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Liberal media. Duh.
Weirdly I know a fair amount about rent control. Talked about a fair amount in various economics courses.
Andy - Can you answer my "slums in Manhattan" question? I assumed there were none, but the one (NY I think) poster referenced slums and Manhattan in the same post earlier. Sure I could try to look it up, but terms like slum are goofy and subjective and I trust your take on it.
Because the Obama campaign prefers to focus on the "Romney is a right wing deathbeast who wants to take away your Social Security/Medicare" narrative, believing that will help them more than the "Romney is a flip flopper" narrative.
That said, plenty of ink has been spilled about Romney's flip floppery.
From an economics stand the overriding interest is Economic Efficiency - avoiding the dead weight loss (inefficiency) caused long term by rent controls. Of course I am not convinced the ultimate goal of society is to have as efficient an economy as possible. I acknowledge everything else held equal efficiency is great to have though.
EDIT: I fully endorse 1905 (and suspect he reads some of the same blogs I do - if I had a better memory I would know for sure).
No, that's not true. The overriding interest is that of society. The reason why I would want only very limited rent control is that rents get to high. SF right now actually has the highest rent in the country due to the app developing boom (higher than Manhattan--$3,500 on average for a single family home). I think that there should be fewer restrictions on building before you really mess with Rent Control too much, but eventually you have to unwind it. The big problem is the building restrictions though. Both artificially reduce the supply of housing, but one has a bigger impact.
Rent control helps you keep your place, but it means you're a prisoner. Lower rents in general by increased supply is more beneficial to society and the individual.
Better put than my post, though I did get there first :)
Some of it is the decision by the Obama campaign not to emphasize it. Attacking Romney on flip-flops runs the risk of allowing him to sound more moderate (not really doing all those bad things we keep hearing about - he is just a policy wonk and was trying to placate the GOP base).
Part of the problem is that the limited debate format doesn't allow enough time to delineate the chronology of all those flip-flops and Etch-a-Sketches. It's easy to post a chart comparing Massachusetts Mitt to Primary Mitt to Newly Minted Moderate Mitt and see the ongoing pandering and position shifting. It's also easy to do this is a TV ad or a web video. But when you're up there in real time and have only a minute or two to speak, you have to be able to demonstrate those flip-flops in a sound bite way that will be remembered by non-policy wonks at the office or workplace the next morning. That's not exactly the easiest thing in the world.
With rent control the interests of a few renters ends up trumping all other interests and it does so for very little gain to the community and city. With rent control renting becomes a right and it never should be a right. If you sign a lease and one side of the agreement is allowed to leave at the end of the agreement so should the other side and yet with rent control that does not happen. If a renter wants to stay they get to stay until they either die or can longer make the payments and in both cases it still isn't so easy to get them out or get rid of the rent control. Furthermore rent control gives the renter a false value simply because they are a renter. An owner of a piece of land shouldn't have to pay a renter any sum of money to vacate the property.*
*If you sign a 1 year lease and they want you out before that contract is up I have no issue with money changing hands but I do have an issue with a renter allowed to renew their lease in perpetuity.
A freer market leads to development and revitalizing of dying neighborhoods. Rent control stifles that.
Agreed with all of this. I think the 20-year CAGR is something like 3%. My ancillary point was only that a 20% vacancy increase can give landlords the opportunity to catch-up to some extent with respect to apartments with significant turnover. My building is in Gramcery/Flatiron. The apartments with longer-tenured tenants are well below market value as would be expected. However, there are several apartments that have turned over almost annually for a number of years (Baruch students, young professionals changing jobs, etc.) Some of these have moved much closer to market value (and I know a couple that probably pay full market). Of course, even then a tenant would still receive the benefit of cappped future increases.
That's way beyond the realm of my first hand information, and given the extreme gentrification on the upper East Side (above 96th) and all points North, I'd say you'd almost have to do a full month's walking tour, complete with camera and tape recorder, both daytime and nighttime, to get even the beginnings of a real answer.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "slums," but there are some very depressed neighborhoods in Manhattan, including on the lower east side and up above 96th street, into the Harlem area. Not every neighborhood looks like Tudor City.
Although improvements are being made everywhere constantly, including in Harlem.
The entire problem with this sort of argument is that it is framed with a particular assumption: that 100% of your salary is supposed to be fair payment for your services rendered and then the government steps in and takes X% away. The reality is that your salary is set (or, if you are self-employed, the price you can charge for your services is set) with the understanding that a healthy portion will be dedicated to sustaining the conditions that allow you to earn that salary.
