebuyers to buy the house without as much stress as they would have before were drastic improvements. For example, by establishing minimum standards for home construction, provided homebuyers with the satisfaction that their investment would be free of gross structural or mechanical deficiencies. The fact that there were inspections done to supervise the implementation of the law makes it seem like the government really believed that these changes were necessary and needed to be enforced.

The most surprising thing for me was that the FHA was helping the building industry against the minority and inner-city housing market, and its policies were supporting the income and racial segregation of suburbia. That was the first time that the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace. The FHA exhorted segregation and covered it up as public policy. This is very surprising to me because I would have never imagined for a government administration to clearly conduct discriminatory practices in public works. Overall, the move from the inner-city neighborhoods to the suburbs was caused in large part by the government’s influence on the American public through its loan system.