Revisiting "Riding out the Credit Collapse"

At BoingBoing today, Douglas Rushkoff passes along the link to an article he did this past spring for Arthur magazine titled "Riding out the Credit Collapse." As he writes on BoingBoing, this is "a way to review the steps that led to our current fiasco, explain it in the greater context of centralized currency, and help people not feel so very terrible about it all."

Here is an excerpt of the Arthur magazine piece:

...Bush’s tax cuts and other measures favoring the rich led to the biggest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in American history. The result was that the wealthy—the investment class—had more money to invest, or lend, than there were people and businesses looking to borrow.
The easiest way to bring more borrowers into the system—and to create more of a market for money—was to promote homeownership in America. This is precisely what the Bush administration did, touting home ownership as an American right. Of course, they weren’t talking about home ownership at all, but rather pushing people to borrow money tied to the value of a house. If people could be persuaded to take mortgages on homes, real estate values would go up for those already invested (like land trusts and real estate funds) and banks would have a market for the excess money they had accumulated.
In short, there was a surplus of credit in the system. Americans were encouraged to borrow in the form of mortgages, which created demand for the credit banks wanted to sell. In many cases the credit itself wasn’t even real, but leveraged off some other inflated commodity that the bank or investor may have owned.

When headlines go terribly wrong

From today's Page Six:



Wow. A few angry readers have chimed in on the "fear of frying" headline.

Lou Reed wants us to remember him

The Daily Star has this Lou Reed item today:

The 66-year-old rocker was born in Brooklyn and has spent all of his life living in Manhattan, where he was once nicknamed the Bard of the East Village. Reed is fiercely proud of the city, and hopes a future mayor will recognise him - in the same way punk star Joey Ramone was honoured when the 2nd Street East Village block where he once lived was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. Reed says, "Lou Reed Way would be nice. Any little street would do."

(Via City Room)

Bonus! Please watch Lou Reed in a Honda Scooters ad from the 1980s...

Wizz kids

Columbia University's New Media Newsroom site has a handy-dandy interactive map showing 311 reports of urinating in public in Manhattan since the beginning of 2008 by zip code.

And the winner? 10011 in Chelsea. Woo-hoo! Nice going! (Uh, so to speak.) And in the 10009 zip code of the East Village? Just one! Hmm.

According to the post:

Admittedly, information about where we pee illegally may be subject to reporting bias: residents of tony Gramercy, for instance, may be quicker to complain to 311 than those in the neighboring (and more transient) Lower East Side, which may explain some of the difference captured in the DoITT's reports. Indeed, neighborhoods that rank the highest in complaints may even try to claim superior citizenly virtue, for being so quick to notify the city of their misbehaving brethren. This isn't the last word in the Great Manhattan Inter-Neighborhood Piss-off. But until then, let's let the numbers tell their own story.

Things better than we think on Wall Street?

Here's a photo of a locked box for members at the New York Sports Club on Wall Street across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. As the photo below sent by a tipster shows, the occupant of this particular box couldn't be bothered with collecting the pennies that were left behind.

Was not Was

Gawker has this shot taken along Avenue A by a tipster:



As Ryan Tate notes at Gawker: "[G]iven that the WaMu's failure was the largest in U.S. history , the branch's signage could hardly have malfunctioned in a more appropriate fashion."

Farewell to the Emerald Inn

This just makes me sick. The Emerald Inn on Columbus Avenue (near 69th Street) will be closing next spring. Rent for the bar, which opened in 1943, "is more than doubling" to $350,000 a year "for the cozy, 800-square-foot saloon."

And get this: Owner Charlie Campbell, whose grandfather opening the place when FDR was in office, "got the bad news when he saw the location advertised for lease on the Web site of real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis."

Here's some of the report from the Post:

The cozy inn, with a few booths and faded pictures on the walls, was once well known as a "beer and a shot" joint.

In the mid-1980s, Columbus Avenue was a rough stretch of blue-collar taverns, bodegas and hardware stores, with few of today's high-end boutiques and beaneries.

But the Upper West Side's whirlwind gentrification changed everything, and the Emerald Inn today draws mostly upscale customers.

Among them yesterday was Michael Morfit, 46, a partner in Lighthouse Financial, who said he comes in twice a week.

"We used to have all these ma-and-pa shops," Morfit lamented over a couple of Buds. "Now all you have is big companies like Circuit City and Best Buy, because smaller companies can't afford the rents."

Well, I'll spare you from yammering away about how much I like the Emerald Inn. It's expected to close in May. Go and enjoy while you can... and stop by the P&G while you're at it.

Four more years of Bloomberg?

Looks that way. (New York Post)

RIP Margot Gayle

Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100. (New York Times)

[Photo: Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times]

The 10-year-anniversary celebration of when Drew Carey met Joey Ramone

From season four of The Drew Carey Show, which aired Sept. 30, 1998.

Noted

Before today's epic 777-point meltdown, Reuters had a piece on how the economic crunch may have an impact on downtown living:

The state labor department expects Wall Street to lose 40,000 jobs, perhaps permanently, which means the city's service industry could lose another 80,000 workers, in fields ranging from retail shops to law firms.

Lower Manhattan's future could rest on residential development, which has seen its population double to about 57,000 since 2001, as a older, obsolete office buildings were converted into trendy apartments for Wall Street whiz kids, said Mitchell Moss, professor of Urban Policy and Planning and director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University.

"That's going to turn out to be one of the great ironies that the residential development is going to create the demand for office space," Moss said, "because people enjoy working near where they live."

But financial sector job losses could drive down prices for apartments 20 percent to 25 percent, more than the rest of the city, said Bill Staniford, chief executive of real estate data web site PropertyShark.com.

"The buildings that have gone after this young hot Wall Street crowd will be the most vulnerable," said Pamela Liebman, chief executive at The Corcoran Group, which specializes in luxury homes in the metropolitan area.

"Finance is one of the more dominant buyer profiles that you'll see, so obviously it's a concern," said Angela Ferrara, a vice president of sales for The Marketing Directors, sales agent for The Setai, a luxury building at 40 Broad Street.

The week after Lehman Brothers failed, brokerage Cooper & Cooper received several calls from clients who needed to break their lease or could not take a new apartment, according to the brokerage's Vice President Jed Cohen.

More input on what NYC buildings should be demolished

Yesterday, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote a piece suggesting some dreadful buildings that should be torn down in NYC. This afternoon, City Room put the question out to its readers: Which New York building would you demolish?

So far, there has been a tasteless suggestion of the World Trade Center...all of Third Avenue in Manhattan...and the "astonishingly ugly Blue building on the Lower East Side. Who in their sane minds could have put up something as hideous as that."


[Photo by everystreetinmanhattan via Flickr]