Author: Benjamin Cohn

Small Businesses in New York

Benjamin Cohn 1 Comment 4/15/16

I liked the proposal to require corporations and chains to get the approval of the community board before opening on a local shopping street. I think the real solution here is giving more actual power to the community boards so they can accurately represent the needs of the community though the purest form of democratic action. I think that the law should go farther than just requiring chains to get the approval of the community boards, all businesses that represent higher rent for existing tenants should have to prove how they will contribute to the area in a positive way. Now, bars and restaurants need the approval of the community board to get their liquor license but they should need all of their proposals accepted before they open. The other forms of local government in the LES have failed the businesses that either used to exist there or are struggling to exist there now. Corrupt Assemblyman Sheldon Silver was more concerned with lining his own pockets than preserving the character of Orchard street. Rosie Mendez, the City Councilwoman has sponsored a number of mostly failed bills that are meant to protect local shops. The community board should have the power to influence how their community changes. There are realities of the market to contend with and a strong local government is the only way to make sure people aren’t getting completely screwed over.

I think the closure of some of the iconic New York institutions like CBGB’s over the last 15 years is one of the saddest things to happen to the cities character. Only once the boom stops and the gentrification runs out of steam will people be begging for the mom n’ pop stores that created the New York appeal they commercialized and stole.

There should be consultants within the city government that help local businesses adapt to a changing marketplace. Software engineers that give advice on expanding a web presence and advertising specialists that expand a stores presence should at least be partially subsidized by the city. It sounds like this would take away from the entrepreneurial spirit of commerce and make people dependent on government for innovation but really it would push small business in the right, sustainable direction. Corporations are subsidized with tax payer money that they don’t really need so why should small businesses not be getting help in the areas they really need help in. Tax breaks and cash are not enough to keep business going through sky rocketing rent,

Russ and Daughters, Katz’s, and the 2nd Ave Deli are part of the elite local institutions that managed to brand their way through gentrification and commercialization. I mean, a pastrami sandwich should not be 17-18 dollars and a bagel with loxs should not be 8-10 dollars but they have to do it to survive and the crowds of tourists they draw certainly helps.

(P.S, after watching the Orchard street video I am definitely going down there for a leather coat, I need one.)

Questions:

What are your customer usually in here for?

Do you have a lot of regular customers?

How much contact have you had with local government?

Media’s Role in Changing Shopping Streets

Benjamin Cohn 13 Comments 4/8/16, Readings, Weekly Responses, Where Will We Shop?

I think one of the most important things Professor Zukin mentions in her book is the role of the media and the internet in the creation and vitality of certain areas. I think most internet tools end up being very hard to understand in terms of their impact on cities. Yelp can help keep stores in more remote areas busy with customers. It can also open people up to new experiences in taste and culture. However, Yelp is often the scout of a larger gentrifying force. If a bunch of 20 somethings that just moved to a city read about something on Yelp and make a journey to an area to try it, it sets off a chain reaction. (I’ve done this to get Nepalese food in Jackson Heights, but you know , I’m leaving myself out of this) Maybe those millenials fall in love with the “quaint” and “diverse” (using quotes because I would say immigrants and working class don’t look for diversity in their neighborhoods, or at least not what it has come to mean to the gentrifying class) area and want to take a look at the real estate.

I was in Tacos El Bronco in Sunset Park last week. It’s a famous place mostly because of it’s food truck and it’s cheap prices. (The first time I went there was at 3 am walking through Brooklyn and it was a much different experience.) It is a really great place for tacos and basically any other kind of Mexican food. I was visiting after I attended a community board meeting focused on gentrification and homelessness. I saw in the store a mix. There was a lot of Spanish families and couples out to eat, there was some Asian teenagers and some Middle Eastern teenagers. There was also a surprising large number of white hipsterish looking people sitting all around and coming in to pick up. I thought about the future of this place. I know that Sunset Park is on the verge of some huge changes and I wonder how long it will take for Tacos El Bronco to either adapt, (become fetishized and overpriced) close or move. The people who move into the neighborhood will begin telling their friends about this “great little spot” near their “great new place” and it will become a phenomenon. In a few years they’ll be making more money but maybe they’ll have alienated their original base in the community and it will feel like a less vital enterprise. A restaurant that is of the ethnicity of one of the groups of the neighborhood it inhabits is much more important than a purely commercial venture meant to take advantage of economic trends and brands. A Chipotle has no use beyond its seemingly endless supply of burritos, there’s a place for Chipotle, but not a domineering place. New York’s ethnic neighborhoods are being taken over by people who have turned authenticity into something that can be bought. Tacos El Bronco needs to be protected and that means Sunset Park needs to be protected.

