I felt that this week’s reading was a bit lacking in focus. The chapter opens with a quote which does a wonderful job of creating a tone of crime, chaos, panic, and danger. However, the writing that follows seems to only barely relate to that theme. Hanhardt fluctuates between discussion of riots, racial segregation and gentrification, and gay communities without really providing what feel like strong connections between the themes. What’s worse, none of her themes seem to serve any overarching informative goal – the chapter seems to lack a purpose.

The real shame is that this weeks reading seems to be covering a particularly unique subject. While we have already spent a fair deal of time discussing racial tensions and how they relate to financial and housing crises, I believe this is the first time that discussion of LGBT communities and “The Gay Index” has come up in class. The Gay Index was a completely new concept to me, and I found it genuinely interesting to discover that there were such important correlations between the presence of gay communities and various advancements in tech and business.

There’s a line near the opening of Callahan’s article this week which explains how a park funded by a billionaire is “just a short walk from his office in Chelsea.” This line has a strong implication which I feel the article overlooks to a degree. Callahan seems accepting of this and other such works as acts of philanthropy, despite the clear ways that they directly benefit the “philanthropist” performing the act. The park built by Barry Diller can just as easily be seen as a personal luxury instead of a public service, especially considering its location in an affluent neighborhood. It’s worrying that wealthy populations are spending so much time just looking out for themselves, even in their charitable acts.

This grows even more worrying when one considers the “rich get richer” numbers which are brought up in Cohen’s article. Wealthy people already enjoy a wide array of luxuries and amenities with no immediate fear of losing them, and it’s appalling that they would still be so greedy as to try expanding that array. I do wonder if the growing income gap is a result of this greed (as opposed to a way to dis-incentivize greed), but I still believe that there should be a balance between self-serving behavior and looking out for those less fortunate.

While discussing the idea of Progressive Community Planning, I was surprised to see Angotti take such a realistic approach to describing the forces involved in the housing crisis, especially in his reference to the work of Paul Davidoff. His summary of Davidoff’s work describes community planning as an inherently value-oriented affair. This was a refreshing change of pace from many previous readings which took a noble, if not fairly naive stance. While other passages seem to encourage property owners and policymakers to support housing movements out of the good of their heart, Angotti and Davidoff acknowledge the harsh truth that money *is* still extremely important to consider when engaging in community planning. While it’s often tempting to write money off as being something that only greedy and corrupt people seek, it’s good to maintain a more realistic view of how important a role money plays in community planning.

It’s always alarming when a person or organization acknowledges a problem without also presenting a well thought out solution. This was my initial reaction to the PlaNYC page detailing some of the particularly frightening projections for the future of New York’s environment. The page did seem to offer a few actual plans for combating climate change, but they were hidden behind links, PDF downloads, and not presented in a particularly accessible manner. It gives off the impression that the plans weren’t well enough thought out to show off on a front page as a concrete solution.

This lack of concrete solution became even more alarming while going through the following readings, which detailed the chaos and public outcry that leads up to and follows natural disasters. The enormous and passionate demonstrations of concerned New Yorkers that the NY Times article reported on make it clear that people want real answers for the issues of global warming, and it’s near tragic that none have been easily presented. Furthermore, the threat of political turmoil like that which followed Hurricane Katrina is looming over New York now more than ever with the significant threat that global warming poses as a climate crisis.

One thing that struck me most about this week’s readings was the comparison of gentrification to “Class War” in the Smith excerpt. Before this week’s reading, I never really thought of the term “Class War” as ever really referring to a true war. While the conflicts surrounding gentrification in the Lower East Side certainly didn’t escalate to the point of armed soldiers killing one another on a grand scale, they strongly resembled the violence and strategies of many of history’s more traditional wars – just on a smaller scale. Large chunks of the reading discuss events through fairly militaristic terms, describing parties as “claiming land,” “making strategies,” and “retreating.”

Much like more traditional wars, this smaller scale class war proved to be largely fruitless and extremely costly for both sides involved. Victims of gentrification were beaten down in riots and pushed into unhealthy living conditions, while policymakers and gentrifying parties spent absurd amounts of money keeping lower income families out of the Lower East Side. I can’t help but wonder why there aren’t more systems in place to prevent costly battles like these from breaking out. There already exist a number of diplomatic institutes which aim to limit and prevent traditional war, so why aren’t there any dedicated to preventing class war?