ACORN Protesters Storm The Beacon Tower
The anti-gentrification movement stepped it up a notch yesterday with ACORN protesters storming the open house at the Beacon Tower, Shaya Boymelgreen’s 23-story condo development at 85 Adams in Dumbo. What a shame! What a pity! We can’t live in New York City, the 50-odd protesters chanted while blanketing the sales office with flyers that…
The anti-gentrification movement stepped it up a notch yesterday with ACORN protesters storming the open house at the Beacon Tower, Shaya Boymelgreen’s 23-story condo development at 85 Adams in Dumbo. What a shame! What a pity! We can’t live in New York City, the 50-odd protesters chanted while blanketing the sales office with flyers that read, Beacon Tower developers get rich off the backs of working families.” The protesters main gripe? That luxury projects like the Beacon still receive tax breaks in a holdover from a program started in the 1970s to stimulated development. The ambushed Corcoran agents manning the open house called in the cops who removed the protesters. Prospective buyers didn’t appear to be too sympathetic to the cause. “Tell them to get jobs and go live in the projects,” said Jenny Malone, who was there checking out apartments. “People just want something for nothing.”
Activists Protest Dumbo Condos [Metro]
More coverage in the print edition.
While the data post 2000 is still a little fuzzy, most likely NYC is losing population as higher density poorer families are pushed out by smaller wealthy households, empty nesters and the trustfund set. The City is booming if you are looking to buy a million dollar one bedroom, but that is small percentage of the population when you get down to it.
This may all simply reflect the effect of globalization and the general “trickle-down/plutocracy” economic model that the nation is currently engaged in. Anyway, there are a lot more rich people with money to burn and many more poor people who are providing personal services to the moneyed elite. This model is more along the lines usually found in South America than the USA. Unfortunately, many of the rich seem have adopted attitudes toward their fellow Americans more in line with those of the South American elites. Perhaps everything will work out, but the general trend is disturbing, but good if you need some cheap domestic help. Since there is no populist movement of any note, things are not changing any time soon.
we need to establish a fully functional acorn barracks at the gates of PLG. just in case.
What is market rate vs. luxury rate CHP? If people are paying “luxury rate” doesn’t that mean that is the market rate for that market?
Josh, you haven’t proved your point.
There certainly are plenty of luxury apartments for the well off to choose from, with more opening up every day. That is a market “up there”. That has absolutely nothing to do with life down here on earth for the rest of us.
Even if one or two high end buildings has to slightly drop their rates a bit in order to sell, that means only that an apartment dropped from 2 mil down to 1.5. Hardly trickle down, and hardly a blip on the statistical radar.
If you were to tell me that entire buildings were unable to rent at luxury rate, and decided to offer at market rate or below, then we’d have something to talk about.
I think some people just fail to comprehend that project like this on in Dumbo do help all of us – they attract many upper middle class people to the city (who may otherwise live in the suburbs and pay taxes there), they bring stores, restaurants and other businesses to the neighborhoos that all of us – rich or poor – can enjoy. They revitalize the areas that were bad and dangerous. And they generate a lot of money in real estate (even after abatements), transfer and other taxes. And the create a lot of construction and other jobs. The value of those abatements to the city budget is very small (compare to the size of the budget). We are not talking about billions of dollars. Now that the real estate market is slowing down, we need to keep the abatement to keep the market strong (so it keeps generating taxes and jobs).
Trickle down economics decidedly does not work, because instead of trickling down wealth gets hoarded at the top. Bx2Bklyn is exactly right: if trickle down works, why is inequality getting worse?
People have a lot of funny conceptions about each other.
The idiot in the article notwithstanding, I think that if you stopped most people on the street, they would agree that the real estate market should meet the demand of people of a variety of income levels and stages of life living in their neighborhood. New York City is the only city (or one of very few) in this nation that is actually gaining in population. All of the other major cities have started losing people to their suburbs again. Losing population means losing money for schools, infrastructure, health care and other social services–and of course political power. So I find it sad that New Yorkers are so focused on staking out a piece of turf that we can’t occasionally step back and realize that we’re lucky to be living in a booming city. We’re lucky to have these issues. If we weren’t so fortunate, we’d look a lot more like Detroit.
The other reality that we often forget is that neighborhoods are constantly changing. Whenever someone writes that newcomers are displacing people who have lived for “generations” in the neighborhood, I often wonder if they have ever bothered to read their history books. The neighborhoods of Brooklyn and NYC have done nothing but change for the last few centuries; remember that our country wasn’t founded in 1945. In any given neighborhood in this country, up to 50% of the population moves every year.
Clearly, the real estate market has not caught up with the most recent demographic trends of the city (the same is true in other cities in the country where finding an affordable two bedroom apartment is very hard even for well educated people making around $100K total a year).
Imagine if instead of focusing all of their attention on attacking new residents or developers, groups like ACORN reached out to new residents and new residents reached out to current residents and we all worked together to figure out ways to help the real estate market catch up to the demand for a wider variety of home options in our neighborhoods. This may mean getting rid of old tax incentives for a new variety. Or it may mean something else. Either way, it doesn’t mean going at the throats of our neighbors to the detriment of our futures and the future of our shared city.
CHP – let me rephrase:
The 421a program was meant to kick start development in all parts of the city when no developer wanted to. Nothing to do with specific undesirable areas, it was the whole town that needed it back then.
Hardly respected. Trickle down economics didn’t work then, and its unrealistic still. If it did work you wouldn’t seeing the spreading economic gaps we have today.