Category: New York City

Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion

11 March, 2010 (11:12) | Apartments, Leases, Moving, New York City, Rent control, Tenure, US News | No comments

By David A. Smith
 

Can you count the times you’ve moved?  Remember how much fun it was?  How long it took you to unpack the final boxes?
 
Got everything?
 
Most of us hate moving – and we understand that moving is a sunk cost that yields nothing but emotional, temporal, and economic entropy, so we try to [...]

Not only better but also cheaper

3 March, 2010 (12:45) | Apartments, Construction, HOPE VI, New York City, Public housing, Theory | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
Would you rather spend $138 and get 360 brand-new objects, or spend $130 and get 269 used objects?
 
What is this, asks the reader, a trick question? 
 
Not to the New York City Housing Authority, but perhaps to those whose willingness to believe and trust has been incinerated by many years of unfulfilled [...]

Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 3, future

5 February, 2010 (10:35) | Apartments, Essential posts, Housing, New York City, Public housing, Subsidy, Theory, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]
 
In using the New York Times’s superficial examination of the Ingersoll and Whitman public housing properties in New York City to bring out the challenges facing not just these two large properties but the entire legacy public housing inventory, we have so far [...]

Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 2, present

4 February, 2010 (10:53) | Apartments, Essential posts, Housing, New York City, Public housing, Regulation, Subsidy, Theory, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we visited Ingersoll and Whitman Houses, two large public housing properties in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, where the New York Times showed the obligatory photographs of empty apartments and broken windows before giving an assemblyman a platform to spout complaints about the invisible ‘administrative management’ that makes [...]

Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 1, past

3 February, 2010 (11:03) | Apartments, Essential posts, Housing, New York City, Public housing, Regulation, Subsidy, Theory, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 

What bureaucrat can we blame for this?
 
The New York Times story inspiring this post follows the time-honored journalistic formula for spotlighting a problem to deplore: start with an incontrovertibly deplorable problem, chase it with a provocative quote, and skate superficially through the background. 
 

It’s simple, class; to publish, you must write
 
Someone had [...]