This course has really taught me a lot about what is going on in New York. To be honest, I didn’t know much about the issues New York faces before I took this class. In previous Macaulay seminars we learned about the art and history of New York, but never leaned about present day New York and its happenings.

I got to learn about the affordable housing crisis more in-depth than I ever had. Also, while doing research for my group’s final presentation about local shopping streets, I learned a lot about the dangers they face with the new generation and chain stores, and how we can try to help the local shop owners. But the topic I think interested me most was talking about technology in the workforce. I had always been a techno-pessimist when it came to technology and machinery in businesses. I always thought they were going to replace human workers and widen the gap between the rich and the poor who would not be able to find jobs. But while doing the reading I learned a lot more on the topic, not enough to change my perspective just yet, but enough to make me consider rethinking certain things. Also, I really liked the trip we took to Civic Hall. It opened my eyes to the benefits of technology and how it can be used to make people’s lives easier and better, such as the Benefits Kitchen app. I think this is a must-see for future classes.

The other students’ presentations at the Macaulay common event were not quite like ours and they didn’t hesitate to point that out. Most of their presentations were very factual, using a flood of numbers, percentages, and statistics but it made them less captivating. One group even proposed a new form of currency (I think it was virtual currency, like BitCoin) so that banks would not be needed anymore. But while our group was taking questions and comments, we got comments that the students liked our presentation because it was unlike the others and more relatable and heartfelt. It really got them thinking about what they could do to preserve local shopping streets.

Small businesses are facing enormous problems in their fight to survive. It seems to me that the biggest problem that they face, one that each storeowner that we read about mentioned, is the rising rents. This is a major problem in today’s economy and market. If the rents keep rising, storeowners are forced to sell their businesses to people who can pay those rent prices but then went the rent goes up again, that owner cannot afford to keep his shop open in that location and has to sell to someone else until it happens again. It’s an ongoing circle that will continue until a big business who can afford the higher rents buy up properties and storefronts in a neighborhood comes in, thus leading to gentrification through down-up development and also leads to big businesses monopolies since small mom-and-pop stores may not be around and the big retail stores may be the only places to go to for the things you need.
I think that the Small Business Jobs Survival Act taken on by the organization Take Back NYC is a good start to fighting against the problems faced by local shop owners. It attempts to tackle the need for fair negotiations in commercial lease renewal between landlords and shop owners. For starters, there would be a ten year minimum on lease renewals. The landlord and tenant have 90 days to negotiate the terms and conditions on the new lease and if one party still does not agree to the new terms, a mediator or arbitrator is brought in to settle the dispute, hopefully without any biases toward landlord or tenant and he shall decide the rent price. This act seems pretty fair to me and I hope that this bill will pass so that tenants, shop owners, and landlords as well, can obtain the rights they need to fair prices and negotiations and that there can be less ill will between them.

As for 3 questions that I have for store owners:
1. Who are your customers? People from the neighborhood your store is in or perhaps people from other neighborhoods? People from the same community or ethnicity perhaps? It would be interesting to see how the storeowner would classify his customers.
2. Has rising rent prices affected your business? If so, what have you done to try to combat them and help your business stay afloat?
3. Are you aware of or do you take part in any organizations that try to help small shop owners maintain their businesses such as the ones mentioned in the articles we read? Do you think these organizations can have an impact on the problems your shop is facing today?

In the past, local shopping streets have always been epicenters of every neighborhood. It was where people went for their everyday needs and it was where people socialized, whether it was just a good morning to an acquaintance met in a local cafe or talking about the weekly gossip with a friend while browsing over the fruit at a grocery store. Shopping streets were not just places where people ran their errands and went home. Local shopping streets “bring together in one compact physical space the networks of social, economic, and cultural exchange created every day by store owners, their employees, shoppers, and local residents” (Zukin, page 4). They are usually safe places where people can interact and feel at home with the people of their neighborhood and are not excluding of outsiders. It’s also usually eco-friendly, with shops being close to residents’ homes and allowing them to walk or bike through the market place and carry their bags home.

The types of stores on local shopping streets usually indicates the class of people that live in the area. Working class neighborhoods usually has small immigrant-owned shops with bright displays and affordable merchandise at low prices to cater to the people who live there while higher end neighborhoods will have more upscale and trendy stores with merchandise of higher prices that entices the more affluent. Changing storefronts is usually a good indicator of gentrification.

Change on local shopping streets is almost always inevitable. Local shopping streets can go through the process of ethnic succession. When a group of one ethnicity starts moving out of a neighborhood, they take their goods with them, leaving the space to the new group of a certain ethnicity that moves in after them, just as the Russian and Eastern European Jews did when the earlier German immigrants moved out of the neighborhood in the Lower East Side. A new ethnic group moving into a neighborhood with stores that represent their ethnicity can also push out a different ethnic group. However, just as you’ve mention in your book, Professor Zukin, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, neighborhoods retain their ethnicity and their charm, such as New York’s Little Italy and Chinatown.

