In “Five Boroughs. One City. No Plan.” Jarrett Murphy talks about the vast increase in zoning that has taken place during the Bloomberg administration. Zoning designates the permitted uses of the lands, such as for residential, commercial, manufacturing, the style and size of buildings, and the size of yards, amongst other things. During nine years of Bloomberg’s administration, there were 108 rezonings, and since 2002, 9,400 blocks in New York City have been rezoned. This is especially astonishing when compared to the 1980s and 90s when it took five years to rezone five blocks, and it seems like it doesn’t take much work or effort or thought to rezone during the Bloomberg administration.

Amanda Burden, head of the Department of City Planning, said that the rezonings “are setting the conditions for sustainable, transit-oriented growth” and are “designed to accommodate a population of 9 million New Yorkers projected by 2030.” This sounds nice in theory, but I wonder what happens if the developments and projects don’t work out. Maybe a certain type of zoning won’t work in an area. If the neighborhoods and areas do not develop like expected or people don’t live or go there, what happens? It would be a waste and it could leave neighborhoods empty and ruined.

Something interested mentioned in the article that we have also discussed in class was giving developers the right to build large structures if they also build affordable housing, protect cultural institutions, encourage bike racks, and other things that are supposed to help the people of the city and make it better. This sounds like a good way to make sure that there is benefit to everyone, not just the developers and a certain part of the population, but it would only work if done correctly. One thing to look at would be how having affordable housing mixed in regular market housing would affect who lives there. The article also says there would be bonuses for builders who protect neighborhood grocery stores, but I wonder how this would be done since by developing the area, rent would probably go up thereby kicking people out since they could no longer afford it. There is also the question of whether or not developers do what they are actually supposed to.

In the article, Pratt Center’s Eve Baron writes that planning is not just about the physical, but also about having day care, schools and other services. That along with transportation, parks, and health care is part of a comprehensive plan, but New York has never really taken a comprehensive approach to planning.  This sounds good, but I think it’s difficult to do when an area is already developed. If you have a very little developed area, then it much easier to put things where you want, but if it’s a developed city with a lot of people and businesses you would have to see where an upcoming neighborhood is before deciding to add more transportation or school or something. There is not point in planning and building something if you aren’t sure that people will go there.  Just because you build it, it doesn’t mean people will go.

Right now, the plan or agenda in place for the city is PlaNYC. It isn’t a really plan, but I don’t believe that a complete developed plan is really needed for it to succeed. It’s more of a vision of what the City should be like in the future, and perhaps there is not really a concrete strategy to everything outlined in PaNYC, but having it is a start and it could be decided on later on. What might work in area might not in another, like with parks and open spaces, so catering the plan to each area would be best.

Eminent Domain is the power for the government to take private property for public use. In the U.S., the Fifth Amendment gives the government the power to take property for “public use” as long as it makes “just compensation” for them. This leave a lot of room for debate, as there is the question of what is public use and just compensation. There is also a question of whether or not this power of the government is right, since peoples right to private property is taken away. When talking about eminent domain, it’s hard not to think about Robert Moses and all that he built and that many critics believed that he abused the power of eminent domain. Although that may be true and many people were displaced because of all of his projects, it’s difficult to imagine the city without the things he built. For me, when I read about the project that it in the works that will use eminent domain, such as Atlantic Yards, or Willets Point, it’s difficult to think that the positives and benefits of the project will out weight the negatives of displacing people but when I look back on projects, like those of Moses, it’s much easier to see all the positives and why there is a need and use for eminent domain.

In the case of Atlantic Yards, the justification for eminent domain was blight, but the author says that the consultants had to stretch for the area to be labels as blight. Prospect Height was not initially blighted, but after owners left due to the threat of having their property taken away due eminent domain, it became a state of decay. This really just does not seem right on the part of the government, but I imagine that this happens in many areas where there is the possible threat of eminent domain to be used for a development project.

When I first saw that the article was going to be about eminent domain, I immediately thought about my project topic, Willets Point, which is also mentioned in the article. There is currently a plan to replace the scrapyards, auto body shops, and industrial sties of Willets Point with a large shopping center, housing, office space, and some other things meant to improve the area, and could potentially use eminent domain to acquire the land needed for the redevelopment project. As the article says, there is the mindset that in Willets Point, “anything is better than grubby body shops.” But the area serves people that would have a difficult time find another job since it is mainly immigrants, with limited skills who work there. It’s also a destination area to get cheap work done which is good for people who may not really be able to afford to go elsewhere to get their cars fixed.