People who work in NYC make more money, generally speaking, than people who perform the same job in Broomfield, Colorado, because there is an understanding that living in/near and working in NYC is significantly more expensive. A city as large and densely populated as NYC demands a tremendous amount of resources in order to function, but those resources drive what makes the city such a profitable place to work. When I transferred from Massachusetts to NYC, I got about a 10% cost-of-living adjustment.
If you could somehow earn your same income in New Hampshire, rather than NYC, you would save much more money than 4% per thousand dollars over $250K. Of course, it would be very difficult to maintain your income in New Hampshire, and you wouldn't have access to all of the advantages that come with living here.
To what extent has the lower east side been gentrified since the early 90's? I know that most all of the old Bowery flop houses and Thunderbird bars are long gone, but how far does it extend beyond that?
Hang on, I have to look up the word 'gentrified'...
...Oh, renovated.
Well, there's been a lot of gentrification going on in the LES over the past couple of decades, obviously. But you still have a lot of low income areas and apartment buildings there, and projects, etc. It basically goes in sections, but each street is different. Tons of dive bars and the like, with mostly young white trash hanging out in them. Many of the areas there are still very depressed.
Rent-controlled apartments are very tough to get, but rent-stabilized apartments are out there if you look for them. I found a rent-stabilized apartment in Bayside on Craigslist a few years ago.
My current apartment is a subsidized co-op and maintenance scales with income. I had to wait 18 years on a list to get in.
You'll note that the complaints about tone and rudeness avoid the question of truth and falsity altogether.
Turkey/Syria continues to escalate.
Don't sell yourself short -- it's entirely PC of you.
I live in Manhattan, and I can't think of any place I'd call a slum in the borough. There's public housing ("the projects"), but even those places are reasonably well-maintained and generally safe to walk around in.
Yeah, about 5 years ago or so I was dating somebody who lived in the LES and it was a dicey neighborhood. Not sure I'd go so far as to call it a slum, but it was way shadier than most of Manhattan. There were people buying/selling drugs almost every block, and fights/loud altercations were common at night.
Can't say I've spent much time there since though.
I laughed.
The LES bars are mostly populated by wealthy students and bridge and tunnel folks at this point, not people who live in the neighborhood. There are some dive bars in the East Village still (Double Down runs the nastiest porn you'll ever see, on a constant loop, and that does a good job keeping the undesirables out), but once you cross Houston to the LES, for the most part, it's pretty posh. There are some of faux-divey bars in the LES, but that's just to market edgy to the straight crowd.
Did anyone watch the Limelight documentary?
Yeah, I don't know what qualifies as a "slum," which is why I've tried to stay away from that term and just describe the areas as I see them.
I feel safe in Harlem at night, when I've gone there. And I've been there not infrequently. I don't feel quite as safe on the LES.
FU Saudi Arabia, seriously STFU. You get to censor your own populace but not everyone else's.
I thought he mentioned Kerry by name but I was wrong
My American history teacher in high school told us, one day in class, that he considered the class of "white trash" white people to be the equivalent of the class of "n-word" black people. (Of course, he didn't say "n-word", he said the actual word.)
He said there are black people and white people, and then there are n-words and white trash.
In school, during class. I don't remember it being part of any lecture or topic, just something that he brought up one day.
Based on this and the replies of others, it only reinforces my thought that the only way to answer the original question about Manhattan slums would be to take an extensive walking tour of great swaths of the island above 96th and on the lower east side.
--------------------------------------------------
My American history teacher in high school told us, one day in class, that he considered the class of "white trash" white people to be the equivalent of the class of "n-word" black people. (Of course, he didn't say "n-word", he said the actual word.)
He said there are black people and white people, and then there are n-words and white trash.
In school, during class. I don't remember it being part of any lecture or topic, just something that he brought up one day.
BITD Willard Mullin was best known for his Brooklyn Bum caricature, but until the Orioles came along he had an almost equally famous representation of the St. Louis Browns as a moonshining Ozarks hillbilly with a two foot long beard, a whiskey jug in his hand, and a label of "Po' white trash". If anyone ever complained, it never came to my attention.
I should also note that while Mullin never engaged in "darky" stereotype cartoon figures, more than a few other Sporting News cartoonists often did, complete with dialect. It was an era where pretty much every comic stereotype was fully expressed with little hesitancy or reservation.
There is something weird going on on 40th street between Broadway and 8th. Every time I walk there, day or night, I see people just hanging out either holding or talking on their cell phones - clearly waiting for someone or some thing. I'm not sure what it's all about, but drug dealing was one thing that ran through my mind. Perhaps you and Good Face can investigate, Crockett and Tubbs style. Whoever decides to be Crockett will have to get a light blue suit jacket and white pants.