Response to Civic Hall Visit

Benjamin Cohn 1 Comment 3/18/16

The mix of profit and service motives in Civic Hall makes it a unique kind of cooperation. The tech people of San Fransisco and Silicon Valley exist in their own sphere outside the realm of city government and the general population. They have come to be resented by the people of the city for displacing many people and spending lavishly. The city government has been very accepting and lenient. The men and women of Civic Hall are out to prove that technology exists for the purpose of improving everyone’s lives, not just the people who can afford the latest phone or software. I think it is very important that Civic Hall keep up the with the work its people are doing. There needs to be a fresher, more advanced government web presence because so many people will be switching to getting there services online. I can imagine this being something that can help fix the mess that paper documentation has created in the VA administration that has left so many veterans without medical assistance.

I understand that there is a line between the people who work for profit at Civi Hall and the tech employees that the government has on its payroll but I think time and again, outside companies have proven to be more innovative than government agencies. The tech companies of Silicon Valley would be smart if they started to put more of a emphasis on helping the communities that have enabled them to prosper for all these years by developing the same kind of outreach programs and development software that Civic Hall has created.

Dangers of the Single Market Economy

Benjamin Cohn 1 Comment 3/11/16

What are the benefits that the growth of technological innovation is supposed to bring specifically to New York? Is disagreement on these benefits possible? What potential negative issues do you see emerging?

Mayors love it when a entire industry decides their city is this best. San Fransisco was long a cultural icon, starting with the era of the Haight. There has been some blight in the city and after pop culture went away the city was suffering. Why would San Fransisco politicians have the kind of hind sight to see that their city would be flooded by techies and used as the launchpad of Silicon Valley? They knew that the city needed help and they were looking for economic stimulus. What happened in San Fransisco was a result of a the city turning a blind eye to gentrification because of the money that it brought in. San Fransisco became they tech city and became very expensive and “fancy”. But there was a problem, unlike New York, San Fransisco became totally dependent on one industry for its life blood and its survival.

New York has been dependent on the financial industry since Wall Street was made financial capital of the country but we have never become too dependent. As Brom article pointed out, the cities growth survived the dot com collapse of the 90s and the crash of 07/08. Not only has the city survived but it has flourished. Flourished meaning the unsustainable unchecked growth continued to create inequality and drive people out. Anyway, New York survived because our city has not built itself on the back of one industry. If there is ever to be a total collapse of the tech industry or even a slowdown San Fransisco’s economy will take a huge hit. The financial sector is the biggest industry in New York but the cities fate is clearly not directly tied to it.

San Fransisco already sold out to Silicon Valley and only now that things have gotten so extreme and so many residents have been pushed out, has the tone of the administration change. But not really. The Streitfield article in the Times illustrates how resentful people have become of the techies that have made their city a rich mans playground and it shows whose side the city government is on. Clearly they want to keep making money, driving out the homeless and the unsightly and replacing culture with a desire for authenticity. What has already happened across the country is in the process of happening here but New York is too much of strong and diverse city to give in completely to the pressures of the market. To Mayors De Blasio’s credit, the cities policies are at least attempting to help people keep their homes and keep the middle class alive. He isn’t doing enough though.

It is difficult to fight against something as strong as the desirability of New York and the money that’s it when there’s is no support from the Feds and barely any from the State. Technology is the wave of the future in numerous ways and it is possible for New York to adopt without losing it self in the process as our brethren on the West Coast. People in a democratic country don’t have to take bullying by the market lying down and the people of San Fransisco will surely mount a last ditch defence. Perhaps they’ll take Elijah’s advice and use aggression and generally Tom-foolery to get the techies out but I would guess otherwise.

