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.
“In this housing market, which is so extreme, as in high cost, low cost and not much in the middle, how you can say that someone leaving a high end building to move to another high end building is opening up a spot for anyone other than another high end buyer? How does that serve to make adjustments in the housing pool? The top tiers may be shuffling around, that has nothing to do with anyone else. Trickle down ecomomics didn’t work, neither does this.”
Think about it this way. What would happen to the price of real estate if we reduced the # of units by 1/2?
And, trickle down economics, in retrospect has gone from being one politician’s plaform to what is considered a respected part of standard economics – regardless of your opinion on it.
This thread features a bunch of self-interested yuppies who think that poor people are lazy but that their wealth was completely earned. That’s ridiculous, because bourgie white folks get handouts from the day that they’re born, while poor people from the beginning face stigma, hardship, discrimination and brutality. Don’t give me any bullshit about how you grew up poor only to become successful enough to evict your very own low-income tenants from your new brownstone. The question is a social one–what reproduces poverty?–not a personal one; we’re talking about large patterns, not individual anecdotes.
You idiots who think that the poor are freeloaders need to examine the entire political economic structure that supports your ignorant bliss. Who does the work that creates the profit that you use to buy your million dollar brownstone? Who drives the bus, operates the subway, comes to your rescue when your house is on fire? Who actually built your brownstone, your street, your sidewalk, your Brooklyn Bridge, your subway system, your city? Who lives next to bus depots and contracts asthma so that you can live in a leafy, healthy neighborhood? When your white skin gives you privileges, who do you think suffers as a result?
The facts of the matter are that wealth needs and creates poverty, privilege needs and creates discrimination, and the whole system of circulation requires a shakedown of the poor and a shroud of ignorance hiding the brutal realities from the wealthy. Surplus value must be extracted in order to create profit. THAT is Economics 101.
The very LEAST anyone can do is support affordable housing–that would just begin to start to pay back the debt that the rich owe the poor in this city and every city.
anonymous 3:15, an adult:
symbiosis
Main Entry: sym·bi·o·sis
Pronunciation: “sim-bE-‘O-s&s, -“bI-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural sym·bi·o·ses /-“sEz/
Etymology: New Latin, from German Symbiose, from Greek symbiOsis state of living together, from symbioun to live together, from symbios living together, from syn- + bios life — more at QUICK
1 : the living together in more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms
2 : the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship (as between two persons or groups)
new yorker – where are these developments moving them? im not exactly sure what your point is. i believe the beacon was just a plot of land before it became a luxury condo, who were the inhabitants of this plot of land? this is where i feel people people they have this right and privilege. anyway, if you are priced out of a certain area, you can either work harder to afford it or move somewhere more affordable. can’t it be that simple?
new yorker – where are these developments moving them? im not exactly sure what your point is. i believe the beacon was just a plot of land before it became a luxury condo, who were the inhabitants of this plot of land? this is where i feel people people they have this right and privilege. anyway, if you are priced out of a certain area, you can either work harder to afford it or move somewhere more affordable. can’t it be that simple?
3:02 – you are absolutely right, as I mentioned in my posts. They have severely compromised their credibility by jumping on the AY boat without checking to see if it had enough life boats. Getting thrown a bone or two from the big table is not the same as sitting at that table.
Mixed metaphors aside, that doesn’t necessarily make them wrong here. I might have done it differently, but sometimes the only way to get attention is to be in your face. It might have been better to get directly in Boymelgreen’s face, but I believe they made their point.
For the last time – an adult – read what people have been saying. NOBODY said to move people into free places they can’t afford in ritsy neighborhoods. Newyorker’s reply is absolutely correct.
I can only guess since I’m not an expert on those places. Those are enclaves that have always been expensive. Except for Miami, I don’t think they are building mass apartment complexes that are displacing long time, poorer residents or drastically changing neighborhoods. And in Miami I think they ar still spreading out horizontally as well as vertically. New York has several things unique to it, one of them being that even in the richest neighborhoods, there is some mixing of incomes. We are essentially packed one on the other- and like New Yorker says, it is the amazing engine that drives the city. But again, most of us posting know NYC, not those other areas.
Acorn supports the Forrest Ratner Atlantic Yards project…? Ratner is being subsidized with more than $100 million. Is that not a problem? Why the double standards? In my view Acorn has no credibility whatsoever. Shame, shame, shame on them….
an adult:
perhaps you fail to understand what we are discussing here. the plebs dont want to move INTO one trump plaza, they dont want IT to move in on them and push them off the coney island shores right into the water.