BEFORE: I had a lot going on this weekend, from watching Jon Stewart's farewell to "The Daily Show", which ran long, to catching the finale of "True Detective", which also ran long. So it's quite fortuitous that the next documentary on my list is just 50 minutes long. It's co-directed by a friend of mine, Jennifer Senko, and I've been trying to get around to watching it for a few years now. Finally, after contributing to her Kickstarter campaign for her upcoming film "The Brainwashing of My Dad", I received a copy as a gift for my donation, so I was finally able to schedule it in my line-up.
THE PLOT: Issues of class formation, land use, rezoning decisions and the upheaval of longstanding neighborhoods combine to provide a critical look into the deeply rooted policies of one of the world's most iconic cities.
AFTER: Boy, what a great scheduler I am - this was a great way to stay on a theme, since the film about Banksy touched on a few related issues like gentrification, the demise of certain NYC neighborhoods (Willets Pt. in Queens features prominently in both films!) - of course, that was from a graffiti-related point of view, but I think it's still a fantastic coincidence.
Highest compliment - I watched this film, shot mostly in the "talking heads" style, with a number of NYC officials and residents talking about urban development and tax loopholes, and I did NOT fall asleep. I can't say that about "Lust for Life" or "My Kid Could Paint That" or several other recent films that stopped being interested with 10 or 15 minutes to go - forcing me to scan to the place I dozed off the next morning and finish the damn things.
Here's the issue: a couple of decades ago, NYC went through one of their semi-frequent fiscal crises (they seem to happen about every 20 years, but no one ever figures out how to predict them or react to them) and the powers that be started giving tax breaks to developers willing to turn run-down lots into high-rise buildings, thinking of the need for all the new New Yorkers to have places to live, and how much more it would benefit the city to have living, working taxpapers there instead of a pop-up flea market that only appears on alternate Sundays.
Around the same time, the global marketplace proved that it was economically beneficial for companies like American Express or Citibank to move their operations to Third World locations, such as India or Wyoming. So the government of NYC chose to bend over backwards and offer tax breaks as incentives to keep those companies from moving their headquarters out of town. And then, when other companies saw what breaks THOSE companies were getting, they pretended to also be considering moving, just to get the same tax breaks.
Fast forward a bit, and the city came up with another "great" solution to make sure there was affordable housing available - they'd rezone everything and permit new developments to take place, and again offer tax breaks to new developments that agreed to set aside a certain percentage of units for affordable housing. Problem is, nobody could seem to agree on what that percentage should be, or what the word "affordable" really means.
What you end up with, after all this legal maneuvering and all these backroom deals, is a tax code that's applied rather un-uniformly to the city as a whole. And any tax breaks over HERE mean that some other people have to pick up the slack over THERE. Otherwise, we'll end up with another city financial crisis, and that's what the whole messed-up plan was supposed to prevent in the first place.
There's also this thing called "eminent domain", which gives the city power to purchase property for needed things like highways, hospitals and such, but in recent years has given way to NYC buying up buildings in certain neighborhoods, and selling them back to developers with bigger and better plans, because the government thinks it knows better about what types of buildings go where, instead of letting the free market work this all out - in Willets Point, some unattractive but successful iron works companies were about to be replaced by a more attractive but less essential convention center + hotel complex, and any time the city expresses an opinion over how land should be used that disagrees with the opinions of actual residents, yeah, there's bound to be some conflict.
Are we losing some of the things that make NYC great? Yeah, probably - but change is about the only thing that's really constant, in the end. How many times have people bemoaned the loss of their favorite restaurant or coffee shop? (Or record stores and book stores, remember them?) How many
people are still upset over Times Square, how it's all so commercial and corporate now, and all the porno theaters and head shops are gone? And don't get me started on places like CBGB's or The Bottom Line...
My parents always used to think they were cursed, it seemed like every time they liked a restaurant and started going there regularly, it would close. I then had to explain capitalism to my mother, pointing out that they were probably the customers who helped the place stay in business as long as it did (this was in suburban Massachusetts, not NYC, but the principle is similar.) It sucks when you can no longer go to your favorite restaurant and get that sandwich you like, but you have to just remind yourself that it's just the free market taking care of itself.
I used to own a condominium in Brooklyn, and the building had J-51 status, meaning that there were no property taxes assessed for the first 10 years after the initial sale, and I (with my first wife) was the original owner. J-51 was a tax status given to developers who had taken over abandoned properties to convert them into livable units - and this was a building clearly aimed at people with middle-class incomes, the cheapest unit sold for $105K, with a 5K down payment and a ridiculously low monthly common charge.
I lived there for 11 years, and never paid a dime in property tax - as the treasurer for the building, I was in the habit of filing a protest of the city's annual assessment, because there was a women's shelter across the street - the theory was that if we kept protesting, when the taxes did get phased in, it would be at a lower rate. In retrospect I do feel a little guilty for using the shelter as an excuse to protest the city's assessors, but if I was doing something untoward, NYC merely had to ignore the protest or disallow any re-evaluation of the property.
