Your Huddled Masses: Inequality in NYC

Apartments in New York. Visions of walking around one in the evening after work. Backdrop to a phone call: gassing while stomping around a moodily lit open plan thing, miles up and on a corner, with windows on two sides. All those millions of lights clustered into skyscraper shapes outside in the dark. Standing at the window at dusk and pretending you’re flicking joggers and cabs into oblivion.

Or lower down: small and shaky buildings, all interior doors with fanlights over them (just so that you can never mentally shut the door, not really) and out in the hall echoes harshly with the noisiest motherfuckers you’ve ever heard. Sash windows looking out onto alleys filled with shipyards’ worth of steel (all those sawtooth fire escape stairs) and there’s sash windows opposite to look right back at ya. Proximity. You have the best conversations – what comes out when you’re that relaxed and comfortable. Neighbours as school mates.

The federal standard for rent affordability is 30% of people’s incomes. Nearly a third of renting households in New York pay over 50%.

I guess like anything that looks good on TV Manhattan’s always going to be at the pricier end of the American experience ($1 million car parking spaces, etc.). And while the crown probably shifts around a bit (Atlanta was ‘top’ in April) New York currently has the greatest level of income inequality in the US:

 “The recovery seems to be going to those at the top, much more than those in the middle, while those at the bottom may even be losing ground.”  - Andrew A. Beveridge, sociologist at City University of New York.

There are more than 50,000 people homeless in New York. In January last year 21,000 of these were children. These are unprecedented highs – 41,000 was the high-water mark in 2011. People do help: New York has one of America’s largest food banks; the Doe Fund has a ‘help not hand outs’ back to work ethic; the Ali Forney Center houses homeless LGBT youths (they make up nearly 40% of America’s young homeless); and there are many others.

What does New York’s inequality look like? Apart from setting utterly gorgeous lives where peoples’ high earning/spending cycles rival small country’s economies beside people sleeping in subway stations, that is. According to US Census Bureau data released on 18^th September, “The top 5 percent of households earned $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent.”

Bringing the two together is One Riverside Park, a luxury apartment building in the Riverside South area (a fun bit of real estate value context for the zip code here). Luxury in this instance means a 24-hour concierge service (the kind that’s more like a PA), a private pool, bowling alley, cinema, gym, climbing wall… (Strange how ‘rich’ now looks like a supposedly cool, more exclusive and fully-lived version of working class life).

Riverside Park offers $2000-per-square-foot condos for private buyers and rental apartments for people on sub $50,000 incomes (less than 60% of the NYC Area Median Income: $35,280 to $50,340 a year, with the upper amount needing a four person household to be eligible). There are separate entrances for the two (the rental entrance has been dubbed a ‘poor door’) and the above amenities aren’t available to renters.

#110397100 / gettyimages.com

Obviously there are lots of arguments: People who are paying more should get more (and the converse). Renters are lucky enough to be able to live in certain areas of New York, compared with other low earners’ experiences. Offering facilities to renters would cause problems if they were entitled to rent reductions if things later had to be closed (an argument citing the amenities’ transience is an awkward one for developers to shout about – especially when they say that they provide the facilities to entice new buyers, who have high expectations when paying market price).

Despite all the arguments, some of the case studies are hard. People who’ve lived in a building for thirty years, using the rooftop garden the whole time, get a little upset when a developer tarts it up and says they can no longer ‘use’ the roof.

The argument runs on and on as to whether these case studies speak to wider, terribly unjust segregation in NYC housing…

“You know that show Downton Abbey? Where the servants have to come and go through separate entrances and bow their heads when they see a noble? Well, there could soon be a version of Downton Abbey right here, on the Upper West Side!”

…or a pragmatic step in the right direction.

“But the repugnance is not universal. Among the roughly 500 cities with inclusionary zoning programs, housing supporters have been mostly focused on having the affordable units built close to the their market-rate counterparts so that low-income households share some of the benefits of wealthier neighborhoods, like good schools and public safety.”

And a pragmatic answer is perhaps the best people will get for the moment. As with Britain, people who come up on the authorities’ rent books are under closer scrutiny these days – when taxpayer dollars are contributing to your ability to live in a certain home it is possible for you to be ‘overhoused.’ You’ve just got too much damn residence to justify to the public, particularly when budgets battle deficits. The Section 8 housing voucher programme has seen cuts (currently no new applicants are being accepted), and some people have found that the home they were housed in last year is too big for them this year.

Again like Britain, ‘public housing’ is not given the priority it once was in the States, with private developers now ostensibly making up the gap.

Back in May New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $41 billion 10-year housing plan to build and maintain 200,000 affordable units. Part of this plan was a requirement that developers include affordable housing in their constructions. In exchange developers get to erect larger buildings than they would have been allowed. Schemes like this were around during the previous Bloomberg administration, though voluntary.