In a similar process, local shopping streets can change through gentrification. As more upscale stores open in a neighborhood, more affluent people are attracted to the area, thus allowing the rents to rise and forcing small shopkeepers to close their stores because they cannot afford to pay the rent to keep their stores open anymore. These shopkeepers have to move their businesses to a different neighborhood with lower rent prices while more upscale stores move into the neighborhood, making the neighborhood more upscale and allowing gentrification to continue.

Just as Professor Zukin wrote in her book, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, the stability of the local shopping streets depends on the supply chains that bring merchandise to the stores, the demographics of the neighborhood, laws and policies of the state, and media image contributing to a street’s “brand”. A disruption in any one of these can lead to store closings and new store openings, thus changing the local shopping streets. Technological innovation such as online commerce and retail chains has a major impact in all of these aspects. Although there can be some benefits to shopkeepers such as good online reviews bringing in new customers and using technology to manage their inventory, technological innovation has many downsides for small shopkeepers. The ability of resident’s to get all their needs online diminishes the need for many neighborhood stores. Instead of walking over to get a newspaper from a corner newsstand, people can get the news online in their own homes. With huge online clothing retailers, people don’t need to go to clothing stores and can have clothes shipped to their doors. Some grocery stores allow you to order online or call in an order for groceries and have it delivered to your door without even having to leave your house. People don’t have to get their needs locally anymore either. You can order what you want from overseas online and have it shipped to you in a couple of days. One of the benefits of people going to local shopping streets is that the money stays in city. However, with all of this technological innovation, money is leaving the country and going elsewhere to different countries supplying the merchandise. This is a big problem for America that gets a lot of its merchandise from industrial countries like China.

Overall, online retailers who work out of huge warehouses of merchandise can really have negative effects on local shopping centers, especially small mom-and-pop stores. In this day and age, people are having less human interaction and more screen-time. I think that many retailers may have to start moving some of their business online if they want to keep up with the fast-moving, tech-based generation. Those memories of going to a familiar shopping street and feeling at home with shoppers and shopkeepers who know their customers by face if not by name may become just that: memories, a thing of the past.

This week’s trip to the “Silicon City” exhibit was really eye-opening for me, seeing the evolution of technology from the first computer that was invented to solve numerical problems, to computers of today’s day and age. Perhaps my favorite part of the exhibit was reading about IBM’s company motto, “THINK”. Without new ideas and thought, there would be no progression, no innovation. There must have been something really inspiring about that motto or perhaps it was the employees constantly seeing the word “think” everywhere because you can really see how their technology evolved over the years. There was a tremendous amount of technological innovation and I saw that as I made my way from the beginning of the exhibit to the end.

Speaking of tremendous technological innovation, it was amazing to hear about the work that Civic Hall is doing. As much of the techno-pessimist that I am, I must say that our visit to Civic Hall has really shed some light on the positive ways technology can be used and how it can people rather than harm them. I was incredibly intrigued by Melanie’s website/app, Benefit Kitchen, which allows users to put information to see what government benefits they are eligible for and even more so, tells them where they can go to get it. It’s extremely unfortunate how much money that was set aside by the government to help families in need goes unclaimed because families or individuals don’t know they are eligible for it or just don’t know where to go to get it. This one app makes the process so much simpler for these families. It’s technology like this that should get more recognition because up until Friday, I had never known about Civic Hall (besides for what we read and spoke about in class) or the Benefit Kitchen app, which leads me to believe that there are so many more people who don’t know about it but can stand to benefit from it or, if not, at least pass on the information to someone else who can. Civic Hall is an amazing company that deserves much more recognition for their work.

The planned rezoning and renovation on the waterfront of Sunset Park will be a huge change for the residents and workers who live and work there. This deindustrialization will result in major changes to the big businesses that reside there as well as the small businesses that contribute to the economy of Sunset Park. Although the new project promises to supply many new jobs to compensate, it’s not certain just how many jobs that will be and whether it will be enough to supply jobs to the workers it will displace.

The new projects will have a great impact on the social dimensions and demographics on the waterfront neighborhood. As much as people promote innovation and its benefits, the benefits do not reach everyone and even have negative impacts on some people, such as the workers the innovative projects displace. These people will have to find other jobs and maybe even have to move to different neighborhoods as Sunset Park becomes less affordable to them. The new projects will attract more middle and upper class people to the area, thereby causing rents to rise and relocation of people of lower income, thus promoting gentrification. The only people benefiting from these innovation projects are the owners of these new buildings, the higher-income individuals, and perhaps the people who manage to secure jobs working there.

