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September 23, 2008
Masters of None. That old canard about being money not being worth the paper its printed on? Well, if three is a trend story, but your sample set maxes out at five, arguing that investment banks turned out to not be worth the buildings they are housed seems like a viable argument, even if that only turns out to be true of two of them.
Remember investment banks? Batting about the acronym IB to malign any boorish nonintellectual who was destroying wide swaths of Manhattan culture, with his evening at Scores followed by bottle service at Lotus and the unthinking embrace of ostensibly marquee quality architecture at positively obscene rates? That was so last week.
Really, let that sink in. FIRE, the term that has haunted New York and any other 'intellectual capital' center that has watched the traditional mix of light manufacturing, civil service and the arts get squeezed by an untenable (I think I get to use that term unreservedly now; if not, let me introduce you to a $700 billion bailout -- which would pay for a shitload of theater companies and have a higher ROI on a job created/retained basis) market model, just lost one of its legs. Granted, the catch all 'Finance' embodied for better and worse by Jamie Dimon, who will cast a longer shadow over the next ten years of Manhattan more than any financier since his progenitor, Morgan, is still a heavy footprint, but rest easy, no one will ever tell you with a straight face that they are an 'Investment Banker' ever again. But if they do, be sure to have a good laugh.
In six months, a century of high finance, the center of a charlatan driven-engine of 'compound interest' spun out from 1929 to now as the absolute unstoppable force of western civilization, vanished. Really, allowing that Jimmy Cayne's dope & bridge habit caused Bear Stearns to implode early, saying that investment banking died in seven days is a scenario the most exercised undergraduate Marxist sociology fantasy couldn't have dreamed up, no matter how many Clash albums you own.
But this is an architecture blog, you say? Well, you say. I try to write about the culture of the city, and since the days of Milken, it's hard to argue that any other culture mattered. Sure, those idiots who went to the kickball prom think they are the zeitgeist, but that is just part of a rapidly unwinding real estate scam, the rickety basis of which they are about to learn most painfully.
How will this abrupt change refashion the culture of the city? Well, aside from the glib, but still hoped for elimination of the term 'bottle service', the nasty effects will of course be felt some rungs further down.
Early signs are not good. Today it was reported that Starrett City bids will take a massive haircut. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but it will likely erode the almost infinitesimal gains in affordable housing, since little headway was made on 421 revisions and the Bloomberg administration has mostly paid lip service to developing new mechanisms to mandate affordability, we will see over-leveraged efforts on the part of organizations like the Toll Brothers simply whither. And once the likes of those people skip, there will be no modern day Sam LeFrak to take up the mantle.
The contagion may well move up and down the ladder. Debt servicing on Stuy Town blows up in about two years. Lacking a pliant Fannie Mae to bail out Tishman, who can say what happens when the largest rental complex in Manhattan becomes insolvent? In both cases, regulated tenants will have a modicum of protection, and are used to living under the tutelage of maliciously benign landlords, but what of the growing ranks of market-rate tenants who think that, you know, garbage should be picked up? Our knight in Shining Silver take another inch or two about the knees he already cut them off at, smiling and telling you he is all about constituent services, too late for you to realize his notion of constituency ends at about where his shoes go. And that is important information when the likes of Tishman start showing up in Albany hat in hand, demanding additional 'reforms' to rent stabilization.
Signature buildings only now just sprouting downtown, looking to remake the skyline of New York as more residential than commercial, will likely proceed apace. Sales may make completion a bit tricky. The Euro is losing ground -- provided condos are willing to embrace all manner of sketchy Russians, it may be the hordes of ostensible discount shoppers from Europe drying up might not adversely effect things too much.
This is all just dithering about real estate. The vibrancy of this town should not depend on eyeing one's burgeoning property investments, if only because this has proved to be futile just about everywhere else on earth at this point (though one should not discount the boundless egocentric focus of a New Yorker). What the past ten years have stripped is a thorough-going discussion of what it means to have land management. Now that value are plummeting to earth and far removed suburbs are reproducing the worst vestiges of urban decay (without the density that city services provide to offset the challenges), these questions are being tentatively raised. Here, the forever spiral upward squeezed out rational conversation about mixed use, about historical pricing patterns, about just about anything except the worst pimping of a Curbed comment thread.
So here we are, gazing at the interesting but intellectually bankrupt offerings of Herzog & de Meuron and Koolhaas, edifices that may prove compelling over time, but being touted on the verge of the nationalization of everything that made them possible, ring more than a little hollow.
