Posted on 04/04/2005 6:20:54 AM PDT by Brilliant
Welcome to the billionaires' club. Ordinary New Yorkers need not apply.
When Robert Wood Johnson IV, the fabulously wealthy owner of the New York Jets, craned his neck from a perch in the New Jersey Meadowlands (where the Jets now reside) and trained his eyes on an enormous parcel of Manhattan real estate, his heart began beating wildly and a single obsessive thought began racing through his brain: I want it.
After all, it was waterfront property, right up against the Hudson River. Very valuable. You could walk to it from Times Square.
Not only did he want this publicly owned property turned over to him so he could build a grand stadium for his privately owned franchise, he wanted the city and state to kick in hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars to help him realize his dream. Being a member in good standing of the billionaires' club, he asked his fellow billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, to take care of this matter for him.
Mayor Mike was only too happy to oblige. He quickly came up with $600 million in city and state money for his pal Woody (all of Mr. Johnson's friends call him that). To put this in perspective, consider that the $600 million is nearly equivalent to the entire amount ($635 million) that Woody paid for the team. In effect, the public would be reimbursing him for the cost of the franchise.
Then Mayor Mike persuaded the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns this very valuable property on Manhattan's West Side, to agree to hand it over to Woody for a bargain-basement price, hundreds of millions shy of its real value.
So quicker than you can say "scandalous," the billionaire mayor arranged the transfer of more than a billion dollars' worth of goodies from the public domain to the private stash of his friend Woody. Quite naturally, Woody plans to use this windfall, which rightfully belongs to the men and women of New York City and New York State, to further enrich himself. Trust me, it's good to be a billionaire.
There are a few other weird things about this deal. The proposed 75,000-seat stadium - surrounded by the dense, traffic-jammed neighborhoods of Hell's Kitchen, Times Square and Chelsea - will be built with no new provisions made for parking. On game days, the entire West Side of Manhattan will be paralyzed. Fans driving to the stadium will be lucky to make it inside before the final gun.
Then there's the price tag for this stadium. Originally it was supposed to cost $1.4 billion. There is only one appropriate reaction to spending that kind of money for a football stadium: hysterical laughter. (In Philadelphia, a billion dollars bought two new stadiums.) Usually when something is overpriced, it gets marked down. But in this case the price has gone steadily up - to $1.7 billion, and then $2 billion, and now, incredibly, $2.2 billion.
Mayor Mike and his friend Woody have lost all sense of reason. Perhaps their personal fortunes (they've got the better part of $10 billion between them) have warped their sense of proportion. Spending more than $2 billion on a sports stadium is insane. As is anyone who thinks the price of this boondoggle is not going higher still.
Even as the mayor and the M.T.A. are going out of their way to finance Woody's dream, the ordinary New Yorkers who have to go to work or to school are struggling with the higher fares and deteriorating service of the transit system the M.T.A. is supposed to be running. The authority will begin closing token booths and removing token clerks from subway stations in a couple of weeks, leaving passengers in many cases dangerously vulnerable to subway predators. This is occurring even as crime in the subways is increasing.
Subway passengers are also struggling with severe service breakdowns caused by fires, flooding and other foul-ups in a system that is old and in need of billions of dollars' worth of modernization and repairs. Even as Woody Johnson is getting the royal treatment, the M.T.A.'s executive director, Katherine Lapp, has been pleading with the state for billions in additional funds just to keep the quality of transit service at an acceptable level.
New York's subway passengers are not members of the billionaires' club, so they can't be expected to get the same kind of first-class attention that the mayor's friend Woody gets. Woody is special. He has friends in high places. It's good to be a billionaire.
Never turn your back on a guy who has the nickname "Woody."
It's what happens when government has the power to take private property for "public" use.
Well, the MTA property is not exactly considered "private property". Another reminder of the inexorable "tragedy of the commons" law.
It likely once was.
You are probably right - in any case, it belongs to "the government", which is "owned" by taxpayers. The taxpayers should flood their state government with outrage. Nothing disinfects better than sunshine, as they say.
It all depends on the type of "taking". If the government was only allowed to take a "right-of-way" rather than full ownership, then the land would revert to the original owners when it ceased to be of use and was "abandoned".
Many of us who stood to be negatively impacted by the Rails-To-Trails movement stood up and fought back based on this concept.
Welfare for the ultra rich
A right of way is private property. ROWs are deeded, tradable, and you can borrow against one.
Many of us who stood to be negatively impacted by the Rails-To-Trails movement stood up and fought back based on this concept.
Indeed a classic example of the problem. Once the bureaucrats have their hands on private property, there is no end to it. Abandoned waterfront properties are another classic example.
Why doesn't the federal government just ban state and local governments from spending public money on stadiums? There is no benefit to be had by one city competing against another city to decide who can build the best stadium with taxpayer's money.
It should be interesting when "Woody" asks the mayor to condemn thousands of perfectly good homes as a public nuisance (blighted) to make parking spots.
Of course with the newly expanded "public use" clause that's morphed into the Marxist "public good," I'm sure "Woody" will be allowed to destroy thousands of homes, churches and businesses. Maybe the serfs who get thrown from their property can be declared "misfits" and forced to build the parking lots at gulag prices.
Outrageous costs of living has driven a lot of people away in the past few years but a coming crime wave will rid the place of a lot more people. I'm not from there but NYC seems to have these cyles of crime every 20 years or so, and they are about due.
Why are folks bitching?!
Millions of people will love
the new stadium,
and enjoy the sports,
and many, many thousands
will profit from jobs
building the new place
and tearing down the old place.
(I swear, last few weeks,
it seems like FR
has fewer Republicans
than it has oddballs!)
One terrorist attack could clean out the whole areas population making it easy enough to bulldoze whole neighborhoods for parking....
Naw the terrorists wouldn't do that do...maybe if they got a piece of the action...
;)
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