He Built This City

AM New York’s piece this morning assessing Mike Bloomberg’s legacy is one of the first of many, many articles that are sure to come as the mayor enters the twilight of his term. The article positions Mayor Mike as a great post-9/11 rebuilder who’s played a big role in luring tourists, spurring development and making formerly undesirable neighborhoods hot. “Places like Red Hook that were once a no-man’s land are hipster havens, and Brooklyn is now a center for culture and art for the whole country,” says Mitchell Moss, a professor of history at New York University and adviser to the mayor’s first campaign. “Whoever thought people would want to live on the Gowanus.” The article notes that the Bloomberg administration’s aggressive rezoning agenda (“one out of every six square feet in the city” has been rezoned) and drive to incentivize development on NYC’s waterfront has altered the lay of the land, and New York has much more of a “luxury” sheen than it did six years ago. The cost of all this is high, according to critics who say the city has become too expensive for the working- and middle-class and resulted in inorganic changes. “There has been a pinching of people’s sense of place, and a destruction of community identity,” says Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. “They have accelerated the transformation of this place from a manufacturing city to a condo and office tower city, but a lot of people don’t feel invested in that growth.”
Bloomberg Reshapes City, Despite High-Profile Setbacks [AM New York]
Photo by CarbonNYC.