Something that caught my attention was the author’s assessment that eminent domain abuse is a symptom of a deeper problem, the government’s belief that central planning is superior to free-market competition. In the case of Atlantic Yards and Willets Point, it seems like the government just wants to a big developer to go in and boost the area and economy as opposed to allow the small business stay and perhaps boost the area with time. I think it’s understandable to use eminent domain to build a public highway, hospital, school, or something like that, but for entertainment purposes, it really doesn’t seem like it should be used. There is more to Atlantic Yards than the Barclays Center, but that is the main part of the development, and for Willets Point, it would be the shopping center. The other stuff just seems to make the redevelopment sound better and more like it’s really for public use. In theses situations, eminent domain seems to be used to enrich few private developers at the expense of many small private developers.

I think it’ll take time to see whether the Atlantic Yards development, or other similar megaprojects in the city will be successful or not, but so far it seems to be the approach the city is taking as opposed to just trying to fix up an area. As the article said, the courts also aren’t much help for homeowners, except maybe in the case of West Harlem. In the research I have done so far for the project about Willets Point, the resident of Willets Point and several business owners have filed lawsuits, but it does not seem like they will win even though they have before. It sounds like the redevelopment plan for Willets Point will be approved and go on as planned, but a part of me hopes that it won’t because I don’t really think it is the best thing especially if the use of or threat of eminent domain is used.

The article “Government Can’t Help? Tell That to the South Bronx” by Michael Powell talks about how the government saved the South Bronx. The South Bronx reached a low point in the 1970’s, with significant poverty, gangs, drugs, fires, and more. However, that changed with the governments help, and the Bronx, along with many neighborhoods of Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, is one of the greatest public rebuilding achievements since World War II.

Something that caught my eye was that former Mayor Ed Koch began the resurrection, and is continued today with great vigor by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the end, the Bloomberg administration will have invested more than $8 billion into building and preserving 165,000 apartments. This is something I hadn’t heard about before. Most of the things most people hear about are the negatives, and I also believed that the Bloomberg administration wasn’t really doing anything, or not enough to combat the housing crisis, so it is good to know that the government is actually doing something about it, but there is more to it than just building and preserving apartments, so I wonder if the problem could really ever truly be fixed by the government. Part of the problem is not having enough housing, but I think a larger problem is people not being able to afford housing, which there are many factors causing that.

Something related that I also found interesting was that the South Bronx could be seen as an example that the government can work on a large scale and accomplish remarkable tasks. This is something that many people think the government can’t do, and I think a lot of people don’t have faith in the government to accomplish much. Of course people tend to focus on the negatives, but it would be nice to read more and hear more about all the good things the government has done so people can trust policymakers more and not just think they are in it for themselves or won’t really do much in office.

From the title of the article, I expected it to be much different than it was. I thought that it would be about the poor conditions of the South Bronx and how they need government help to get by and improve conditions because when I think of the South Bronx, I think of a poor, dangerous area, filled with drugs and violence that is falling apart. I think this is how most people in New York who don’t really know about the South Bronx view the area. I never knew about the urban renewal in the 1980s or about the buildings mentioned in the article, which sound like they’ve really helped to improve the neighborhood.

Upon further research however, I found that many of the residents live below the poverty line, and drug and gang activity among other things are still common there. The last sentence of the article is “ The era of government may be in danger. But it saved the South Bronx.” I guess there are different ways to interpret this, but although the area is better than it was in the past, it doesn’t seem like the government actually “saved” the South Bronx. It seems like there is still much more the government can do to for the South Bronx and its residents.

The article “Making New York Smaller” by Roger Starr talks about how different ways to get New York out of the financial crisis in the 1970s. I hadn’t really read much about this before, and much of what was in the article wasn’t really anything I had read about either, so I found it very interesting and though provoking. Seeing that there was a financial crisis very recently, it’s interesting to think about if what he wrote still applies and his solution could still work today.

Starr says that New York can be divided into two cities that are responsible for producing New York’s wealth, the Economic and Political city. The Economic City is made up of the private and public enterprises that create goods or services people are willing to pay for. The Political City provides services for people such as criminal justice, elementary education, and fire protection. The Political City is partly funded by the Economic City by taxes and fees by vendors, but the Political City also produces wealth through the federal government. Starr’s distinction between the two cities and what they do is pretty interesting as I have never thought about or read about the city being separated in such a way, especially with the Political City because those services are things that I and probably most people don’t really think about since in this country, they are just services that city’s everywhere provide, as opposed to other countries where is might not be the case.

