Comments on: 326 Melrose: Condo Ready for the Recession

By: sophia

sophia — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:21:20 +0000

this position on gentrification makes sense to me….

“Low-income households actually seem less likely to move from gentrifying neighborhoods than from other communities,” said Frank Braconi, co-author of a similar research project, the New York gentrification study by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York.

It may be convenient for community leaders, student groups, and activists to make a villain out of ‘gentrification,’ as their way of fearing a future in which their advocacy for the chronic poor is rendered irrelevant by the rising tide of economic growth. In fact, the disingenuous cries for the ‘preservation’ of the present inner-city communities by activists and some neighborhood leaders have to be looked upon as a way of preserving their own influence over the business of poverty, oppression, and victimhood.

What benefit is there in impeding a massive and wide-reaching improvement of the entire economic and social structure of a community? Isn’t this precisely what neighborhood leaders have called for since the Great Society? Isn’t this the end result they would all wish for their disenfranchised constituents? Rather than condemning Harlem to a state of perpetual stagnation-defined by broad tracts of public housing and widespread poverty-wouldn’t a new model of economic growth hold more promise?

That is the very question that such tenants’ groups, activists, and leaders, should consider before they condemn-without restraint-any wide-ranging, comprehensive upgrading in the social and economic conditions of American cities. They can continue to mistakenly characterize gentrification as a perverse process of social and economic Darwinism, or they can make an honest assessment about the critical and substantive benefits realized by all residents of a community undergoing positive change: jobs, better municipal services, decent places to live, thriving commerce, and the hope that a whole community can start stepping out of poverty once and for all.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D. is director of Boston University’s Program in Book and Magazine Publishing at the Center for Professional Education.

By: vertigo

vertigo — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:12:52 +0000

“Tenants right,” you should make a blog of your own if you want to push the idea of housing as a right. I’d like a right to an apartment that other people pay for, but I know that eventually, that someone’s gonna have to be me. I came to the city with much the same ideas as you do: The rich landlords are gouging the poor, so much of our money goes to rent, all of our hurry and hustling is just to survive. I figured the surest way to avoid that trouble was to work and buy my own building so that i didn’t have to struggle like that if I wanted to live here. And so I did, I bought a building in Bushwick (my family helped, we’d been saving since we immigrated here). I’ve come to understand now that the rents that people pay (and complain to me about) are actually not money I make. The rents go to pay a PORTION of the cost of the building (including the property taxes that pay for other people’s low-income housing). The rest, I pay by working more than full-time. Actually, rents mask the true inefficiencies in the system. Note: most people in apartments do not pay for their water, it’s required that landlords provide heat and hot water. So if someone uses a lot of water, then everyone in the building has to pay, and that cost is rolled into your rent. The city has 3 different agencies that fine you for garbage that OTHER people leave in front of your building. Each has a different fee (one requires that you show up to court, and then they impose a fee). All that rent? Goes to the city. If you are renting, you are agreeing with your landlord that he provides you an apartment, and you are paying for (a portion of) it, not that you can live there forever and pay less than the cost of your living there. If you really want to lower the cost of living and rent, pay attention to the way our corrupt politicians are mismanaging the system. Rent control and bureaucracy is distorting the cost of housing and living in the city.

I have one tenant who totally disregards instructions from pest control, and as a result the whole building has to be visited by pest control every month, which costs everyone in their rent. If I was rent controlled, I would be forced to allow them to stay, while everyone else in the building suffers. How many times have you heard about low-income and rent controlled conditions being miserable and roach infested? You wonder why?

On a different note, I’m gonna miss the hep of poop jokes

By: tenants have rights

tenants have rights — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:17:28 +0000

The construction activity occurring in the 6+ unit buildings on Melrose Street is a clear example of the active destruction of affordable housing in Bushwick. Landlords are driving out the longtime rent-stabilized and rent-controlled tenants, renovating the buildings, and then increasing the rents. This website should really take a more critical approach to gentrification… Instead of giving so much positive coverage to the Bushwick real estate boom you could raise awareness about how people are unjustly being forced from their homes.

By: sjp

sjp — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:04:44 +0000

it will be unfortunate for the real estate market when the tax credit expires.

hopefully these developments sell out before then, or else there will be more unwanted rentals in the neighb (as if 144 castle braid shitstains aren’t enough)