Posted on 04/27/2015 5:04:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
I caught New York Mayor Bill de Blasio streaking along Manhattan’s waterfront—and it wasn’t the first time.
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true,” writes author Nathanial Hawthorne in his classic novel, “The Scarlet Letter.”
Mayor de Blasio has finally reached complete bewilderment over who he is as a politician. Is he a champion of the poor and oppressed? Or is he the oppressor? In his confusion, he has taken to metaphorically streaking in public, giving us clues to his true intentions.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a bit confused in his own right. He wanted to ban hunting despite mistaking a semi-automatic rifle for a fully automatic firearm. Yet despite exhibiting ignorance with regard to the 2nd Amendment, at least Bloomberg understood that the 4th Amendment allows private developers to have a choice in whether to include affordable housing units within their developments. In contrast, Mayor de Blasio wants affordable housing inclusions to be mandatory.
Extell Development Company is now leasing One Riverside Park, a 33-story tower looming along the Manhattan waterfront with fully-loaded individual units going for up to $25 million. Extell decided to include 55 low-income units within the tower. The affordable units are very reasonable for Manhattan’s Upper West Side: single bedroom units will rent for $895 a month and two-bedroom units will rent for $1,082 a month.
Extell asked the New York City Council for approval to give the affordable units—which all face 62nd Street rather than the Hudson River—their own door and address (470 West 62nd Street versus 50 Riverside Boulevard).
Never one to pass up an opportunity to rally for the little guy, de Blasio lambasted the separate entrance as a “poor door.” Meanwhile, poor people have expressed excitement and gratitude over the prospect of fleeing rat-infested studios for opulent lofts in a prime Manhattan tower that would otherwise be outside their price range. So far, over88,000 people have applied for the 55 affordable units.
De Blasio is a man who embraces condensation. He maintains that underprivileged New Yorkers are too inept to educate their own children and opposes charter schools with proven results, like Success Academy Harlem 4. However, I caught him “streaking” or revealing his true colors when he made schoolchildren trudge to class while snow fell at a rate of three inches an hour and buses careened on the road. In his mind, real parents would never have made such a “stellar” choice.
De Blasio also contends that poor people have such fragile egos that they are not capable of living in reality; they must never face the realization that they are poor; they must live in fantasyland. He also apparently believes that wealthy people must be ashamed of their wealth and never publicly admit that they are affluent.
De Blasio has tried so hard to wear two faces—guardian of the poor and champion of entrepreneurial innovation—that he has become condescending to both groups. His true colors have shown through and New Yorkers—rich and poor alike—are dismissing him as irrelevant. On behalf of the wealthy, Extell president and founder Gary Barnett told the New York Times that the poor door controversy is a “made up controversy.” Meanwhile, the city’s poor are speaking out via their applications to live at One Riverside Park, which are flowing in by the thousands. One Riverside Park now has roughly 160,000% more applicants than available affordable condo units.
Most underprivileged people will express gratitude for opportunities afforded them by capitalism. The New York Times recently interviewed a homeless San Francisco woman named Holly Leonard, who had received a free smartphone from Google. Despite San Francisco’s stark disparity between upper and lower class households, Leonard expressed more appreciation than resentment: “…I have to be happy with what I have. I just feel like a lot of these companies are helping those that are less fortunate.
Instead of using income or race to pull Americans apart, politicians should focus on lowering taxes so that every group of Americans can feel the pride and fulfillment of opportunity. When there is opportunity, Americans will build their own doors and whether that door is made of wood or gold, the door will belong to them; they will have earned the door through their own hard work and ingenuity.
Please throw on a T-shirt and shorts, Mayor de Blasio. Your secret is out. We know what your redistributive policies entail and you can no longer feign to be a champion of the poor—or the rich. You are streaking buck naked.
Not a good mental picture.
Not good at all.
What a way to put it! Saving this quote forever!
Evita will likely want HIM for VP
Yes DB is a communist idiot, but the writer says reason is school was open during snow, in NY. That is normal in NY. Why not pick real reasons? Or is this article meant to mock those who criticize DB?