 “New York and other cities use a variety of tax breaks, subsidies and additional incentives to encourage developers to build affordable housing. In the case of 40 Riverside [yeah, the address is confusing people], the developer, Extell Development Company, is using a program called inclusionary housing, which allows it to build more square feet than the zoning code would otherwise allow in exchange for a certain number of lower-rent apartments.”

Mireya Navarro ‘‘Poor Door’ in a New York Tower Opens a Fight Over Affordable Housing’, New York Times, 26^th August 2014

But have you ever really thought (US or UK) about what having the term ‘affordable housing’ says about us? Apart from the housing provided, subsidized, for the lowest income workers, everything else on the market is beyond affordable – taking too big a chunk of people’s paycheques for them to be able to live properly on their salaries. Part of their property’s value isn’t necessary, and has some level of status tacked onto it. It’s buried behind features, location, size… but it’s actually status. Because everything else is not affordable, not to everyone.

Conspicuous consumption’s like an ironic in-joke people make when they’ve just been kinda enjoying it. But the idea that the official term, in policy and law, for cheaper housing is ‘affordable’ – it’s like it’s unselfconsciously mandated that price inflation to allow everything up to uber exclusivity in property is just dandy. We just have to allow for a small percentage of reality – just for those who can’t afford to buy something that’s priced up to exclude others. And that’s ‘affordable’ - anything more expensive is then supposedly unaffordable? Ridiculously priced? Priced not at its real value, but as a way to keep the numbers accessing it down. So you ‘buy’ the exclusivity.

Spend a bit more and the neighbours and lifestyle get nicer – obviously there’s going to be a scale like that, reflecting earnings, but the idea that the cheapest housing is ‘affordable’ is terrifying.

“In an ideal universe, progressive leaders would possess marketing skills so profound that they could alter and recast our definitions of status, so that we might see the aggressive and intimate mixing of disparate populations as having its own cachet and appreciable value. Gentrification, when it doesn’t result in wholesale displacement, accomplishes this to some degree. Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and Boerum Hill in Brooklyn have both witnessed significant surges in real estate prices in recent years, though both areas are home to vast public housing complexes. Multimillion-dollar brownstones and apartments are in immediate view of buildings that house the very poor.”

‘On the Upper West Side, a House Divided by Income’ New York Times, 25^th July 2014

Finally, something that popped up in a Morse episode unexpectedly once:

“What sort of life do we offer our young people, Lewis? School, (if you’re lucky) college, then marriage, a ‘starter home,’ then children, a two-bedroomed semi. If you do well you’ve just about got to four bedrooms when your kids leave to buy starter homes of their own. […] This British home-owning democracy we’re all so proud of – it’s really a form of slavery. […] Man was born free, but everywhere he’s in the property chain.”

Why Matt Taibbi is my Hero

#106336450 / gettyimages.com

He was reacting to journalist and commentator David Brooks’s discussion of a recent basketball game between the Duke and Butler university teams in America. Brooks said that the game was widely set up as a class conflict: ‘the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys.’ However, for Brooks, the Duke win did not come from privilege but through hard work on defence. He went on to add: ‘I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?’ Taibbi’s reaction to the thought of rich people being more industrious was magnificent. He noted first that only a person who’d never held a real job could come up with something like that:

There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling [sic] the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives […] (Matt Taibbi, ‘Brooks: Let Them Eat Work,’ Taibblog, April 10^th, 2010 <http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/10/brooks-let-them-eat-work/>)

I liked Taibbi’s remarks because he’s nailed it, and it’s not always easy to defend the low-waged or poor from criticism from the rich, or judgmental high-fliers. It’s also tough trying to argue with anyone who believes in the idea that, if you study and work hard, there’s nothing to stop you reaching for higher things, and certainly nothing to stop you from having enough to get by. It’s your own problem, not theirs, if you ignored all the opportunities and are poor, or struggling on a marginally better income. And it’s certainly not up to the government to interfere and spend public money on you.

The rhetoric of the right is always going to be more appealing than that of the left, which often gets tangled in arguments about how it offers more financial incentives to the unemployed than to those in work. Still, I used to struggle to understand the appeal of the right, despite its placating rhetoric of freedom from government control and freedom to pursue…whatever it is you do. I struggled because I think along the lines of Taibbi’s description up there. Surely, as most people don’t earn enough money to find living particularly easy (and even if they are quite comfortable, they know that everything depends on them staying in full time work), surely they would be put off by the self-congratulatory reading of the right by those who, economically, don’t know they’re born.