These articles from this week’s readings have not changed my stance on being a techno-pessimist, however, it has opened eyes to many new issues that I hadn’t thought of that come along with innovation.

This week’s readings focus on the benefits of technological innovation for New York specifically. It used to be that New York’s finance sector was the one that brought in the most revenue and were responsible for the city’s economic booms. However, now it’s the tech sector that’s taking over New York’s economy. According to the article by Calderone, with the increases in technological innovation, the costs of starting a business are much lower and so more businesses are being developed with many becoming successful. New York has the benefit of having many major tech companies and offices located here such as Etsy, Buzzfeed, and Spotify to name a few. The tech sector in New York is also growing with a speed that greatly outpaces the rest of the country, growing by 57% from 2007 to 2014. With this growth came the city’s most recent economic boom and its surge towards being one of the top tech cities.

There is a great debate going on about whether technological innovation’s benefits outweigh the costs and exactly how beneficial it could be.

I think that technology can be very beneficial. such as with CivicTech, technology “used for public good and betters the lives of the many, not just the few,” as well as “an interoperable, extensible platform for government upon which anyone can build services that increase transparency, efficiency and participation,” (Grodeska). It aims to better communities and improve the public good. This is when technology can be extremely beneficial.
However, there are also the downsides to technological innovation. While those who are in the tech sector are enjoying the benefits that come with it, those who do not make their living from there are the ones burdened with the negative costs. According to Streitfeld, overcrowded cities come with higher demands for living space and therefore higher rent fees as well as congestion in the streets and subways. Groups are being evicted in favor of start-ups. While the wealthy get wealthier in the tech sector, everyone else is struggling to afford the rising costs of living in the city.

After reading all of the articles, I’m not sure if I’m a techno-pessimist or a techno-optimist anymore. I think that, although technological innovation comes with a ton of benefits to many people and communities, we also have to look at the costs of the innovation and whether the benefits outweigh the costs for the nation as a whole and not just a small group.

This week’s readings focused primarily on the innovative sector of global economy and how cities are able to develop and flourish. Firstly, the definition of a city had to be given and Glaeser put it simply as an absence of physical space between people and companies. This definition was important in learning how a city develops and succeeds because all the human talent that is concentrated in one area and their ideas (or what is called “human capital”) is what leads to innovation and productivity.
Cities used to thrive on harbors and importing/exporting physical goods, but they have now shifted to relying on the innovative sector which provides ideas, innovation, ingenuity, knowledge to “create things the world has never seen before.” According to Moretti, this leads to the multiplier effect, increasing employment and salaries for those who provide local services to the innovative worker. Therefore, for a city to develop economically, it must attract innovative companies that will provide jobs for the less skilled workers by consuming more local services than other workers and creating a need for more local jobs.

Since innovative workers are attracted to other innovative workers, the economy of the location changes and develops but it also increases the divide between cities and communities because talent lays with the talented and the “talentless” are drawn together, separate from the talented. Another point that also exacerbates “The Great Divergence” is that one worker with a college degree gets less salary than another worker with the same degree in a bigger, more productive city, simply due to geographic location.

Although right now this increase in demand for innovative workers seems like it is greatly improving the global economy and especially the economies in large cities, I believe there is the possibility of “creative destruction” where these innovative jobs and new technological advancements will actually destroy jobs. Cities can become more mechanized and dependent on technology. Already technology has taken the jobs of many, producing what a human would in a fraction of the time and fraction of the cost.
Moretti believes that this is unlikely since the innovation sector of the economy is always increasing and looking for new talent. Perhaps this is so but I don’t think there is enough innovators to keep supplying jobs for the less-innovative, the labor workers. And even if the numbers of innovative workers keep increasing, the technological advancements they come up with will also keep increasing until the need for physical laborers will be almost non-existent with machinery taking over the jobs of human workers.
Technological advancements can be amazingly helpful to the world and the economy as we’ve seen with the creation of planes for trading and global communication technology as well as medical advancements that save millions, maybe billions of lives every year, its rapid growth may take a toll on the jobs of the less innovative.

After reading these articles, I probably don’t have even a fraction of understanding of the struggles that renters face but I think I got the gist of it and it’s clear to me that changes must be made in policies for affordable housing and these are just a few of the proposed policies that I think should be enacted.

48-Hour Response Time For Necessary Repairs.
I agree with one article writer’s depiction of most landlords, that they “operate on a continuum between greed and laziness,” which prevents them from up-keeping the apartments they rent out, sometimes even forcing tenants to pay for these improvements themselves. I don’t, however, believe that the landlords are purposely trying to push tenants out; after all, that’s where their income comes from. I just think that most times they are too lazy or cheap to take responsibility for the repairs. However, tenants are suffering from this laziness. Therefore, I would propose that landlords have a 48 hour response time to make necessary repairs before a tenant can take legal action.