But that's my point - I wasn't thinking of any long-term consequences, or who had to make up the slack if none of the owners in my building, especially me, had to pay property tax. People tend to make financial decisions in merely their own best interest. Now, the issue in this film is not related to J-51, it's more about a loophole called 421A, but I think the overall argument is the same. If it hadn't have been for J-51, that developer might never have taken over that abandoned property, and it would still be lying fallow. If not for 421A, it's quite possible that developers wouldn't be building any "affordable" housing at all, and then, where would we be? People would still get displaced from their homes, but at an even faster rate.
But, at some point, doesn't the law of supply and demand kick in, meaning that the price of things eventually settles out to a (semi-)reasonable rate? If greedy landlords keep raising rents, one would hope that they would reach some kind of limit, some rent that people aren't willing to pay, and thus they'd realize that no one wants to live in their high-priced buildings, so maybe they should bring the price down a bit? No one thinks of the communal effect of renting an apartment with high rent, though - or gets together en masse to boycott a building where the rents are too high.
The problem now, as I see it, is hipsters (isn't it always?) - and entitlement. Entitlement is that feeling that someone should have what the next guy has, plus a little bit more. So there will always be someone in their 20's who's got rich parents, who doesn't balk at paying high rents because either Daddy will pay it, or he knows four friends willing to share the space with him and keep his own rent down. And I guarantee you that said rich douchebag doesn't think for a SECOND about who lived in the apartment before it was converted to a luxury duplex loft, or where those people are now.
Look, everyone wants the best for their kids - but that doesn't mean that you have to go out and buy it for them, or pay their rent. They're never going to learn the value of things if they don't get a job, stop playing shitty guitar music at the cafe at nights and start paying their own way. Think it through - what's going to happen when they're senior citizens themselves, and their parents are deceased, and they can't even collect social security, because they never paid into the system? They'll be old and homeless and begging for money. So it's called "tough love", and it starts, like, yesterday.
Here's how my own living situation in NYC has progressed - dorm room, summer sublet, shared apartment in Queens, my own apartment in Brooklyn, the condo in Park Slope, and then my current house in Queens. That progression took about 25 years - were some of the places terrible? Of course they were, but that gave me an incentive to find something better. My advice to anyone paying high rent is to try and scrape together a down payment on owning SOME property, even if it's not a great one, because if you can live there for a few years you've got an OK chance of selling it for more than the original asking price, and you can upgrade. But as a tenant, you don't have nearly as much power as a property owner does. If your landlord wants to raze the property and sell the lot to a developer, or convert the building to luxury condos, he's got that right. All he has to do is just NOT renew your lease.
Some of the folks depicted in this film had lived in their East Village apartments for 30 years, and even though it was a shame that they had to move, they fought a four-year legal battle only to find out that since they weren't property owners, they had no rights to stay in the building if the landlord wanted to convert. When your legal argument falls back on things like squatter's rights, or the simple "But that's not the way I want things to be!" you're pretty much dead in the water. And if these people can no longer afford to live in Manhattan, again, on one level it's just the free market taking care of itself.
I'd love to see an update on the issues raised by this film, now that we have a mayor who doesn't resemble "Mr. Monopoly" and maybe, just maybe, the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way, in favor of the common man and not mega-corporations. That is, unless our new mayor is so focused on silly issues like carriage horses, as well as important ones like racial bias in police operations, to focus on people being forced out of their homes by mega-developers.
The best example of the way that development has gone in NYC over the last few years is probably the Barclay's Center in Brooklyn. A developer named Bruce Ratner (I don't trust anyone with that name, whether they're in real estate or filmmaking) wanted to build a new sports complex/residential facility in downtown Brooklyn as a new home for the New Jersey Nets, and this eminent domain policy was used to buy up the buildings that were in the way. Naturally the people who lived there at the time weren't happy about being made to leave - those that stayed had to endure months in a wasteland, where there was very little police presence at night. The last few holdouts were well compensated, though - my wife and I believe that when someone comes to the door offering you money to move that equals twice what your building is worth, your only two questions should be, "Where do I sign?" and "What day would you like us to be somewhere else?"
But once the lawsuits were filed and dismissed, and Ratner's company got the go-ahead to build their new basketball stadium/high-rise, the recession hit in 2009. It was pretty funny to see the building stuck in mid-construction for a while - OK, it was funny until you thought about the people who got displaced so that a building could be half-built. But again, eventually the free market takes care of itself, and if the thing really deserves to be completed, someone will find a way.
If there's a problem or inequality caused by the tax code, then someone needs to change the tax code (which is the point of the film) but that's not going to be easy when the people who own the most property are also major contributors to most political campaigns, or in some cases, are the candidates themselves. Hey, it's Trump's world now, we all just live in it.
RATING: 5 out of 10 city planners
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