The two cities are intertwined, but from the article, it sounds like the Economic City is more important because it is the backbone. The Political City previously increased the local taxes on the Economic City when the cost of the services it provides increased, but in the 70s, it wasn’t possible with the Economic City not being able to provide enough jobs. Its like if the Economic City fails, the Political City would too, unless it gets enough money from the federal government, which doesn’t seem very likely. I think this can bee seen in other cities where the main industry and main source of wealth has fallen and the city can’t really survive, or at least in the same level it did before. The article mentions how New York’s exports lost their attraction and manufacturing shrunk to almost nothing, but I’m assuming that it wasn’t so bad because there are so many different industries and not just one large one with some smaller ones that most people are a part of.

The main argument in the article is the idea of planned shrinkage, which as Starr notes is not a popular idea. This is when there is a deliberate withdrawal of city services, to deal with decreasing tax revenue. This really just sounds unjust because the “normal” city services are what you expect in return for paying taxes. In addition, how would it be decided which neighborhoods would lose their services? How bad does a neighborhood have to be? Starr also says that the idea that the poor would be victims of the policy isn’t true, and the opposite is actually true. His reasoning for this just doesn’t make sense to me because he argues that the poor need the most government help, so it the government isn’t properly using its resources economically, it would hurt the poor the most, but wouldn’t just taking away government services including “normal” ones be worse since their neighborhoods wouldn’t get them at all?

Another thought I have is about after people do leave. The article says that consistent density through out the city is important. It’s better to have one full building than two half buildings. However, you could have many people leave from one neighborhood, and only some leave from another, but it’s not like you can just move those still in the mostly empty neighborhood to another. There could be the use of not providing city services but it might not necessarily work. I just don’t think planned shrinkage would be a good plan because it doesn’t hurt the people who need the most help and there are also so many different outcomes that  could happen that aren’t easily dealt with.

The film “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” was much more interesting than I imagined it would be and it also had a much greater impact on me than I believed it would. I thought it would be pretty boring, just talking about the history of Pruitt-Igoe and why it went wrong, but it was more than that. Although the New York Times article had quotes from the interviews in it, it was different and more powerful when watching the people talk about living there and all the emotion that they felt and displayed.

The greatest and most touching part of the film for me was hearing the former residents talk about how it felt when they first moved into Pruitt-Igoe. There were descriptions about it as a hotel and a “poor man’s penthouse.” Another talked about how she came from a family of 12 and her mother actually had a room of her one with a door, after sleeping the in the kitchen. There were also stories about Christmas and how beautiful and fun it was. The most memorable for me was at the end of the film when the women teared up as she spoke about how she remembers it for the good and refuses to think that it was all bad. Hearing all the accounts of how the people felt first moving in and all the good makes me actually want to do something to work towards developing affordable housing for all so they can experience what it’s like to have a livable nice home. Of course a lot of people are trying to do this and it’s not easy, with Pruitt-Igoe being a prime example of what could go wrong.

Although there were many accounts of some of the good, there were also of course many about the bad. The worse one and the one that stuck with me was when the man spoke about how his brother got shot and his mother tried to put everything back in but couldn’t. This is just so shocking and scary to hear about, but I suppose this isn’t really uncommon, both in the past and today. When the film got to all the bad that happened and the film said that police wouldn’t come because they didn’t care, this just didn’t sound right. It probably was true, but the film also talked about how when the police did come, people threw firebombs outside wanting the police to leave. It’s like they wanted to be helped and everything to get better, but at the same time, they turned away outside help.

It seems like Pruitt-Igoe was destined to fail given the lack for funding for maintenance cost. With no government help to take care of the place and not enough from the resident’s income, its no surprise that the elevators didn’t work, or that it wasn’t taken care of and became really dirty. However, the lack of funding wasn’t the whole problem. I wonder why the residents didn’t do something when things first became bad. I know there was the discussion about the amount of children outnumbering the adults, but if I wonder if maybe there was something that could’ve been done if everyone worked together to really act like they cared about the place and make it better. There some socio and economic reason why it might not have worked, but I still think there could have been maybe some things that could’ve been done, even just little things like cleaning up hallways and not burning and throwing garbage there that could have prevented it from becoming as bad as it was.

Seeing a film like this makes me wonder about the public housing of today. Most of what I’ve read have been about public housing in the past, so I don’t really know what it’s like now. When I walk near or through a housing project, it does scare me a bit, I guess this is just from my own prejudgment. I wonder what the government has done differently, more money probably, but also if there are other things to prevent another Pruitt-Igoe. I wonder if government has done anything about the ratio of children to adults, which might be tricky and a bit difficult to do. The big question I have is if there is a way for the government and residents to do something to improve the conditions and quality of life and stereotypes that seem to preside in public housing.

