Jeremiah Moss of Vanishing New York has launched the #SaveNYC campaign.
He writes about it today in an op-ed over at the Daily News.
Small businesses in New York City have no rights. You’ve been here 50 years and provide an important service? Tough luck — your space now belongs to Dunkin’ Donuts. You own a beloved, fourth-generation, century-old business? Get out — your landlord’s putting in a combination Chuck E. Cheese and Juicy Couture.
And despite de Blasio’s rhetorical fears about gentrification, his progressive pro-development push may well only hasten the trend.
Read the op-ed, titled The NYC we love is disappearing: It's becoming a hollow city for hollow people, right here. Find out how you can get involved at the #SaveNYC website.
21 comments:
Not worth saving IMO. What can one person do. Best thing is to save yourself, if this place no longer feels like home. Let's let the oligarchs have NYC and rot in it. We live in an awesome country, and it goes without saying that there are multitudes of great places to live. Some better than -gulp- here even.
I would say, there are other great countries to live in. America is going down the toilet. I don't see economic change or prosperity or universal healthcare or full gay marriage or jobs until 2075. Maybe 2100. I'll be dead by then :)
"The power of one" is a very powerful thing, Anon 12:46. It has accomplished many many very real things - I know this from my work with the Surfrider Foundation. If every "one" person just did what they felt was important with regards to an issue the overall result is staggering. Just sayin'...
With regards to NYC "the city of sheeps" now.... I just moved back here after being away for 2 years and I'm outta here end of the month. I have learned that this city is a place for me to visit and leave. I'm a native New Yorker and I've been just shaking my head nearly every minute I'm here as I look around at what this city - MY city - has DEvolved into. Sad, frustrating, aggravating, heartbreaking all come to mind. I will help try and "save" NYC in any way I can but the power of greed and money sadly steamroll their way over humanity daily worldwide and here is no exception.
I'll be around for a few more weeks and then a visitor to the shell of a city that once had balls and once held the bar SO high that no other could top it. Not anymore...
Let's just verify that SBS - Small Business Services has a ton of hacks in their agency with fancy titles...."capacity building" what they do...nobody knows. But, what we do know is they are not helping small businesses thrive.
NYC should become it's own country and only allow access to it if you are a millionaire and can contribute something positive to the community. If not, get the fuck the out. This is the playground for the wealthy and a purgatory like arena for the poor, middle class, and creative set, who are clamoring to survive, but can't.
The bottom line is Mayor DiBlasio needs the real estate industry to help his housing plans succeed. He can squeeze money and 'affordable' housing out of them but there has to development for that to happen. This is now a city for the very rich or the very poor. There is no middle ground anymore. Not sure how you can 'save' NYC anyway.
Ignore the naysayers, Jeremiah. We've got to try. It is going to be impossible to do the damage that is already done, but if people band together, maybe we can make some positive changes.
My heart breaks for those, like Scooby, who bemoan so impassionedly the loss of their home, not because alienation isn’t real but because they presumed that the city was ever theirs to begin with. The pig does not own the farm. You all wanted change but now you discover that the future doesn’t care about you. What is one person to do? What you’ve always done: stick you head in the sand and learn to love the limited license of your servitude. Now excuse me, lest my champagne bath goes flat.
I recently starting looking through the financials of my coop and the laws that have changed in the past 5 years or so.There is the real difference here in the east village. Taxes have escalated incredibly, rules like the 80/20 for storefronts went away in 2007 and in 2013 the Department of finance took away many abatements or tax discounts for buildings. Landlords int eh EV are greedy, but even my small coop is being crushed by these changes taking away the chance that we can keep a consistent budget. 50 percent of all tax money for the city is real estate taxes. Real estate shouldn't be a game, it's peoples homes and family businesses we're talking about.
Exactly. You all love DiBlasio and his $80 billion budget. Where do you think that money comes from? Its a matter of priorities. He cant fund his 'progressive' agenda without all those taxes. And hed love to raise taxes even more. Pre K for all and free school meals and free everything. Someone has to pay for all this.
Grieve, why don't you just call your blog Vanishing New York, Jr.?
I love Jeremiah's blog, which is why I'm sort of disappointed in sentences like this:
You own a beloved, fourth-generation, century-old business? Get out — your landlord’s putting in a combination Chuck E. Cheese and Juicy Couture.
I feel like the point would be made so much better using concrete examples of the type of retailer pushing small business out (which JM provides daily on his own blog). Because nowhere in this city, to my knowledge, is an actual century-old business (such as DeRobertis) being pushed out for a suburban clothier inexplicably sharing space with a child's burger palace. There IS no Juicy Couture in Manhattan or any of the boroughs for that matter—they closed all their US stores last year. The closest Chuck E. Cheese is in the Bronx or LIC.
This type of inaccurate hyperbole is only going to give power to the people who deny that NYC is becoming a bland, corporate wasteland. Which it is. So I wish realistic examples had been used to make the argument.
@7:48 it's called hyperbole, a device that is often used to make a point by using an absurd example, not unlike the hyperbole contained in your own statement. You're welcome.
