Nestled between the high-rise brick buildings of the Bushwick Houses is a chlorine oasis: Bushwick’s own public pool, aptly named Bushwick Pool. I was unaware of a pool in the area until my roommate, who works for the Parks Department, informed me of one’s existence. So, on Tuesday, I headed over to the projects on Bushwick and Flushing to go check it out.

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Bushwick High, by A Guy in Brooklyn

I have been hard on Bushwick community organization Make the Road NY, and we do disagree on many important points. I think their point of view on certain economic issues is more characteristic of the beginning of last century than this one. That said, I appreciate their immigrant advocacy services — the idea of a person’s very existence in a particular place on earth being “illegal” offends me on a fundamental level. The other day I realized we have something else in common: opposition to the anti-child hate crime that is our heavily armed and armored public school system.

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CB4 meeting

Brownstoner today wonders if Brooklyn’s Community Boards are on their way out, given their ineffectualness and ever-deepening lack of funds. The commenters on the post are (as of this writing) unanimous in their acceptance and even cheer at the approaching demise of the CBs. They complain of “NIMBY seniors” who are “out of touch” with the new realities of their neighborhoods. These descriptions and more resemble Bushwick’s Community Board 4.

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The curve on that chart is so high I can fit a pic of Vito under it!
(Chart from Federal Reserve paper on demographic shifts in wealth [pdf])

Your moron State Assemblyman and local political boss Vito Lopez has a bill currently rotting in Albany that would extend rent stabilization from buildings with a minimum of six units to those with three, but just for tenants over 62. It has no co-sponsors, of course, because the other Assemblypeople aren’t retarded and/or don’t have any interest in helping Vito cement in his constituency of poor people that he can whip into a hysteria and then lead to the voting booths.

Here’s the, um, eloquent “justification” of the bill:

“Senior citizens need to be protected from landlords who increase their rent to proportions beyond their financial means. The elderly should not be penalized for living in dwellings, which consist of six units, or less. Presently, the law stipulates that rent stabilization may be granted to senior citizens residing in dwellings containing more than six units. Most senior citizens are presently sustaining themselves on a fixed income. This bill would prevent excessive rent increases and harassment about eviction from landlords because the tax rebate acts as an incentive.”

Vito. Did you plagiarize this from someone’s ninth-grade civics class paper? That’s not nice.

But seriously, it’s 2008 and the government is still pitting the various (somewhat arbitrarily defined) classes against each other? I understand divide and conquer, I just think it’s vulgar and out of place in a liberal democracy.

Some facts:

*When prices rise, it is not a punishment. In fact, it is a mechanism by which scarce resources are more efficiently allocated. I’d be interested to find out whose moral compass is used to determine “excessive” rises in rent.

*More senior citizens may have a fixed income, but that does not mean it’s a low one or that they are not wealthy. In fact, senior citizens are the wealthiest segment of society. It would be rather perverse to transfer yet more wealth from a less-wealthy demographic to a wealthier one.

Why is an overly complicated regime involving tax breaks and more regulation being proposed when the government could just subsidize the rent of the seniors instead of — oh wait, I forgot to put on my scheming power-hungry politician thinking cap on. More employees to run more bureaucracy means more voters and political machine cogs for Vito!

You got it all squared away, huh, Boss?

If you have ever ridden your bike down Myrtle in Bushwick, you know you are risking your life. I routinely avoid riding on Myrtle, which is a significant handicap given that it’s a perfect shortcut across Bushwick’s pretty rigid grid. The street is simply too narrow to accommodate two directions of traffic, two lanes of parking, and bicyclists. So when I walked by a city bike map one day in Union Square, I was pleasantly surprised to see Myrtle Avenue, as well as Central and Evergreen, slated to get bike lanes. But then, remembering how narrow Myrtle is, I wondered where the lane would go. Will they remove a lane of parking? How will that work in both directions?

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Residents finally moved into the gut-renovated Bushwick Initiative buildings across the street from me this weekend, four months after they were completed. Oh, the Bushwick Initiative? That’s where the City uses your tax money to fix up someone else’s private property for them, with a guarantee that all the people who lived there before can move back in afterward — with the same rent, of course. Where these families have been warehoused for the past two years, I can’t imagine, I mean — what are they, cattle? Don’t they have plans and dreams? They just live wherever the City plops them? What is the point of this?