Skepticism About the Tech Economy

Benjamin Cohn 1 Comment 3/4/16

We all know that technology is the future of the global economy. Both the Florida and the Moretti article talked about the tech boom as a indicator of which cities are going to survive and which cities will die. I think what they glossed over the most in their articles was the role that city governments can have in the viability of their cities. San Fransisco is a example of a city that has been almost entirely lost to a ravenous tech boom that eradicated the charm of the city and replaced it with a business class starved of authenticity. Cities that hear the sounds of money rolling in will fling the doors open without a second thought. We saw in “My Brooklyn” that Bloomberg worked closely with developers and corporations to initiate his own kind of revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn. Glaeser is guilty of making his argument for the total urbanization of the world without considering what governments can do to strike a balance between vitality and quality of life. The city government of San Fransisco allows Google buses to drive their employees to and from their $2,000 lofts and past the homeless that crowd the neglected parts of the city and the cities parks. That is the future of the tech boom in New York, we kick out all the poor people and go after the middle class until all we have left is highly educated people making a lot of money walking around buying stuff. De Blasio seems like he has a robust plan to combat over saturation but it is not enough to stop what the market seems to be making inevitable.

Glaeser also wants to go after historic areas of a cities and build taller and taller buildings to expand the real estate market and make things cheaper for everyone. Does he not get what the market is like in New York? If there are more apartments in areas that are already completely desired and gentrified there will just be more rich people living there. The financial industry is a good parallel and all three authors reference it. New York was partially brought back to life by the finance boom but it was regulated by the federal, state and local governments. The people who worked at the banks and on the trading floor were more educated than other New Yorkers and had more money but wanted to blend in and enjoy establishments that had allured them in the first place. The millennial tech boom conglomerate is made up of people who go places based on opportunity, and expect where they move to bend to their needs, if they are given free reign in New York, there is no saving what little authenticity we are clinging to right now. Hipsters and others are at least pretending to be struggling artists and bohemians.

Affordable Housing Plan

Benjamin Cohn 0 Comment 2/26/16, Readings, Weekly Responses

Capitalism works because there are always ebbs and flows. There was white flight and there was crime, then there was a revival now there is over-saturation. The same people who had to live through the blight and the crime are being driven out by the sons and daughters of the whites that fled in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s not fair for them and its not fair to anybody who wants to live a affordable life in New York. We have just become too much of a cultural and economic icon for the tide to be reversed by people’s decisions. The commercial sector takes notice of cultural and political changes and uses information to make money. That’s why Brooklyn has blown up and that’s why it has become so expensive. It’s part of a real estate bubble like in any other place, there is going to be a rise and there will be a fall. This does not mean that landlords and developers should get to walk all over people. Bloomberg was very developer and landlord friendly because he himself was a man of commerce. Now De Blasio is trying to make himself into the great progressive crusader against the affordability crisis. He knows he has to work to do within the confines of the market and that means working with developers but not favouring them. In the future I think that the best the city can do is try to make sure that people are not abused by their landlords and by developers. That means strengthening tenant unions (something De Blasio mentions in his ESN plan but does not emphasize) and giving community boards more of a real voice in what goes on in their areas.

Like the Professor mentioned in class, it was the Poles in Williamsburg that decided to start charging more for the newer people rather than only renting to other Poles, they made a decision to benefit from the forces of the free market and they paid the price. There is really nothing that can stop the forces of the market and De Blasio’s plans are really just a straw roof for the people that know that the dreaded hipsters are heading their way. Unions work very well for industries and are the one of the greatest social aspects of our society that protect people from the arbitrary nature of the market. Tenants who form together and make themselves powerful, even by getting lawyers or getting themselves into the government, will be able to actually to protect their homes. Realistically, the only way to stop people from wanting to move into your area is by going after the super gentrifiers that are now pushing the hipsters out of Park Slope and Williamsburg. The people are being pushed down into Eastern and Southern Brooklyn and will continue to flow and change rents until they realise the New York the moved here to live in does not exist anymore because they have gotten rid of what they grew up dreaming about. That’s a different way of saying that they will have buyers remorse because coming in somewhere just as the financial bubble is about to pop is no fun. Time is on the side of the tenants because this bubble has been building since the 90’s but for now my recommendation is to build a defense around grassroots political organisations and prepare for the arrival of the developers and wait for band aids from the city.

