Tom Angotti, who teaches urban affairs and planning at Hunter College and recently published
New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, interviewed a fictional liberal in a recent Brooklyn Rail post and concluded that Michael Bloomberg's "populist" image is just a cloak.
Bloomberg is seen as the "anti-Guiliani", says Angotti, but under Bloomberg more minorities have been stopped and frisked than in "Guiliani Time". And what about Sean Bell, Omar Edwards, the Republican Convention crackdown, and the crackdown on Critical Mass?
If Bloomberg is a "good manager", why then, wonders Angotti, did we get into this fiscal mess? Most mayors may not have foreseen the collapse of Wall Street, but Bloomberg, one of the wealthiest men in the world, is supposed to be a financial wizard. Why didn't he see the crash coming? Why didn't he wean the city off Wall Street revenues? Why did he subsidize downtown development and new stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets, then cut city services when the crunch came?
The 311 system may be making government more efficient, says Angotti, but it has been used as an excuse to trim the community boards' budgets.
Some praise Bloomberg for getting rid of the school bureaucracy, but, says Angotti, he has also tried to bust the teachers’ union, dominate parent councils, turn principals into CEOs and turn teachers into test administrators.
Bloomberg is seen as supporting "affordable housing", but Angotti sees it as a cover for zoning schemes that have gentrified New York neighborhoods. The city has in fact lost more affordable units under Bloomberg than it has gained.
Bloomberg has done nothing, says Angotti, to support rent and eviction controls, has let equity funds take over buildings, and has ignored the predatory lending practices that have brought down many of the city's homeowners.
Why, wonders Angotti, has Bloomberg, supposedly an independent free of the taint of special interests, been forgiven for enabling Big Real Estate?
Bloomberg, says Angotti, oversaw the transfer of Hell’s Kitchen -- now a new luxury neighborhood, underwritten by tax-exempt bonds, called "Midtown West" -- to landowners who included Bloomberg's personal friends.
Developers don't have to buy influence from the Bloomberg administration, says Angotti -- they get it for free.
The jobs New York now sorely needs, says Angotti, were pushed out of the city when Bloomberg converted industrial zones to luxury highrises that sit empty and unsold.
As for Bloomberg's "green" legacy, PlaNYC, Angotti calls the plan itself "unsustainable" because Bloomberg refused to submit it to the community boards, the City Planning Commission and the City Council. PlaNYC was outsourced by the Bloomberg administration to a global management firm.
Angotti calls PlaNYC a "green"-branded real estate estate scheme created to siphon tax dollars into building infrastructure for developers, ignoring the future of the city's poor and immigrant populations.
Bloomberg is seen as a supporter of mass transit, but, says Angotti, we don't need the #7 extension -- the most expensive one-mile subway project in history -- which exists only to serve the Midtown West development.
The
post from the Brooklyn Rail.
Coverage from the Brooklyn Paper.
