Category: New York City

If you can’t define it, you can’t use it: Part 2, my neighborhood, blight or wrong?

19 March, 2010 (09:53) | Atlantic Yards, Blight, Cities, Eminent domain, Law, New York City, Policy, Regulation, Theory | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
By: David A. Smith
 
As we saw yesterday, using as our text a protracted City Journal editorial essay by Nicole Gelinas, when eminent domain is used for economic development (ED4ED) with a private developer as the implementing party, the potential for mischief is simply enormous – because the law of economic gravity [...]

If you can’t define it, you can’t use it: Part 1, the blight-line test

18 March, 2010 (09:51) | Atlantic Yards, Blight, Cities, Eminent domain, Law, New York City, Policy, Regulation, Theory | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
Is blight, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

Houses to be condemned to make way for Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Look blighted to you?
 
Or is blight just a planner’s word for a city’s natural messiness?
 

Does this look blighted to you?
 
Though the question is metaphysical, the answer is anything but.  On that [...]

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 [...]