The “haves” and the “have nots” occupying the same building.
I can see it now, the entire building filled with real live rats after six months. Gonna be a fun time in that place.
DE blah blah is just your typical liberal.
De Blasio is a man who embraces condensation.
Whaaaat...the communist mayor likes water??
Hard to appreciate the gravitas of the composition when the author is too vacuous - and the editors too stupid...to employ correct grammar.
BTW, the word is "condescension".
“Evita will likely want HIM for VP”
He’s refused to endorse her, and at a very critical time.
In the extremely unlikely event that HDR survives politically, DeBlasio is going nowhere.
Everybody hates Bill de Blasio.
The Statue Of Liberty says,
“Give me your tired, your poor, but keep Bill de Blasio. I hate that son-of-a-bitch.”
If there is some screening device to ensure that the lower-income tenants are working people, this could work. If they fill it up with Section 8 occupants, it will be trouble.
I do think that cities should zone for mixed income development. The larger the city, the more important this becomes. In some areas, it's not just the store clerks and bus drivers who can't find housing close to work; it's the teachers, police, and young professionals. This is not a good way to run a city.
With the rise of the automobile suburb after WWII, the poor became increasing isolated geographically. Out of sight, out of mind is not a good plan. If we expect the poor to go to work, they need to be able to live within reasonable proximity to jobs. And if we want to contain social pathologies and rebuild urban public education, we ought not to dump the poor into concentrated left-behind communities where the problems reach critical mass and create a toxic culture.
Diffusion of low income housing is important. We have 50 years of bad policy to undo. Solutions are highly site-specific and it gets ugly when distant federal or state authorities try to impose arbitrary remedies. But exclusionary zoning is a problem. Here in DC, gentrification is pushing a lot of the poor into the suburbs. Some of our fat-and-happy suburbanites who for years chortled that poverty was DC's problem are getting an education, as inner city neighborhoods get yuppified and gangbangers move out. I don't see any easy solutions, but concentrating poverty is a sure prescription for permanent failure.
As a woman, I consider the idea of a naked Bill Blasio a microaggression! (And a vomitous one at that).
Tourist cites have similar problems...who can afford to live in Sun Valley and clean those homes/hotels or wait on them?
Some people react reflexivly against any government role in enforcing mixed income development. Sometimes they even drape themslves in the mantle of the free market. Before that discussion begins, I would just note that cities used to be much denser, with people of all income levels rubbing shoulders on a daily basis. There were plusses and minuses, but for the poor, it meant that jobs were nearby, and the school systems were functional. That was the city under a real free market regime.
It was government that built the highways and subsidized the water and sewer infrastructure to support the mass flight from the cities to sprawling suburbs. You may applaud or deplore that policy, but do not confuse it with the free market. Free market cities would be denser, taking advantage of economies of scale and existing infrastructure. It was government, utilizing eminent domain and subsidizing mass homeownership and suburbanization, that trumped market dynamics in favor of housing policies which were politically popular with middle class voters but which left the poor behind.
As the cities began to spiral downhill, LBJ then stepped in to save the day, and created a disaster. It was government, in the name of urban renewal, that tore down the organic communities in which the poor still lived, and herded them into projects. This was supposed to be an improvement. It was not. It was government that punched arterial roads through urban neighborhoods to for the convenience of commuters. And it was government, in the suburbs, that utilized exclusionary zoning to prevent the poor from escaping, by doubling or tripling up in apartments or via multi-family housing out in cul-de-sac land. In a free market, the poor would have moved to jobs. But we do not have a free market when it comes to zoning and occupancy.
Government's fingerprints are all over the problem. Just sayin'.
Haha...”GOVERNMENT” is always the problem
Often, not always, but government certainly created the problem of the modern underclass. The problem is, we have now created a dysfunctional population numbering in the tens of millions that has been systematically incapacitated. If we tried to simply return to the status quo ante, these people would starve, or die rioting. Nasty problem.
Dude turned a lesbian because his Marxism was so pure that she found it irresistible.
I smell the storyline to a porno flick...
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