What Jadxia said about “how New York City often seems to set precedents for other cities around the world” really struck a chord with me. For one thing, I completely agree, especially having read the article about New Orleans, etc. New York City is the Rome of today, the center of our world in many ways.

As much as I admit to the veracity of that claim, it still troubles me, as it evidently troubles Jadxia as well, if we can judge by her statement that “[i]t’s kind of scary that a city with such careless treatment of its middle and lower classes often sets the precedent for cities nationwide and worldwide.” Yet again, I agree with Jadxia–the lack of regard that the Big Apple shows for its inhabitants who are anything but ultra-wealthy is awful, and that it could be used as a precedent elsewhere verges on horrifying.

Nevertheless, I’d like to take Jadxia’s consternation one step further. It is bad enough, yes, that New York’s flaws are disregarded when it comes to setting precedents for other cities, but I think it is also bad that, in a world as globalized as ours, nobody can look past New York. Sure, it’s the financial capital of the world, but who ever said that it’s the capital of anything else? The capital of moral and ethics? The capital of environmental cleanliness? The capital of health and safety? Please, don’t try to convince me that this city is the capital of fashion.

It’s perfectly understandable to use New York City as a precedent–if you’re trying to run a successful financial company, that is. But if you’re trying to find the best example of, say, environmental friendliness, you’d better look in a dozen other places. I remember learning in my high school AP Environmental Sciences class that Chattanooga, Tennessee, was a great example of a city that has taken strides to reduce pollution and whatnot.

There are hundreds of cities around the world, each with its own magnificent specialty to show off to the rest of the planet. Why do we always turn to New York? Maybe it is the Rome of today, the capital of society and civilization, blah blah blah, but Rome had forced its lifestyle on all of its conquered territories. People who looked to Rome often had little choice. We have choice today.

Stop choosing New York.

Well, I think that title sums it up pretty succinctly. What I got out of today’s reading was that Amanda Burden is little more than the female, modern-day version of Robert Moses. Obsessed more with what the city looked like than what the city could provide for the average person living within it, Burden sought to create a haven for the ultra-wealthy–a group of which she, of course, was a member.

 

Before I discuss Burden’s actual urban vision, I’d like to point out the sort of person that she is. Frankly, I think it speaks a lot to who she is that a Google search of her name turns up a Vanity Fair article that does little more than accentuate her wealth as the third result (following only the standard Wikipedia article and her page on the Bloomberg Associates website). For all that Burden claims to have done all she could to escape the stigmatism of being no more than an Upper East Side socialite, she still lives that type of life, and that comes through in her method of urban planning, where everything must look fabulous.

This UES attitude is further reinforced by Burden’s requiring her projects to involve “starchitects” like the world-renowned Frank Gehry, even at the expense of running up the cost of a project well beyond what may have been necessary (Larson 140). Obviously it never hurt anyone to live in an aesthetically pleasing environment, but the city government is supposed to help it’s citizens; wouldn’t money spent on these starchitects have been put to much better use funding, say, schools or other public services?

Burden tries to shake her Moses-like disregard for people, but she never really manages it. In an interview with Urban Land Magazine in 2011, Burden opens by saying that cities aren’t about buildings, they’re about people. But as she tries to explain this in her next sentence, she goes on to talk about “how important well-designed, well-used public open spaces are to the economic and social well-being of cities” (Burden 0:13 – 0:22). She goes on to talk about bringing private investment into the city, and though maybe her intent is that such investments will benefit the city, she rarely mentions the actual people of the city again.

It doesn’t say good things about the city and its planning when the people considered most influential in urban planning have a regrettable tendency to forget the people for whom they are purportedly working. Sure, maybe Burden’s design ideas were based on Jane Jacobs’s ideas as Burden received them through the hands of William “Holly” Whyte, but I find it hard to believe that Burden’s motivations equaled Jacobs’s. Think back to the video we watched about the Harlem re-zoning. Did the woman we saw chairing those zoning meetings seem like the sort of person who was trying to help people or an economy? Sure, some people may benefit from the economic gains of Burden’s plans. But which people? The residents and small business owners of 125th Street? Or the corporate giants of Wall Street?

Burden is unconvincing in her regard for the people, much like the last urban planner to have as large an impact as her: Robert Moses.

What I found most striking about Ariana’s post is a fact that, quite honestly, shouldn’t be new to anyone in this class at this point. We’ve all been through multiple Macaulay seminars–we must have all heard dozens of times about the rampant inequality that is in large part a defining facet of New York City. However, seeing the numbers in black-and-white, as Ariana quotes them, remains astonishing. I refer, in this instance, to the middle of Ariana’s final paragraph where, talking about the NYC housing market, she says, “the idea that municipal planning requires a share of new construction to be low-income affordable housing units. However, the ratio for this is 80 percent market rate housing to 20 percent affordable rate housing. I was shocked to see this ratio because 20 percent in my opinion is nowhere near enough.” And, of course, I completely agree with Ariana.