Well, whatever, it seems like a great deal for everyone involved: the landlord gets his building overhauled for cheap and doesn’t even have to hire his own contractors; the tenants get fancy new apartments for the same rent which they can somehow — isn’t the point of regulated rent to help the poor? — then afford to fill with a truckfull of new furniture (see photo above); and the political bosses get to keep their subjects in Bushwick, while appearing far-sighted and magnanimous. Who am I missing? Oh yeah, the taxpayers who fund all of this, especially the losers who were unsavvy enough use their own damn money to invest in this neighborhood only to be spit in the face by this whole crooked, corrupt “Urban Renewal, Fourth Time’s a Charm!”

Is it even necessary to mention that Bushwick is exactly as rundown as its proportion of rent-regulated apartments would suggest? The Bushwick Initiative is just the City putting a sad little band-aid on the giant ax wound it created in New York’s housing situation.

The bright side is that ultimately, none of this matters. The desperate fight against the natural order of the market, though backed by practically unlimited pools of cash looted from middle class pockets, is failing on the most important front: the big picture. For all the City and “private” organization RBSCC’s idiotic talk of “revitalizing commercial corridors” though this or that program, it’s happening without them as entrepreneurs take their own initiative. So they renovated a handful of crappy apartments here and there in an arbitrary bit of Bushwick? Well, sorry, no medal for them — developers and landlords have rehabbed and built thousands of units in Bushwick in the same time. Bureaucracy is so dumb and lumbering it doesn’t even realize its much-touted grand efforts are but a drop in the bucket compared to what ordinary people, working mostly in their own interest and of their own direction, have done for Bushwick.

That’s initiative.

Money wasted on this map could have been used to buy produce.

Just when you thought the people of this city had endured quite enough paternalism, our benevolent overseers have now found it fit to tell us we don’t eat the way they say we should. Bushwick is, as usual, alarmingly red on the map of areas in the city which rate poorly. Lower Manhattanites, along with people in some other areas in the outer boroughs, apparently eat a bureaucrat-endorsed amount of veggies daily. Less-obedient people in other neighborhoods apparently do not eat “enough,” with up to 26% of people having responded to the one-day survey that on the previous day, they had eaten no fresh fruits or vegetables. That’s “400% less than Manhattanites!” I can see the stats-mongers screaming.

To remedy this, the city wants to recruit people to run fruit stands in these “underserved” neighborhoods, so that the people there will buy and eat the approved amount of fresh foods and thereby have lower rates of everything bad. They are calling it the Green Carts program. A few problems I will note:

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I got a letter from HPD today inviting Bushwick residents to a seminar on bedbugs, “including how to recognize them, prevent infestation, and eliminate them from the home.” The meeting is Wednesday, March 12 from 6-8PM at 195 Linden Street at the Hope Gardens projects. Hm, I thought the idea was to avoid infestations.

Anyone whose responsibility it is to maintain their sidewalk in Bushwick knows how difficult it can be. The trash accumulation here is epic. I am always picking up bits of trash and do a full sweeping once a week. My tree pit is a magnet for condiment packages, tissues, and of course, dog shit. In October, I got a $100 litter ticket on a Saturday afternoon, just hours after I had actually done one of my full sweeps. Despite an experienced neighbor’s insistence that it was futile to fight the ticket, I followed the appeal instructions to the letter.

Today, three and a half months later, I got a letter from the Environmental Control Board, in which the judge wrote:

“I find Respondent’s testimony credible. In light of the facts and circumstances described above, I find Respondent has established that reasonable efforts were made to keep the area free from debris. Therefore the Notice of Violation is dismissed.”

As long as you are slightly less lazy than the bureaucracy, you can win. Fight all your tickets, property owners! It costs $3 to send something certified… if you have time to get to the post office and wait for that bureaucracy’s rusty gears to grind.

by shaftbean, from the BushwickBK.com flickr pool

Can’t we catch a break? Once again, Bushwick takes a number one on the shit list, this time for bedbug complaints. Again, I emphasize that this is bedbug complaints, not actual bedbug infestations. I was under the impression that Greenpoint is actually the epicenter of the bedbug “epidemic” (everything bad these days is an epidemic, right?). But since Greenpoint is heavy on the homeownership and Bushwick is decidedly not, Bushwick tops the complaints. Just a theory — if anyone has some harder facts, please post below.

Not to say Bushwick isn’t known lately for its bedbug problem. If I were to take a word association test right now, “McKibben” would have me blurting out “bedbugs!” in a half-second. There are apparently buildings being scarlet lettered to warn prospective tenants and shame landlords.

I can’t figure out from research whether or not the DDT ban really is to blame for the reemergence of bedbugs, but until someone comes up with a silver bullet, we’ll have to keep washing everything in hot water and rejecting cool curbside furniture finds.