In chapter nine of his book, Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind, Professor Scott Larson makes it clear that the goal of New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg was to build on a large scale in such a way as to make the city more marketable, and more competitive with other super-cities; attractive to businesses and the wealthy. One way this would be achieved was through design, and the recruitment of elite level architects, appropriately dubbed “starchitects”, to design these plans for the city. What is clear in Larson’s depiction of the Bloomberg plans is that his municipality was most concerned with overall economic growth  than anything else. Moreover, from the discussions in class over the semester it is clear that there is a big debate over what the priorities of urban planners should be: economy versus other considerations that are more vague and complicated. Furthermore, it seems that economy has been the victor more often than not and that if it continues this way, the city will become completely gentrified, which is arguably what Bloomberg wants.

Why is this problematic?

Some students in class may be taking the utilitarian economic approach, wherein the belief is that more money is better for everyone. That is hard to argue with, because money is power and makes life easier, not just more comfortable. Thus the more money for everyone, the happier we all are because we all enjoy easier lives in one regard. However, this is not what happens in America. The wealth is not redistributed to make people’s lives sufficiently and markedly easier. Granted, the wealth does provide americans with many of the luxuries they enjoy at least in metropolises like New York City, but who is benefiting from these luxuries? Only those people who can afford to live in Manhattan, and eventually in the burroughs, and then the suburbs, and then where do the lower class live? This is something that could happen.

What we are being told is that economy should not reign supreme, and that marketability should not be the primary and sole concern. Oddly enough, the utilitarian economist is arguably not even following his own principles of bringing the most pleasure to the most people and minimizing pain as much as possible. People in this country are discontent with the income and power inequality that exists between the upper five percent and the lower 95%. Such beliefs are enforced when the lower classes are evicted in favor of new development, or not considered in design consequences like who will patronize the high-line (these people but not those people because they are not into that kind of stuff). It is a problem when the majority is not the main concern.

if a not as developed economy means more people are satisfied, then what is wrong with that? You cannot argue that weakening the economy now will cause terrible economic issues for decades to come, even if that is true and correct, because the 95% does not care right now. The problem with my argument is that there are logical flaws in it, and the most apparent one is that I approach the problem presupposing that economy is not chief whereas the people I am addressing do consider it chief. Effectively, my argument is trash to anyone who believes economy is all that matters. However, even to my argument, is not considering economics as chief and supreme going to be these option for the city?

The point is that other considerations for urban planning always lose when it comes to money. Alongside this is that a prominent website for urban planning and development called planetizen does not even label gentrification as one of the top planning issues of the year or of years past. Either people do not care or do not know. Or perhaps they know about the inequity that exists in our country but do not think it is a big deal. One of the points of our seminar is exactly contrary to that conception. The equity or lack thereof is directly responsible to where you live and consequently how you have grown up. The only virtue in New York City’s plan currently is the virtue of making money; their chief civic responsibility. It remains to be determined if this is ideal or not.

http://www.planetizen.com/node/47535/top-planning-issues-2010

I really like your blog post because it says all the things I could not articulate. Thank you for being my voice.

 

I agree with everything you wrote specifically that it seems almost impossible to detect any ulterior motives from the text of the Regional Plan itself, and that its not surprising that the planners did have ulterior motives in mind. Moreover, I agree with your point that any macro-level decisions are very intricate and that any course of action creates an entirely unique set of problems.

 

Would not you agree that if we had read the entire plan as proposed by Yaro and Hiss that perhaps we would have done the almost impossible and been able to see that there were ulterior motives that were factored into the plan? I read an article by Elliot Sclar and Tony Schumann titled New York: Race Class & Space: A Historical Comparison of the Three Regional Plans for New York in which they point out that within the extended text of the plan we can see that they do not directly address a solution for the social issues that the previous plans have created, but do propose extensive solutions for growing the economy. They argue that this is because of politics, as most decisions are influenced by politics in some way or another. Specifically, the men in charge of the RPA had economic interests that took precedence over the social issues. Ultimately, the authors of the aforementioned essay say that Yaro and Hiss may have been empathetic to the social needs of the era but were limited by the political forces. Now, that may be giving Yaro and Hiss too much credit insofar as how much they really care for the economically disadvantaged, but Shumann and Sclar emphasize that in the text of the Regional Plan is a heavy acknowledgment that these people are essential to creating a sustainable economy. That being said, it is odd that they did not offer concrete solutions and only offered moral exhortations; what good does that do? So either they don’t really care, in which case, why would they include any mention of the economically disadvantaged in a report that will probably only be read by their super wealthy and fiscally biased bosses who would not likely be swayed, or they were being careful not to agitate their employers, following the advice of Dale Carnegie, and trying to win their bosses to their way of thinking; or something else?