Community Board 1 Post and Museum Response

Benjamin Cohn 1 Comment 2/9/16, Weekly Responses

The changes in Williamsburg and Brooklyn over the last 10-20 years have completely changed the needs of many communities. The Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods have been especially effected by these changes. The demands that the community board has laid forth are mostly reasonable and consist of things that i’m sure they have been listing for at least the last five years. Affordable housing, proper maintenance of public space, low zoning laws and accessible transportation are all things that assume most New York neighborhoods would like more of. The gentrification in Community Board 1 is what separates the content of their statement from that of other community boards. The area is transitioning from the gentrification of young people and artists in search of the holy grail of authenticity to a “super gentrification” that will be followed by the rise of condos and luxury oriented businesses.  They won’t have to worry about the bars and the public safety after the areas gets inhabited by the super rich. Once the city recognises that the area is full of important citizens transportation will improve. If it doesn’t the influence of those people and their money will change things pretty rapidly. Families will exist there but not the same kind that are there now. Families like those who live on the Upper East Side and compete to send their kids to private school will live there now. The Polish, Italian and Puerto Rican past of the area will slowly fade into history and be replaced by a new narrative until a fresh cycle of crash and flight changes the area completely. The poorer people who live their now should know that they are not safe from an increase in their cost of living. Even if rents are stabilized or more affordable housing built, the area is trending in one direction and will continue going that way until the market is externally influenced. Prices for good and services are just as effective a tool at driving people out as real estate values are.

The kind of affordable housing that has been built in East New York is the kind that New York will have to build to keep some part of the middle class. As long as the economic trends in New York continue and the housing market sustains itself, (the quest for authenticity pushing the pioneers who are followed by those who search for luxury) there will be continued gentrification of any NYC areas within reach. Making middle class enclaves or areas where the poor can try to sustain themselves is important in the coming years. We should not give in to the European way of public housing which involves pushing all undesirables to large housing complexes outsides city limits to continue to attract tourists. New York is a brand but it is also a city full of people who need to survive and have a right to live in nice areas that are not constantly being threatened by the ravenous real estate market.

Housing Crisis in NY

Benjamin Cohn 1 Comment 1/29/16, Weekly Responses

Just about everyone knows that there is a affordability crisis in New York. The blighted 70’s and 80’s were fixed first by the iron fist of Giuliani and then by the money bags of Bloomberg. Now Bill De Blasio desperately tries to implement his progressive agenda without much help from the Feds or the State. He has always been ambitious and a lot of his plans he has been able to get through with a lot of bargaining with the State legislature.

I don’t necessarily think building new public housing is bad idea but I do think there are much better ideas out there. De Blasio knows he can’t get the funding he really needs from his pals in Albany so he should try to be as realistic as he can. Having private developers investing in the building of new housing where certain apartments have to be affordable or are rent-controlled is a very smart strategy. Building new sprawling HUD complex’s is risky and usually ends up getting bogged down and given a band reputation before doors even open. The larger problem here is income inequality and the wrong being image projected of what a successful New York means. Wall Street and the tech industry are great but they don’t help keep New York an affordable city. The poor people and the minorities get pushed to the outskirts of town to keep up the image of a perfect safe New York that has been built up since the late 90’s. I hope that De Blasio’s intentions here are really to rebuild New York as a place for the middle class. Right now the city (especially Manhattan) is essentially a playground for the super rich and the expense is forcing young creative people out and bringing boring yuppies in (even the “creative people” are pretty talentless). Affordable housing in the form of rent-control or in the form of law making is the only solution to stop the tide of green that has changed the character of the city for the worse.