Rent Freeze
A five-year rent freeze sounds a bit too much for landlords to compromise on. I’d go with three or four-year rent freeze instead. Even after that amount of time is up, there should be a limit on how much of an increase in rent a landlord can ask for. And if this rent freeze is not agreed upon, I support Steven Flax’s proposal for a 1 percent increase for one-year leases and 2.75 percent increase for two-year leases. With Williams Willard’s proposal that rents be increased 3.6 percent to 5.5 percent for one-year leases and 4.3 to 9.5 percent for two, while it may look like small increases to landlords and might not even bring them much profit, it’s a huge burden on some renters who can barely even keep up with their current rents. A small increase in their rent can mean a few less meals for them or cutting out other necessities just to make ends meet.

Rezoning
Moreover, I would propose to enact the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program where 25% of units must be made affordable to families with an averaged income of about $46,600 for a family of three. Now many people criticize this program and state that this plan is still not enough for lower-income residents but I think that this plan is a great compromise between the interests of landlords and tenants because, as I wrote before, landlords need to make a living too and reserving 1/4 of their building space to lower-income families is a sacrifice for them. When you compare this 25% to Bloomberg administration’s 2005 rezoning of Williamsburg where only 11% of units must be made affordable to low-income families, this proposed plan is a tremendous step up.

As a class advocating for more affordable housing, we could make an interactive website that would inform people of the struggles that renters have to face every day along with proposals of solutions to these problems and perhaps we could set up polls with different questions and allow visitors to our website to vote on certain important matters and voice their opinions so we can see where people stand on these matters and be able to see their sides of the story. I don’t believe that we can ever make every single person happy with the decisions that the government makes but I do, however, believe in compromise and I would hope that the website would allow both tenants and landlords to make proposals and, hopefully, compromises.

The majority of people living in Greenpoint and Williamsburg are non-hispanic whites who make up about 61% of the population while the rest of the population living there is comprised of different ethnicities. From an economic view, the people living there range from living below the poverty line to the working middle class. I think the main issue they face while living there is affordable housing. As demand for living spaces increased, so did the prices, thereby decreasing affordability for many people. People are being forced to move either to smaller and poorer quality living areas or even forced to move out of the Community Board 1 area completely because they could not afford the rent. Since, around 86% of people living there are renters, this is a major issue for the community living there.

As for your question about whether I would anticipate conflict between the different groups living there, I would say that I do. With the yearly incomes of residents ranging from living below the poverty line to middle class, there are differences in the needs of the residents. The poorer population support lowering prices of rent and would support rent controls while the landowners would fight against this because this would decrease their income from renting out their land. It’s issues like these that the Community Board 1 has to decide on and compromise on.

I think the pressure “from above” is the pressure coming from the the minority, the landowners and people with more money who may have more power over the decisions made in the community while the pressure “from below” is the renters and the people of lower income who are pushing for their needs and interests to be met. It is the job of the Community Board 1 to reconcile between the two pressures in order to make the community they live in the best that it could be and try to compromise between the interests of the two groups.

Although many of the features of the exhibit intrigued me, I was drawn to one feature in particular; “El Barrio’s Artspace at PS109”. The building pictured had once been a public school built in 1898 but in 1995 was boarded up and abandoned. The abandoned building was then renovated and used as subsidized housing for artists and their families. I was captivated by this building because I love the idea of using already exhausting space for a new, more beneficial purpose, and, like I said in my previous post, maintaining and fixing existing space before building new structures. It maximizes space and stretches the budget for government funding for affordable housing. The government had repurposed this abandoned, boarded up building to help struggling artists and their families. Moreover, I really like how the exterior of the building remained remotely the same, still giving the look of a school building, maintaining its charm and history, while being used as lofts for families in need.

After reading the assigned readings, I am all for building public housing. Having affordable housing is crucial to the economy of an area. As Bloom explained, “For a global city to remain competitive… it requires, at least, the housing stock and well-connected transit systems to support a diverse labor force,” otherwise, people are going to look elsewhere for work (Owens). For this reason, I also support rent controlled portions of building complexes.It allows individuals and families of certain incomes to be able to live in a space that would allow them to improve the qualities of their lives and work while being less burdened with rent prices. I know rent controls are disliked by building owners but I believe that they will be beneficial to the economy in the long-run.

Many would argue that the government does not have enough funds or space to build new public housing buildings. This may be true and for that reasonI would propose another idea. A lot of money goes into building new living spaces but I don’t think enough goes into maintaining existing apartments. “…Untended disrepairs in older complexes mount, leading 10,000 lost units each year” (Owens). By putting money into maintaining the older complexes, there can be more apartments available to people and families and this can financially better for the government. Instead of spending tons of money on building new complexes from scratch, the government should focus some of their attention on fixing what they already have.