 

You got me thinking more about what professor Larson says about creating a narrative of threat in order to accomplish political goals. I think that the way the readings were presented created a “narrative threat “of sorts for Yaro and Hiss and not just the guys above them who ultimately made the decisions for the region. (Admittedly, no one would have read the entire plan). Yaro and Hiss did not have any wicked ulterior motives; their plan was for the betterment of the economy, only as long as it lead to the betterment of as many lives as possible in their quality of living. This is a very utilitarian approach. The moral action is the one that will bring pleasure to the most people and pain to the least people after all things are accounted. The article I mentioned makes the higher ups the ones who ignored the social issues, and renders Yaro and Hiss as helpless pieces of the larger political dynamic, not villains themselves. The point I’m trying to make is that not everyone who makes public decisions is a villain. The most we should ever do is just realize that there are problems; we should not place blame but look for solutions. And these solutions seem to come down to entirely restructuring the sociopolitical structure from the ground up, a daunting and seemingly initially catastrophic series of events. This may even be worse for the long-term sociopolitical and/or socioeconomic structure because the ideal can rarely become reality when it comes to socio-political-economics.

From the assigned excerpts in A Region at Risk and Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind we were presented with two different representations of the Third Regional Plan (herein referred to as TRP). From Yaro and Hiss’s brief comparisons of the first, second, and third regional plans, and from how they explain the TRP, the TRP’s holistic approach to urban designing seems to be the wisest choice when making decisions that will have large-scale global consequences, because “if you pull on a thread, you move the stars,” (Yaro, 2) and that’s some serious universe shaking stuff. The TRP’s core of balancing the Three E’s – economy, equity and environment – was presented to us as a plan for improving everyone’s overall quality of life, especially that of the lower class, by strengthening the region instead of expanding it. But then we read the fifth chapter in Professor Larson’s book and the TRP seems like it directly made gentrification into a corporate and governmentally controlled agenda to the supreme benefit of economy and environment, but at the expense of equity. As Professor Larson says very eloquently, “gentrification emerged as a calculated component of the intentional and methodical production of urban environments amenable to global corporations and their highly compensated workers,” (Larson, 73), and thus gentrification became an economic tool that furthers the economic disparity between classes.

What we have here is the ideal and the reality. Another plan went awry, as plans do; but why did this one falter? Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind had me blaming the “system.” The politicians and billionaires, and even the authors of the plan, had economic interests that corrupted the execution of the TRP. The social factors to the plan were weighed by rich, elite white men, who were more concerned with their own economics than with establishing a sustainable economy with less income inequality; immediate economy TRUMPed equity and sustainable economy. Undoubtedly, this did play a large role in how subsequent urban development occurred.

Still, do not think that all of the “system” could not give a damn about the lower classes and that only college students, the lower class, and Bernie Sander champion the cause for income equality (herein referred to as IE), because the authors of the TRP were very aware and conscientious of this issue. According to Tony Schumann and Elliot Sclar, the TRP indeed gave “prominence to issues of education and access to jobs” by “recognizing discrimination and segregation as obstacles to labor force productivity,” and characterizing the immigrant and minority workforce as essential to its growth and competitiveness. Moreover, it is stated in the TRP that the region is “shamed by its persistent racial and income segregation.” (Schumann). Schumann assures us that the TRP acknowledges the connection between segregation and income inequality as a big problem facing the future of the regional economy. Now, it is true that Professor Larson acknowledges that the TRP was very concerned with IE and increasing general life quality for as many people as possible, as he mentions Jacobsean philosophy multiple times, so I could very well have missed the point. But, I do not think I have because he stresses the “corporate agenda” aspect, implying to me that they did not care even a bit for the disadvantaged.

So, I ask again, how did it manage to not aid the problem if part and parcel of the documented plan was in considerable favor of helping the situation of this population? According to the same Tony and Elliot, it comes down to a contradiction in the Regional Plan Association that prevented the TRP authors from proposing an extensive and effective concrete campaign to combat segregation and income inequality at its roots. Yaro and Hiss, only provide “moral exhortations” (Schumann) in the TRP, which most people did not read and even if they had, would that have done anything? Anyway, the contradiction is that they are spearheading the efforts to encourage unified regional development that does not use up land as it enhances its human resources efforts, while corporate sponsorship of the RPA limits the practical initiatives it can suggest, and when social issues clash with immediate political issues, politics typically are more important to bureaucratic entities. Indeed, Schumann and Sclar point out that Lewis Mumford articulated this underlying principle of the RPA and assert that it is apparent in all three regional plans. Mumford said that the RPA was made to “meet the interests and prejudices of the existing financial rulers… and its aim from the beginning was as much welfare and amenity as could be obtained without altering any of the political or business institutions which have made the city precisely what it is.” (Schumann). Assuming this is true, we see that the RPA became more socially conscious and caring over time.

This is a story like many others. One in which what is popularly conceived as morally correct or morally repugnant is disregarded in favor of politics. It is a corruption of sorts, but what is the root of the corruption? Stories like this make us wonder how far do we have to go to establish institutional social change.

additional sources:

http://www.plannersnetwork.org/1998/03/new-york-race-class-space-a-historical-comparison-of-the-three-regional-plans-for-new-york/

by Joshua Libin