May 9, 2003: In a handbasket
Is it just me, or are you getting the feeling that a lot of people in New York have just started to realize the gravity of the situation facing the city? All through the Autumn and Winter, the politicians and newspapers were talking about the billion dollar budget deficit and the skyrocketing unemployment rate, but it didn't really seem to be filtering down to the street. Not anymore. The last two weeks, that's all everyone seems to be talking about. Possible reasons for the sudden wave of anxiety:
1. $2.00 subway fare
2. Giant increases in water and property taxes
3. 8% increase in rent for stabilized apartments
4. Layoffs of city workers
5. Lack of jobs in almost every industry
In the midst of all this anxiety, the mayor has gone and outlawed cigarette smoking in bars. Now, I'm not an epidemiologist or PhD in addiction studies- but I know people are going to smoke more when the city is crumbling around them. The only question is where they are going to smoke. I was out on the Lower East Side every night this week, and people were lined up ten deep outside the bigger bars, puffing away and creating giant clouds of smoke wafting up past the windows of the tenements above the bars. So you know who is really screwed- it's not the smokers. It's the city worker who just got laid off, trying to get a few hours of sleep in his rent stabilized apartment on Ludlow Street, despite the worries about rent and metrocards, finding a new job, and whether or not the billowing smoke floating in through the windows is giving him cancer. My heart goes out to him.
Comments
And did you catch Bloomberg's quote in the Friday Times article about the Brooklyn Museum closing for two weeks to save money? "We all just need to write checks and get our friends to write checks to support the culturals."
Umm... no, not really, as my friends are actually saving their money up to eat dog food through the next fiscal year.
Meanwhile, it's loud as fuck on residential streets with a neighborhood bar as we're all puffing outside. Quality of life issue? Umm, yeah?
seriously- bloomberg really doesn't seem to be thinking about what is happening to the working man. i think a revolution is in the offing- of course, he'll probably just jump in his helicopter and fly down to the caymans or wherever the his estate is before anything serious can happen to him. i'm starting to think koch is right- bloomberg is going to be a one term mayor. that, or the price for his second term has gone way up. maybe 200 million at this point.
Just wait until the real estate bubble (ostensibly as big or bigger right now than the 1999 stock market bubble) decides to bust... Then we are all in for some real fun with 3+ trillion dollars in illusory wealth going bye-bye just like that... Save your pennies.
You know here in Seattle the republican shit heads passed an ANTI-rent control law that prevents any kind of rent control and durring the tech boomb of the late 90s landlords were free to raise rents some as high as 150% to upgrade to the yuppies who would live in their now trendy apartments.
Only a 8% increase looks great from here.
Then again we do not have a subway system and we have a much higher unemployment rate than NY.
Get Out! Get Out while you can!!! Soon Manhattan will be the island of elites and all the poor people will be relegated to the outgoing areas.
You guys aren't in that much trouble, try growing up there in the 70's.......at least we could smoke.
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