But then one of the changes brought over the last half-century or so has been how we see the rich. The affluent are no longer people with plummy voices, funny clothes and drinks cabinets; they now look like you and me—if we were able to buy everything we wanted. We all have phones, t-shirts and jeans, but the moneyed have THE phones, t-shirts and jeans. They have gone from enviably rich but unattractively square – stuffy, woollen-suited wonders with the solace of the rotary club and trust funds – to almost cool. Western cultural production presents houses and lifestyles that we all salivate over sometimes, but on sober reflection they portray an affluent, deliberately insular culture, atypical of most people’s experience. In British drama we get those loveable upper crust characters: rather arrogant, but frightfully funny and self-deprecating. It’s because there’s fun and funny carefully deployed in those rich lives that we don’t sit there thinking ‘toff’ or ‘wow, they spend more money on heating their drive than I earn in a tax year.’

I suppose rightism offers the freedom to enjoy that culture, or rather for everyone to enjoy whatever level of pay they receive, and to pursue their ideas for business or making money, without being told that they owe the unemployed or low waged something. As P.J. O’Rourke said of his conversion to the Republican Party as a faltering, nineteen-year-old Maoist: ‘I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire. Also, I couldn’t bear the dreadful, glum earnestness of the left.’ [1]

O’Rourke is a very particular breed of Republican. Firstly, he’s funny. Secondly, he’s one of a select group who combine the party’s conservatism, deregulation and individualist beliefs with enjoying illicit hedonism. O’Rourke identified the full possibilities of life and maleness in the first world with his unsurpassed expression of liberal democracy: driving fast on drugs while getting your wang wang squeezed, and not spilling your drink [2]. Borrowing from O’Rourke’s line of argument, your right-winger will probably say that you shouldn’t do that, but if they happened to do it they’d probably have a ball. Your left-winger would say that you can’t do that, and if they happened to do it, they’d probably hate it. If I happened to try it, I’d probably be carsick.

In British politics these lefty/righty distinctions have been watered down somewhat. Gordon Brown likes to figure the difference between the Conservatives and Labour as one of style versus substance. Opposing the Conservatives’ style over substance is Labour’s substance over style. The substance is nu-Labour’s 13-year legacy, with the style perhaps lost under that glum, even dour, earnestness O’Rourke mentioned. But is the substance really leftist? I can’t help of thinking of Jonathan Meades, journeying around disused industrial sites in Scotland:

Further, the Finchley faith [as in ‘iron steel girder Margaret from Finchley’], which became the enthusiastically adopted cross-party consensus of the past twenty-five years, the faith that manufacturing industry was an irrelevance, and that an entire economy—a soufflé economy—might be founded on the no holds barred selflessness of deregulated debt rights peddling expensive money, proved to be just that: a faith, an expression of unfounded wishfulness. It goes without saying that there would be no reprieve; calloused hands and emphysema were so hopelessly old Labour. (Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter, episode three, BBC4, September 2009)

That cross-party consensus leaves us in an awkward place now. When Michael Foot died, taking a large part of what remained of old labour with him, several voices in the media commented that the longest suicide note in history said some things about closer control of banks that seem quite prescient today, as the soufflé does the inevitable. Neil Clarke of the Guardian went as far as to say that it could have saved the country from disaster. Whatever the differences, I doubt New Labour feels much need to apologise for itself; it’s been too successful in getting the party into power and holding on to it for three terms. As to their consensual record, the Conservatives are looking forwards rather than backwards. Now I think we’re faced with finding the lesser of three evils, if you are thinking of voting for one of the big three that is.

Until this situation changes we have people like Taibbi, and our own consciences. The vast majority of people are indeed on subsistence wages. Whatever your political view, or level of apathy towards politicking, it is worth taking some time to consider what you think people need, and, from your voting options, who can offer the best chance of that.

==========================================================================
[1] P.J. O’Rourke, Republican Party Reptile, (London: Picador, 1987), p.xiv.

[2] ibid., pp.128-137.

No DSS, no smokers, no pets

I liked being at school. I had my reasons at the time, but now it’s more admiration for the mix of people that you knew there as friends, or at the very least as people you would acknowledge if you saw them out of school. The comprehensive secondary school puts the rest of the country to shame in terms of its social mix. I spent my compulsory education with people that were better and worse off than me economically and socially, and at the time we were all just mates and ignorant of it. I had friends who lived in places I’d feel apprehensive walking around now, places the news and political leaders would tell me I’m right to feel apprehensive about. And at the other end of the scale there were friends living in places I’d now describe as elitist. What an incredible training it was back then though, showing that we could all get on.

Kids aren’t necessarily braver or more naïve if they’ll happily hang around ‘dodgy’ places and people; it’s just that they are closer to the school years when they had to talk to the bad guys and gals, and thought little of it. If you made the hard nuts laugh or could respond to them personably then they’d often be all right with you in that arbitrary, thump two, let one go approach. The context of school gave you a vague familiarity with most of the people there, which meant that you could actually talk to some of the violent pupils. You could even tell some of them (but definitely not all of them) when they were being dickheads. Now those people are making court appearances and getting violent with people who never shared a playground with them, and who never give strangers the time of day.

