More on the middle class squeeze

This one blog post collected all the links about the topic and summed up the problem nicely:

watch, read or listen to coverage of the NYC middle class squeeze

Of particular interest was this article from the appropriately-titled NY Observer:

The Crisis of the Upper-Middle Class: Big Pay Is Piddling in New York

Oh no! Where will they go?

“They could live in Astoria! Astoria is wonderful, and underappreciated,” former New York Governor Mario Cuomo told The Observer.

Mario pushing for gentrification of his former borough. Maybe he's a friend of Pistilli.

The Crapper's sitting here in my neighborhood that no Manhattanite wants to live in because of the lack of decent public transportation and waiting for the entire city economy to collapse at Bloomberg's feet. This guy's predicting it too:

...I am a late-40’s lifetime New Yorker, who moved into Manhattan in early 1980 (you do the math) and “walked” to Studio 54 the first night I moved in (55th & First). I have been crisscrossing Manhattan, the boroughs and the suburbs since then. I have been very successful at sales over the years, so I am not a member of the angry “have-not” club. My point is that the overdevelopment of this city is astonishing. I truly believe that the “very high-end,” “upscale clientele” that are scooping up these luxury condos like heavily discounted wedding dresses will one day abandon this city and its rows of luxury housing.

It’s all fun in the beginning, but when the city is full of luxury housing and little else, where will they dine out, shop for enticing doodads and generally amuse themselves? In my neighborhood (Sutton Place) alone, we have lost all of the restaurants on First Avenue to developers of these stackable palaces of the rich and their excesses. Each new building serves to remove a chunk of the neighborhood for those that do not live there. It’s like walking a full city block without any access to what you are walking by. Kind of like “forced window-shopping.”

The best part of N.Y.C. has always been that we do juxtaposition better than anyone else in the world! This all strikes me as shortsightedness of a magnitude never before seen. Everyone thinks that the building of all of these buildings will keep N.Y.C. fully populated, but at what cost?

Lloyd N. Greenspan
Manhattan

Above letter from the NY Observer