On the commercial side, the outlook isn't directly fatal, but leaking into territory where the conventional numbers don't apply, since we are drowning in highly-leveraged debt. Lehmans's commercial portfolio is positively absurd, as are some of the notable apartment complex deals in the Barron's article (linked above), eye popping numbers such as writing $350 million in debt on a complex with $17 million in revenue (almost all rent-regulated) -- this after the purchasers refinanced, cashing out almost the entirety of the purchase price.
As the Treasury gears up its printing press, driving our already absurd daily cost of living expenses higher, expect little relief in any way you can measure. The effects should start to become evident in a couple months. Charitable giving, already on the decline, will eviscerate arts organizations (how much was that new New Museum building next door?). Projects underway will slow and construction costs will abate. This will help in areas, such as the WTC, but the concomitant job loss (going all the way up the ladder) and shrinking tax base will offset any benefit. Though in place financing means many of the projects going up will finish, as things start to go sideways here and there, ripples such as construction firms going under and banks that finally start looking at their balance sheet mean the prospect of unfinished hulks in Williamsburg isn't beyond the pale.
Sure doesn't look any different outside. Yet. Nameplates haven't been pulled down, and everyone is warily eyeing the market. The last days of the emperor are writ perfect. Denying the foolhardy greedy and myopic decision making of the last eight years means that doubling, trebling and more down is the only solution they can imagine. Stare at those numbers really hard and pretend. Change? We have no choice; no one has realized it yet.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
September 11, 2008
One would hope this would be the last of 'these'; one would be a fool. Writing a post about the World Trade Center is appallingly easy, a gross natural resource of failure, seemingly malicious incompetence, an almost perverse effort by all those involved to identify perhaps the best -- should we even admit just qualifiers -- possible path, so that when they upend it and crawl inexorably down its inverse, we can be certain they are doing the worst possible job.
As a writer, it's handy. It even provides an uncomfortably glee, the opportunity to conjure your most withering ire -- the bon mot realized too late at a cocktail party, that particularly egregious episode of getting dumped, the quarter-long festering of hatred for a thesis advisor who had you by the short hairs and was making you write them a tenure recommendation -- gather all that anger up and just start slapping one of any number of public figure names to whatever comes to mind:
Want remind everyone that Pataki was at best only a coat carrier? People applaud! Silverstein a heartless sot who wants to clamber over the graves of 2,000 people to prop up a futile edifice of immortality? Spot on, friend. Kevin Rampe a duplicitous macher concerned most with his next paycheck? Fine! Any one of them bordering on criminal? Likely true! I can't even imagine what we would call that guy who actually designed the memorial. What was his name again?
So, yeah, there's a regressive level of poisonous irony in the fact that writing angry screed about the abysmal pace of progress at the WTC site is in an of itself an act that wallows in the same filthy pile of almost unwatchable failings of humanism. Perhaps Dr. Phil could have a big Pop Psychology-In and figure out just when everyone involved has hit rock bottom (given the state of construction, it looks like we are a ways off). The sage advice would be to know leave your wallet unattended while they are around, but it's too late for that: they don't need your permission to take a dip now and again. And again, and again.
Marching right along with this bounty of ineptitude and wellspring of deadlines hastily assembled and just as quickly dismantled is an impressive body of treacly recollection. Maybe there is a fear that once the last bolt has been screwed into place such writing will be looked on as unseemly, and in a town where no one's suffering is as acute or important as that split all over the back pages of the Sunday Times Magazine that would be viewed as a tragedy to which everyone could truly relate. After all, think of all those poor Dalton students just itching to put their 9/11 experience into a college application essay. Who will think of those children?
As I write this, the Tribute in Light is still aglow. The only response that evinced the least bit of elegance, now they stand like uncomfortable guests. What they say is still simple and direct, and their specificity to place admits any range of emotion. The worst is being reminded that from where they spring is a hollow that seems to regress in painful small steps. This is perhaps the finest example of what a memorial does, reminding that tragedy is not a neatly comestible nugget, and our continued complicity in belaboring the failure of imagination and wherewithal that marks every project there also besmirches even the most strident critique. Silence is the terminus, and still deafeningly inadequate.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
September 7, 2008
VOTE: Primary Day, Tuesday, September 9
"Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution... in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element." -- Rosa Luxemborg
We're all friends here, right? And by friends, I mean Democrats. Okay, I know there's some outliers. Someone has to shop at Pink. In fact, I wish y'all (and by y'all, I mean Republicans of any stripe) had your act together a little better, so someone could could provide a spirited challenge to the twisted, self-serving and incompetent beast that is the entirely of the New York State Democratic machine: hacks, politicians activists; loud-mouths and back room operatives.