The LES is harder to place. There is a lot of hipsterish life there, and I have the sense that it became so trendy that the epicentre of coolness spilled across the bridge into Williamsburg and remains there. It's a mix of old and new. There are still anchors of the old Jewish community there (Streit's matzoh factory is still on Rivington Street), but fewer and fewer, and not many Jews live there. Chinatown is larger than I remember it from 25/30 years ago, and that development has made the LES safer and more affluent. The Bowery, which was appalling 30 years ago, is remarkable: there's been a Whole Foods at Houston and the Bowery for a while now. What on Earth? I have walked all over that part of the city, and out to Corlears Hook (where there are so many projects) in recent years, and never felt unsafe, though again where there's a lot of public housing it's never very wealthy.
I know that since then it's been replaced by a high priced high rise, but what I'd be curious about is the spinoff effect on Morningside Park. That was considered safe for kids BITD but by the 60's it was considered a no man's land. Any idea of whether that's still true today? (I doubt it, but then that's just conjecture on my part.)
Besides the New York Times? :-)
[1937]
Canal Street is more focused on retail junk than Broadway in the 20s and 30s.
It's vastly better than it was even 5 years ago. I grew up and still live in Carnegie Hill, and the transformation north of 96th street, particularly on Lex, is astonishing. When I was in middle school, my school used to bus us from the school to Randall's Island in the warm seasons to have PE outdoors. We used to play "Find the White Guy" once the bus passed 96th Street going up 3rd. You won if you saw a white guy on the street. No one won.
That's gone now, obviously, but its still not a place you can reasonably live. I go to east harlem all the time for food now, since there's a mess of great restaurants that have opened up there to take advantage of the cheap rent, but I wouldn't LIVE there. Some guys I know from college had the great idea (at the time, I really did think it was a great idea) of splitting rent for a gorgeous, newly renovated brownstone on near the 125th street station, off Lex. Within a year all 4 of them had been mugged, some more than once. Its (paradoxically?) much safer if you're not white, since the crime is petty muggings and such and being white makes you a target. Similarly, when i was at Columbia, the folks stuck living in the student slums up by 125th, on Tiemann or near the Crips-controlled projects on Amsterdam, nothing BAD happened, but muggings, broken into cars, etc was routine (I used to park there ~5 nights a month when I was going out drinking after class, and in 3 years my car was trashed twice).
If paying enough rent to live in a neighborhood where I don't need to worry about being mugged when I come home at 2AM is a luxury, then I dont want to know what a necessity is.
Morningside Park is still legitimately dangerous if you're a woman, and particularly so at night. It is generally safe in the day for men. The block you're referring to is fine, though I tell my fiance to walk on the south side of the street if its dark out.
There's absolutely no reason for tax policy to give breaks to people who really like nice cars and can't imagine living without a really nice car. The same applies to really nice Manhattan apartments.
Fights were only common at night, and certainly not every corner. Keep in mind I was mostly there on weekends; prime drinking nights. Dealers were pretty common though. Like I said, it wasn't a slum, but it was pretty downscale by Manhattan standards. Also, I'm appalled to realize that it was probably 2005 when I was dating that particular person. Crap, getting old.
Way ahead of you chief!
* Yes, personal experience**. Lived in a 4-plex with a whore, a drug dealer, and guy living off of disability in the other three apartments. Only one gun shot fired (that I heard) in the the years I lived there and I am not sure if it was caused by the whore or the drug dealer (and even so might have been personal and not business - not sure).
** And no I was never a drug dealer, despite my appearance in my high school pictures. Never used, never sold.
I haven't walked that block in many years now, sorry Andy. But maybe it gives me an incidental destination when I go next (I want to see some frame houses uptown, one of my minor obsessions; there's one at 100th & Broadway, and several over in East Harlem, so maybe I can walk across town north of Central Park.)
I'm reminded of Grant's Tomb not far from there, though, where I walked recently. That used to be somewhere you just didn't want to go; like so many Manhattan parks, Riverside Park around there was pretty awful. Now it's clean and bright and looks like any other national-monument-like attraction. These transformations are amazing and welcome.
EDIT: East Harlem in broad daylight as my 50-something male self, as 'zop recommends :)
To (slightly) back off a little from Good Face, the difference between 2005 and 2010 on the LES has not been inconsequential. It was really the "drug deals on every corner" that I think is a massive oversell, and even a commonality of public fights is just not what I ever experienced in that time frame.
And as far as real slums go, the Tenderloin (San Francisco) in the early-mid 90s was the only place that in the middle of the day I've ever felt truly unsafe. And I had moved there from the northeastern corner of South Central Los Angeles.