When I first read about Robert Moses and all of his accomplishments, it seems like he was a really great man who did a lot for the city. While it is true that he did a lot and the city would be vastly different if it weren’t for him, there is also another view of him and many critics don’t agree with everything that he built and what he did to build them. Moses wasn’t evil by any means, and I believe that all that he accomplished and his lasting legacy on the city of New York is much greater and important what the negatives of what he did.

One of the negatives of what Moses did was the amount of people that we evicted and displaced. There is no accurate number for the number of people displaced, but it is estimated to be close to half a million. Most of the housing he built was for the rich, and the housing he built for the poor was bleak and cheap. It can be argued that what Moses did was for the greater good of the city and society and that it benefited much many more people that it harmed. It’s really difficult to decide when it’s worth it to move so many people out of their homes, if ever, but it not really a rare thing to do, and looking at how New York is now, maybe it was justifiable in those cases.

The most surprising thing I learned about Robert Moses is just how much power he had. It’s quite surprising seeing as how he was never elected to public office and was appointed to the positions he held. He was given the positions he wanted, and like the interaction with Robert F. Wagner showed, he could just threaten to resign and he would get what he wanted. Going along with this, I hadn’t read before about Moses hiring skilled investigators who kept dossiers on city officials. This added to his power since all the city officials knew about the dossiers and knew what he could do to them. This sounds like what power crazy men would do, which I guess Moses might be considered as.

I think that the city could use someone like Moses today. As Kenneth T. Jackson wrote, Moses was unusual in his ability to get the resources needed to see a project from conception to completion. The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge was finished under budget and three months early the Tappan Zee Bridge, not built by Moses, was over budget and opened late. It seems like things take a really long time to get done and be built nowadays, like with the Barclays Center, whether is financial or legal issues, and I think it might be good to have someone really ambitious and a go-getter to build large projects.

At the end of Jackson’s chapter, he writes that Moses made it possible for New York to remain in the front rank of world cities in the 21^st century. If it weren’t for Moses, the city might have deteriorated so bad that it couldn’t be brought back to prosperity. I wonder if this is really true, the city couldn’t have bounced back without Moses. This is something the readings make me thing about, along with whether another builder could’ve have emerged. Maybe would there just be less highways, bridge, public parks, and other things he build now, and how much different would the city?

The tour of the Making Room exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York was a lot better and interesting than I expected it to be. The most informative things I learned were the statistics about how people in the city live. The museum had various statistics about the amount of people living alone in the city, unrelated adults living together, couples with no children, and some others. Most of these were what I expected, like how there are mostly people living alone in the city, and especially in Manhattan. When the tour guide was telling show showing us all of these statistics, I was just thinking about how accurate theses numbers really were. I’m guessing that a lot of people don’t answer surveys and such, like with the Census Bureau, so the numbers and percentages are probably off.

I was surprised to learn that New York City only ranked number 17 in the country with the most single households. I expected it to be in the top five at least. I always think of the city as a place where people come alone when they’re relatively young to find jobs and try to make it. I guess there must be other reasons for the large amount of single households in other cities, some of which I was surprised by, like Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Something else I found informative and interesting were the laws about living spaces. The most surprising law is that it’s illegal for more that three unrelated adults to live together. This is something that I, and I would think many people don’t know. Some of the other laws mentioned, like how there has to be a window makes sense, but this one doesn’t really seem to. I can see why this law would be good, like to prevent too many people from living together in unsafe conditions, but if the place is large enough, it should be okay for more than three unrelated adults to live together. This is especially true seeing how much everything costs and how high rent is in the city.

The tour guide mentioned that the projected population in New York City in 2030 is close to 9 million, which is kind of scary to think about. I read an article a few weeks about how some people in Hong Kong have to live in cages and cubicle apartments because they just can’t afford anything else. I know this is really extreme, and probably won’t happen here, but it makes me wonder what will happen if the population keeps on growing like it’s projected to and if there’s isn’t enough housing. Rent keeps on increasing and affordable housing isn’t always really affordable. I know that Bloomberg put in a plan a few years ago to create more affordable plan, and there is the new micro apartment plan, but I wonder how successful the plans will be.

The micro apartment shown in the museum was really cool and fun to look at. It seems like a really great idea, and it shows that a person doesn’t need 400 square feet to be able to live comfortably. Everything in the apartment took up as little space as possible and the whole thing was just really resourceful and creative. What remains to be seen is how successful it’ll be. The price is probably the biggest hurdle and whether or not people can actually afford to live there and feel like it’s worth it. Although it is resourceful, with the little space to move around, people might not think it’s worth the rent.