Then I wouldn't have feel that the most appropriate quote for this coming election (TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9) speaks directly to the perverse condition that most of us, and by us, I mean Democrats, take for granted, often shockingly with pride: the majority of our local contests are only that at the primary level. I know this is true in regions and states that have sharply polarized electorates, but if every other state jumped of a bridge...
We like to be preening, over-weening elitists who tell everyone else what is good for them. We stand apart from the rest of the country on significant issues such as gun control, taxation, arts funding and housing support (though this is hard to tell, even up close), so why we should gleefully accept the turd-like central committee angling that is primary election season is beyond me.
This is a long-winded (is there any other kind around here?) endorsement for PAUL NEWELL (D-64) and DANIEL SQUADRON (D-25). And it must be shrill and antagonistic, because if 7,000 people in lower Manhattan can't be roused enough to show Sheldon Silver the curb, we will suffer at least another two years of back room dealings and obscene gestures of an aristocratic bureaucracy. And that number is a pretty high bar, as primaries go. 4,000 votes can get you the nod as a Democrat.
I'm not going to catalog all the reasons why supporting Newell (and Squadron) makes sense as a matter of policies evinced. Aside from the fact that any interested observer should have plenty of evidenced pro or con, it's also a little late to be debating on merits. If you go to Silver's page, or read the interviews, or consume the selective histories presented by his supporters, he will come off as a more than decent Dem. Too much nuance is required to refute this in a couple hundred words. But trust me, the differences are real, and worth passing over Silver.
There are two good, simple reasons to think about voting, if you haven't, and to rethink your support of Silver and Connor (Squadron's opponent in NY-25) if you have:
ONE: "He's an asshole, but he's our asshole" is a non-starter. This is the sort of argument you hear for any incumbent, or a representative who is nominally aligned with 'outsider' status as pertains to an institution. When you trace the family tree of, say, George Bush, you will come to see a scrappy Jew from the Lower East Side as a perennial David to the white shoe Goliaths of New Haven and beyond. But this is New York, we have plenty of Jews (evidenced by, you know, his opponent), and Silver is the establishment, in the worst possible way. This is the sort of Stockholm Syndrome thinking that pervades unions and other assorted liberal collectives. The point being, it isn't the cult of the personality that makes them strong, it isn't our asshole. It is the collective, and this sort of defeatist 'if not him, then who?' thinking that corrodes oppositional political organizing.
Digging down into his record proves this out. Sure, he stopped the West Side stadium, but you know, that's not his district. What he did least for his district is allow the ongoing evisceration of the Rent Stabilization Guidelines as a sap to Uncle Joe Bruno, as part of their two headed hydra control of the statehouse for the past fifteen years. The preeminent issue in his district and he's been nowhere since the word go, proving again and again that protection of his position comes at the expense of his constituents. Now that Bruno looks like he may finally take that well deserved perp walk, it brings us to reason number two.
TWO: Throw the bums out. A couple years back the Times (both Newell and Squadron have received Times endorsements) took the extraordinary step of endorsing every non-incumbent in the Senate and Assembly elections. So sad is the state of challenges, this means many seats went without one, since the incumbent lock is so strong that many seats run uncontested. Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, not seeing the value of of a challenge means you can't see the essence of a robust, sharp-elbows democracy. If you can't defeat a fool, then perhaps you shouldn't be given a free pass, as most of our assembly members get every two years.
The rhetoric of campaigning has never been a grand as the Athenian model we think of when venerating days of yore. And it never was that fair. So it makes sense that Bruno, Silver and whomever was pandering to them in the Governor's mansion never worked so hard as when they did to prevent change and reform. Thinking that control of the Senate will improve thinks for residents, particularly those of the 64th District is absurd. We will see an even more opaque version of stasis to which we are subjected yearly. There is no confidence that control will bring reform. The best way to do that is to turn the cookie jar upside down.
There are roughly 127,000 residents in NY-64. About 60,000 are registered. 20% of that number are likely to vote this Tuesday. People like to grouse their votes mean little, particularly when they are Democrats in the safest Dem state in history. So here is your chance: this is likely the most powerful, and valuable, contribution you can make to public service. Need your polling location? Find it here.