Sunday, December 2, 2007

The wealthy ghetto

Everybody wants New York to thrive, to build to the skies, to nurture the glamorous people who make the city sparkle. But the last thing the city needs is to become an oasis for the rich with no affordable places for teachers or police officers or firefighters or secretaries or nurses or ordinary folks. That is not a real city. It is a wealthy ghetto.

A Place to Call Home: Preserving Middle-Class New Yorkers

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

but that's what NYC will soon be. Welfare and wealthy. Until the wealthy figure out how to get even the welfare out. People will commute from 3 hours away to wash the dishes and then go home.

Anonymous said...

firefighters save homes from burning down and yet they themselves are often unable to buy homes of their own in those self same neighborhoods, or even in some instances to rent there. Something ain't right about that.

verdi said...

We'll always need
and provide places for the poor.

With no welfare slaves
to do menial work....
the average fat cat
won't be able to figure out
how to wipe his own ass !

Anonymous said...

Phase II of the sub-prime debacle
wave hasn't even crested yet.

Wait until it hits our shoreline.

Unless foreign "investors"
(the Dollar is low) are ready to buy up
some of the slow moving real estate.....
there are going to be
a lot of vacancies around town.

This kind of artificially inflated boom
will soon be turning to bust!

It can't last forever.

Anonymous said...

Most of my colleagues my age (mid 20s) say they don't see themselves raising a family here on Long Island or NYC. My girlfriend and I can't wait to leave this overrated and overpriced dump of a city either.

Anonymous said...

To many priests telling all them Irish Catholic cops and old Bible packing f**ks in Washington (like Bush) there going to hell if they dont "Welcome the Stranger"

Anonymous said...

Only the rich and poor can afford to be in NYC and vicinity.

The rich can afford to be liberal but only to keep the poor from storming their gates.

In the interim the middle is supporting both. With "49 percent of households headed by an illegal immigrant are enrolled in one welfare program or another, typically food assistance and Medicaid for their children". The middle pays for that and cannot afford to begin ith as the rich have pushed up the cost of living save for the middle pay. When will this stop?

verdi said...

Eventually
there won't be enough "loyal"
mercenaries around for the rich to employ
to protect their vast holdings.

The key to it has always been......
a poorly paid soldier will put his hands
in his employer's cookie jar....
or he just goes and works for somebody
who pays him more.

The wealthy are always complaining
how hard it is to get decent help nowadays!

Carol said...

Many middle class people are leaving for the South. Other the next 10 years the South will see an exodus of Northerners to their region.

Manhattan - the Rome of the modern world as John Lennon once called it, is slowly homogenizing into an outdoor mall. The city does not have the same allure as it once did.

Retiring baby boomers too are not going to give most of their pension checks to Con Edison - the warmer weather keeps those energy bills down.

Anonymous said...

I don't know "Carol".....
some of the southern regions
are starting to go bust.

Florida has had a drinking water problem
for decades now.
Most Floridians drink bottled water.
(Their hospital/medical care system....
which you need when you're older....
ain't the greatest).

Do you know that it costs, on the average,
of 4 times more to cool a house than to heat it.
(Air conditioning is very expensive).

Las Vegas, up until a year or two ago,
was the fastest growing city in the USA.
Now, I believe, it ranks #2 in the nation
in sub prime mortgage foreclosures !

For the moment....North Carolina
is attracting a lot of folks.....low taxes
and good quality of life.
But what happens when taxes must be raised
to cover the increase in development
and demand for services ?

No living place is perfect.
Ya pays ya money.....then ya lives with ya choice!

Anonymous said...

I was thinking about the Carolinas when I wrote my previous comment.

And you are right - there is quite a bit of development going on down there now which will eventually lead to higher taxes.

As frustrated as we are with the overdevelopment of our great neighborhoods - I can imagine the South is not too happy about all the changes down there either. There are afterall mostly rural farm areas in NCarolina with the exception of the big cities.

We can only sympathize with their plight and respect their concerns.

Anonymous said...

The middle class will get a break when they force the machine to stop pandering to the tweeded and the upper class to share the wealth (walk around Manhattan and see daily leaf blowers on 5th Ave while our streets don't get cleaned for weeks)

But, the public is mostly turned off by politics (just what the policitos want) and the recieved wisdom for the middle class is to move.

What is the solution?

Anonymous said...

I think a good start would be to elect a Democrat as mayor in the next election. Bloomberg is NOT going to do anything for the middle class.