Word. Driving in Chicago and I missed my exit one time on the south side, so I decided to just follow the highway and get on at the next exit. Half a block later I turned around and got the heck out of dodge. Looked like post shelling Beirut or the set of a post apocalyptic movie. I admit I never lived in a slum like that and thankfully never will.
Meatpacking district is where to go if you want public fights nowadays. Of course, they'll probably be between women, but you take what you can get.
I walked around Detroit in those years, too. And my father lived near (and died in) Camden, New Jersey: I would put Camden up against any slum experience anybody's ever had in far more famous cities.
I've spent much of the past four years working in India. The idea that there are windows, let alone bars over them, or bodegas, fast food, or gas stations in an area makes me think that these Chicago 'slums' are rather middle class compared to what I see on the outskirts of Mumbai.
Similarly, some of the rural towns along the train line in Siberia were quite sobering.
Coke of sorts to dlf.
I had a similar experience in Baltimore. I had just moved to town and got lost trying to get to the medical campus. I parked where I thought was part of campus and tried to walk to where I needed to be. I kept telling myself it wasn't that bad - country boy scared of the city and all that. When I told people where I'd parked and walked they thought I was both crazy and lucky. I may have been crazy but I saw a lot of folks who may well have been "bad" guys. But, geez, it isn't like they just strafe anyone walking around. No one bothered me. ANd it was a very, very high crime area.
Ditto. Bangkok and San Jose (Costa Rica edition) were ever so much worse, though they did not have the same post-apocalyptic vibe that Hammond Indiana (And East Chicago & Gary) had (has?) in its "Glory" days.
I was a grad student there at exactly those times (1975-1980). No, I never walked across Washington Park, but I did fairly routinely take the #55 bus across that park to the El station (not the Dan Ryan El, the closer one, whatever it was called, that became the State Street subway). I would also take the #1 bus that went from the northwest corner of Hyde Park to the loop on a local route through various parts of the South Side, including some projects. No one ever messed with me. And yes, there were some pretty depressing-looking neighborhoods, although I figure that housing that backed right up to the El itself was the worst available even in those neighborhoods, because of the noise.
Anyway, Romney is up slightly from yesterday, to +1.0 at RCP. I doubt last night will move the needle at all.
The first concert I ever went to was KISS in 1976 at the Chicago Stadium. I was 13, and went with my best friend, who was also 13. Our parents drove us, dropped us off, and said we'll meet you at this corner around 11:00, and went off to dinner or something. Today, I live in a very safe small town, and I have parents who are horrified that I leave my 13 and 10 year old kids home alone when my wife and I go out.
Different times man, different times.
The only way it was really going to swing the needle would be if Ryan said "If the old people would just die off sooner, we'd save so much more money in Medicare and Social Security." or if Biden said "If everyone was just honest with themselves, they'd know that socialism is the best way to go."
Ryan had some additional risk due to being a lot more unfamiliar to voters than Biden.
In any event, today's news cycle puts to rest any claims that Biden won the debate. I'm seeing a lot of headlines re: the White House's attempts to "clarify" Biden's claims that the administration didn't know the consulate in Libya repeatedly requested more security. Biden really stepped in it with that claim.
I haven't been following but Nate still has Obama comfortably ahead, though Obama is "only" 66% to win now.
Do other polling outfits have Romney ahead? I thought I saw Joe saying that earlier but I wasn't really paying attention to the polling discussion.
Funny thing is that the housing backing up on the El is about all that's occupied in the eastern section of the Washington Park neighborhood (west of the park itself). The neighborhood is better than it was back then, not because there is anything there but because they've torn down most of the abandoned buildings and it's just a lot of empty lots. The park itself has improved a lot, at least in part because it's used on the weekends by two big Midwestern cricket leagues. Nothing perks up a park like 30 Indian dudes from Milwaukee in their cricket whites. I'd never walk in it at night, however.
So you said it 10 times and yet keep talking about the enthusiasm gap in Ohio despite the Ohio data using the exact same material you are now dismissing. Why is that? Well, we know why. Because for some reason you think the Ohio data is not good for Obama while the data I just quoted is good for Obama. Go figure.
this (a motherjones article) is the best summary I've seen.
Yeah, Camden is (was?) a horror show. On a cross-country trip with a couple of friends in the 1980s, one of them was extremely excited about going to see the Walt Whitman House in Camden. So we drove there, and... well, we high tailed it out of there. It did not seem like a place I wanted to park a car with a large portion of my worldly possessions in it.