@10:28, yeah I already called it "hyperbole" in my last paragraph, genius.
There's no need to make an "absurd example" when plenty of perfectly valid and REAL examples abound. Absurd examples make for poor arguments and needn't be used by intelligent reporters of actual fact such as Jeremiah, which is why I said it was disappointing.
An inability to accept even occasional and mild fault in people you admire is called defensiveness. There's your vocab lesson for tonight.
This string of comments definitely brings out the dual feelings I have about my city right now. First of all, Walter is right-Bloomberg made this mess. Second, there are many fine places to live in both the US and outside of it, Detroit , perhaps my secret favorite. But, we should really rally behind Jeramiahs effort, even if he disappointed one with his exaggerated examples. And last, I said we were turning in to a mall 20 years ago, where have you guys been? Stop being so nice to the tourists, it makes them believe they want to live here.
@anon 6:28 I feel the same way. Losing favorites like 7A, Rawhide, Yaffa, and the million other places I once enjoyed hurt. But I've also discovered places, new to me but existing for a while, right under my nose.
I hate the influx of Duane Reades, Walgreens, Subways, banks, etc. as much as the next person but I refuse to be, or at least make an effort to curb, being yet another person who moans endlessly about how much shit sucks. It does. But since I live and here and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, I make the most of it. I go out of my way to take advantage of the things the city still has to offer, a mix of old and new. But if people want to live like the "glory days" of 1979-1985 than yes, this city is probably going to disappoint.
With that said, I totally support Jeremiah and anyone helping out with this project.
One of the currents of feeling here reminds me of what's really wrong with Taylor Swift's NYC Tourism song, with its refrain, "Welcome to New York/It's been waiting for you." In addition to being horrible-sounding, this song is a) more of a chant, and b) A LIE.
New York City is not waiting for anyone to come. Everyone knows that, even the tourism department.
That's what's the MOST wrong with this "song."
People who severely limit their life experiences to the same few restaurants or bars are going to have a tough time in any city.
It's now hipper to the former outsiders to live here and expect what they know and force it on everyone.
Sad too.
Boring is as boring does.
I maintain a news list and yesterday posted Jeremiah Moss' article to it, along with a preface I wrote, to wit: "A bit of a history refresher is in order here. Remember when Bill de Blasio ran in the last Democratic Party Mayoral primary election, and how he prattled on and on about a 'tale of two cities'? Remember how he was going to put everything in order, do right by the people? Remember how one of his very top priorities was to create and maintain affordable housing? And remember how, after defeating John Liu (who probably had a few real, bona fide progressive credentials), partly in the aftermath of a media-created non-scandal, the faux progressive de Blasio met with eight-hundred higher-ups in the banking, finance and real estate industries to assure them that all will be well? And remember how, following that meeting, de Blasio proclaimed that 'Wall Street is New York's hometown industry'? Remember how these scions of capital gave him their blessings? And after that, does anyone remember those four words, 'tale of two cities', being ever again uttered from the mouth of Bill de Blasio? Anyone who does must have a fanciful memory, because once de Blasio entered the general election his 'progressive' veneer cracked and crumbled, and he revealed himself as nothing more than a business-as-usual politician, a Bloomberg wannabe, and his ascent to Mayor ensured that the ruling class, the one percent, would remain firmly in control of New York City, while the rest of us got nothing but the imperial shaft. Jeremiah Moss, in his article below, takes a precisely focused aim at the crap posing as grandeur that is spreading everywhere, the blandness our city has become, the suburbanization of New York that the economic elite has imposed on the entire city. Our neighborhoods are threatened by sumptuous wealth and the people who own it, by unbridled luxury development, and by the resulting displacement of people, institutions and small businesses whose longevity and tenure in *place* created and defined, for generations, the nature and character of the communities in which they dwelled. Here in my neighborhood we recently lost one of our needed laundromats (soon to be replaced with a trendy restaurant); we lost a third-generation run, independently-owned check cashing business (which served mainly poor people; the rich have no use for such a low-class métier); the venerable Saint Marks Books, a vital cultural and literary institution, was forced to downsize and move to a hole in the wall further east; and today the blogsite EV Grieve reports that Puebla Mexican Food, a mom-and-pop restaurant that has been on First Avenue for twenty-five years, is closing, victim of landlord rent-gouging. As to the hollow people referred to by Moss, they seem particularly concentrated on the Lower East Side. This erstwhile working-class, ethnically and racially diverse community is now nothing more than a corporate model of trendy whiteness, drawing new denizens from affluent, gated communities far beyond New York, and whose presence has transformed the neighborhood into a suburban shopping mall and rich kids' playground, peopled by self-entitled brats who eagerly 'brand' themselves as corporate commodities, conforming and behaving with a bland sameness--and oblivious, even hostile, to anyone and anything not cut from the same mold as they. At this point, Peoria is starting to look a like a favorable, more sophisticated alternative to the insipid sticks New York City is becoming."
We need this badly
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