Perhaps you think thugs don’t deserve conversation, maybe they don’t. Certainly you shouldn’t have to charm your way out of verbal or physical abuse from every man and his dangerous dog. The thing is, some thugs, or abrasive people, are actually hostile because they can see you ignoring them. In silence there’s no way for them to differentiate between you and the people who only speak to them to have a go (telling off, not being a hero). Both aggressive oik and passer by will wonder what the other is silently thinking of them, but it tends to be the former that acts on their imagination in a way that can go from antisocial all the way up to a giggling in court manslaughter charge. They either see or project some kind of snub or slur to themselves, or arrogance in the silent passer by. I’m petrified of raising my head and saying ‘alright’ but it does actually work sometimes.

Where all of this happy clappy community talk is heading is social housing (a slightly broader term than council housing), the realm of Lewis Mumford and town planning. Broken Britain…that loathsome buzzword, but let’s assume for now that your yob, thug, school bully or hard nut is a perfect archetype of him or herself. Let’s say these people are bastards or bitches through and through, and are destined and happy to steal, give abuse and assault others. Fine, but what about the their hangers on—those two or three that were all right when you used to talk to them at school? What do you think they’ll be like a few years after leaving education, having lived in an area where lots of other bullies, hard nuts and the like all compete with each other? How happy would you be to walk past one of them when they’re standing at the end of the road with a big group of mates? What is it like for the not-so-antisocial people who live in the same area? It doesn’t bear thinking about…but of course it does bear thinking about; the former proposition is part of the problem.

How about if the hangers on lived on your street instead, or even the bully? Imagine if they grew up living alongside some of your friends as well as some of theirs, amongst the whole spectrum of the other residents—white collar to blue collar to popped collar, donkey jacket to Armani. You’d have all spoken to each other every now and then. You and the old bullies and hard nuts are similar ages…maybe you went to house parties and offered each other lifts occasionally. They would be no richer and you would be no poorer in this situation - you would just happen to be able live in the same street because the houses are different prices and mixed tenure. That situation is a long way off being common in the housing market—if it is even a goal—but there should at least be evidence of it in our public housing. However…

In December 2008, developers reached deals with councils to cut out the affordable homes in new social housing developments. This means that it is no longer compulsory to include private owner homes in housing association developments, or social rent/shared equity homes in private house-builder developments. Previously, Section 106 of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act only granted planning permission on the condition that 25-50 percent of the homes built were for social rent or shared equity. The Times noted in 2008: ‘Since the 1980s policymakers have backed integrated developments where subsidised rented housing is evenly mixed with shared equity and full-ownership homes. There has been plenty of evidence that mixed housing boosts the prospects of poorer groups, raises employment and cuts crime.’ The fear is that an end to mixed tenure estates will create council ‘ghettos’, only increasing the disparity in living conditions between people living in public housing and those in private homes.

The deals appear to be making the best out of a bad situation, ensuring that new social housing gets built, and that construction continues despite the financial climate leaving house-builders reluctant to start financially risky developments. Failures in mixed tenure are older than the economic crisis however. Both media and political figures have noted the growing division between those in public and private housing since the 1970s. In May 2009 the Independent discussed a report by the Fabian Society:

By splitting up those living in public and private housing, successive governments have fostered suspicion towards those who live on council estates. Research for the study found that a third of those polled felt people living on council estates had "nothing in common with them", and 60 per cent of those believed that mixed housing would be a bad idea.

Meanwhile 2010 sees regular news stories with headings like: work begins on first new council houses in [insert town/county here] for thirty years. The hope is that some of these homes will move into shared ownership as the country recovers from the recession. Others have argued for alternatives though. An Audit Commission report from last September stated that ‘[i]mproving the housing stock that already exists will help more people than building new houses, but more homes are also needed in most places in the country.’

Solutions have also been offered for keeping a social mix in housing estates. Back in December 2008 the Times quoted David Orr of the National Housing Federation: ‘We are not going to back the mono-tenure estates of the past. Half of our housing developments are small, with ten to twenty homes, which could be scattered next to existing private homes.’ [1] Not everybody in the existing homes might agree, as the Fabian Society study showed, but it is a good way of conserving both space and mixed tenure.

Top down encouragement of mixed tenure isn’t enough to guarantee that will we all talk to each other before judging though. Back in 1999 the Independent reported on a Demos research project. They had found that, although residents of some mixed tenure estates integrated more than those of others, overall the tenants and the homeowners didn’t tend to mix. Time we went back to school.

============================================================================
[1] Jill Sherman, ‘Council ghettos may return as recession kills mixed estates’, TimesOnline, 12^th December 2008, <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5327836.ece>.