I made a one-off comment about Ohio that you've turned into a 10-day obsession. The daily Ohio updates are boring enough; I'm not interested in expanding the field to five more states.
***
Here's a link to the latest tracking polls. Romney is ahead or tied in all of the post-debate polls.
***
If Obama has lost Mother Jones, ...
In April, I went with my son on his class trip to Philly. The first day we took the SEPTA to Camden and then walked about 6 blocks to the Aquarium. Had dinner at a pizza joint, walked back to SEPTA, then took a city bus to the hotel. It was fine. The worst part of the day was taking the trolley from the airport into downtown. Now there was some plight.
The Amtrak route from DC to NY goes through some fine neighborhoods, but the ones in Baltimore look just awful Boarded up where they are not burned out.
You've defended you stance about the supposed "enthusiasm" gap in Ohio numerous times.
Numbers against Obama=Good and legit
Numbers for Obama=False, meaningless, and should be ignored.
The RCP average has Romney up by 1.0
Yes I think its pretty clear that Raddatz win the debate
Well, it was even worse in Philly around I-95 and Vet Stadium where they had whole neighborhoods in the projects boarded and falling down. I believe they've finally knocked them all down but in the late 90's early 2000's there was a ton places in Philly one did not want to go to.
East St. Louis, IL says hello; as far as I can tell the whole town is a slum. Approaching St. Louis from the east on I-64 you get to drive through several miles of blight, squalor and general decay. The entire city would be improved by a good fire.
One of these things is not like the others...
If you're forced to spend the entire day after a debate on the defensive over the deaths of Americans, you lost the debate. Glad I could clear that up for you.
Mid 90s Philly had some pretty impressive slums by American standards. What always struck me was how neighborhoods could go from "good" to "bad" on a street by street basis. Never seen a city that could transition so fast from "well kept touristy area" to \"####, I probably shouldn't be here".
I had precisely the same vibe in Manhattan in the bad old days.
Chicago was like that too. Still might be. The Rush street party district was only a block or 2 from the infamous Cabrini Green housing project.
An article about a focus group in Seattle had two women saying that Biden's behavior reminded them of abusive men they had just left. Yikes.
The debate was pretty much a draw on substance, but Biden lost big time on style. Still, he did better overall than Obama.
And now we know where you get your 'news'.
Step 1: Lose debate.
Step 2: Have house 'news' organs feverishly spin that you didn't lose because the other guy was mean.
Step 3: Quote 'news cycle' as evidence that you didn't lose the debate.
Classic.
If Biden won on substance, today's news cycle wouldn't be devoted to the Libya debacle.
Since I've lived in Hyde Park there have been more murders between 61st and 63rd Streets than there have been between 47th and 60th. So, yeah, it can still be like that.
This 2011 homicide map gives a good sense of how concentrated the worst parts are.
It amuses me that earlier in the day JoeK's line was that the VP debate wasn't going to move the needle a bit and now it has become that Biden lost the debate.
Uh, you do understand that both of those can be true, right?
In Joe's world? Of course. The debate means nothing line was basically the holding pattern line until you got your marching orders from the party organs.
I'm not surer that Obama is physically/emotionally/psychologically capable of acting like Biden...
But I sure if he tried really hard, it would be either be highly entertaining or severely cringe inducing, with no middle ground...
I also see that the famous GOP party discipline has reasserted itself bigtime, Romney has walked back from quite a few "Primary Romney" positions towards the center, with nary a peep from the nutters...
Anyway, RCP also has the Dems ahead of the Reps for generic congressional vote, so as I said 2 months ago:
My personal best case scenario is also the least likely- Romney with a Dem Congress :-)
such scenario is actually on the table so to speak.
Have there been a bunch of v.p. debates that clearly moved the needle after a clear win by one of the candidates, let alone after a draw or split decision? If so, you should send a correction to Nate Silver, et al.
Translation: A column by a right wing radio host claims two women who "watched the proceedings from a conservative perspective and wouldn’t have voted for Obama-Biden anyway" told him...
My favorite part of the column: "The rap on Paul Ryan has always been that he might prove too wonkish, numbers-driven and detail-oriented to connect with average Americans"
Reminds me of people who think they're clever when they claim to be a perfectionist in response to a "greatest weakness" question at a job interview.
I'm fascinated by this perception, because I've seen it in print many times, but if nothing else, Ryan's plan and his inteviews pretty conclusively establish that he is NOT numbers driven or detail oriented.
Well, I firmly believe that Admiral Stockdale's terrible performance was one of the nails in Ross Perot's coffin, but that's hard to substantiate. And it's only one example, so even if I could prove my thesis (which I can't!) it wouldn't do much.
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