The fact is that NYC feels ever more like an environment that is hostile to all but the super rich. Not only are lower-income households neglected and forced to struggle, the ultra-wealthy are continually more empowered.

To my mind, the prime example of the empowerment (a term that may not precisely convey my feelings, but it’s the best I can think of at the moment) of the one-percent is the recent construction of 432 Park Avenue. For those to whom the address is unfamiliar, you might know the building better by the description Professor Omri Elisha gave it during a particularly frustrated outburst during a Peopling of New York class last spring: “It’s just a ****ing matchstick!” The second tallest building in NYC, the tallest residential building in our hemisphere, and who does it service? Only those with extreme wealth–and a mere 104 of them, at that. Think of it: over 400,000 square feet of potential living space, and only 104 people will get to take part. For the luxury of living in 432, owners have paid starting prices of $7 million (the penthouse sold for a whopping $95 million) and will likely not even be spending much time there. The massive monument to money is estimated to be only a quarter occupied at any given time. And who will be occupying it? “Middle Eastern oil magnates, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and the Latin American aristocracy,” says Joshua Brown of Fortune. Not low-income New Yorkers.

And bringing this back to the numbers that Ariana quoted, for all the extreme wealth that is wrapped up in this building, how many affordable housing units have to be built? Using the ratio Ariana quoted and assuming that my math isn’t as bad as I dread it is, the total is approximately 25. For the obscenity that is 432 Park Avenue, benefitting the extremely wealthy as usual–and not even New Yorkers, not even people who will live in the City’s precious real estate–25 people will have access to affordable housing. I’m sorry if I’m not being clear about what exactly the problem is here–it’s that I have trouble wrapping my head around numbers this ridiculously out of whack.

Admittedly, I’m having trouble tying this back to zoning. I’ve gotten a little fixated. But look at the skyline. Isn’t 432 noticeably…ah, distinct from its surroundings? Mind you, it sits on a property that once housed the Drake Hotel, which topped out at 21 stories–a far cry from the 96 stories of 432 Park Avenue. How is this zoning even ok? (The answer lies in FAR, a concept I don’t totally understand even after reading a couple of articles, but which I found most helpfully almost explained here.)

And, obviously, 432 Park Avenue is just the (very tall) tip of the proverbial iceberg. Although an extreme example of the drastic inequality in New York, it is one of many similar luxury buildings available to only the deepest pockets. Ariana sums up the problem succinctly, I think, when she says, “we need to be very careful about the choices we make concerning this city.” After all, who really needs new apartments? Is it the super rich who live in other countries? Or the low-income, full-time residents of New York?

As we have already discussed several times in class and in a paraphrase the words of the experts on the topic we watched in that stimulating video, Robert Moses cared less about people than he did cars. Again, as we have discussed, his projects, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway, was built with little care for the people living in the neighborhoods they affected. Using the example of the Cross Bronx Expressway that I am now familiar with from our class discussion, the construction of that particular highway, though beneficial, perhaps, to those using it, particularly those travelling to Moses’s somewhat beloved Long Island via his Whitestone or Throgs Neck bridges, remains to this day detrimental to the socio-economic situation of the South Bronx—a neighborhood, it might be added, delineated by the very existence of the Cross Bronx—and its residents.

Addressing and contradicting Moses’s attitude is the purpose of Jane Jacobs’s famed book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as she herself says in the Introduction to that selfsame opus. Her opening words, wasting no time, are “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding…on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding” (3). Having just completed a discussion concerning Robert Moses’s disregard for people, it is obvious that he and those like him are the object of her opposition. The fact of the matter is that the two were operating in entirely different worlds, and their respective methodologies reflect that distinction.

Moses lived in a world that went, over the course of his career, through two Red Scares. Although aspects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that allowed Moses to complete several of his projects resonates, to some extent, with socialist principles of government assistance to those who require it, much of that was undone or reduced by the middle of the fifties. Moses was of a class and generation that was not about helping one’s fellow man economically or on a grand scale. Jacobs, however, was younger, and, moreover, a woman (as is, not a rich white man). She was not about building a city for the rich, nor even the middle class. Jacobs advocated the building of cities that would stimulate diversity and “argue[d] for high population densities in cities” (Halle 238). In contrast to Moses’s love of winding highways that were parks in and of themselves, Jacobs wanted places for people to live.

In today’s climate, the argument of whose perspectives are better aside, Jacobs ideas are probably more popularly acceptable. After all, consider how many times in class we gave scathing reviews of Moses’s work. In an increasingly globalized world, Jacobs’s views of a diversified city are much easier to accept—and, possibly, better than Moses’s, although that’s a different essay.