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.
CrownHeightsProud. You act as though people don’t actually have the opportunity to get out of the projects here in NYC. The guy working next to me (a computer genius and head of our IT Department) came out of the Farragut Houses. The owner of Starbucks? He came out of a Brooklyn project too. (He was featured last night on ’60 Minutes’.) The reasons for some people getting ‘stuck’ in the projects are varied and sad. We have many programs in this town that help give those that want it a leg up. It’s unfair to imply that we’ve turned our backs on the poor in this city — just not true.
“I fail to see how anyone can think that the creation of luxury housing is going to benefit anyone other than the developer and the buyers/renters.”
Creating more high-end property frees up the middle and low end. If that’s hard to understand, try to imagine what would happen if all of the high-end housing was destroyed in NYC. The former inhabitants of the luxury units would start bidding on the middle and lower tier stuff.
Hey middle, I hate to tell you, but poor people are not the main recipients of unemployment, it’s the middle class. And no one, of any class, volunteers for it, it comes from losing your job, which is not usually something of your choosing. And an unempoyment check is hardly a get rich scheme of the poor, and doesn’t last all that long, either. I hardly think that the world is divided into welfare recipients and rich developers, and those are your choices. You may not like my worker ants analogy, but it certainly is more accurate than your comment, and much more comprehensible.
How ironic that, with ACORN’s support, Bruce Ratner has been able to persuade the state to give him tax breaks and tax subsidies (OK, persnickety readers of this site, I grant that final details are still pending but the project won’t go forward w/o massive public hand-outs) to build the Atlantic Yards. Yet now there’s talk that the affordable housing component of Atlantic Yards may not even be built at the Atlantic Yards site itself. And of course if it isn’t built there, perhaps it won’t be built at all. There’s plenty of precedent for breaking promises on affordable housing. And if it doesn’t get built — what redress will ACORN have then? Well, Bruce has promised to pay them $500,000 if he reneges. Wow, what a whopping penalty! Isn’t that less than the (likely) price of a single one-bedroom condo in Atlantic Yards? I’m all for affordable housing in NYC — let NYCHA develop the entire site in a low-rise, appropriate way — but this particular deal is a con. ACORN members should be demonstrating against their own leadership for allowing themselves to be so blatantly manipulated by Ratner.
CHP as I said, there is plenty of trickle down effect in terms of substantially higher tax revenue for the city in terms of transfer taxes.
“I would also suggest that tempering our brand of cut-throat capitalism with some of the tenets of communism would make our country better.”
I love it. If we could all hold hands and execute some land owners it would all be better. I just know it would work this time around.
“Being poor is tied to several basic factors: education, marriage or partnership, and children. Anyone with little formal education who fails to form some sort of union with a partner and who has one or more children before age 25 will most likely wind up poor.”
And anon 11:41, as an expert on poverty, what’s next? Sterilization? Yours has to be one of the stupidest and scariest pieces of misinformation I have ever read here. I’m sure all of the other myriad and sundry causes of poverty pale in front of this one. Gawd, the arrogance!
why is there a direct correlation between incomprehensible comments and these protest advocates on this blog.
haha, who is talking about worker ants? true workers..that made me laugh..what a tangent.
anyway, there will always be class distinction, people will benefit anyway they can, poor people get unemployment checks and welfare from the public and rich people get hefty tax incentives for developing. i think everyone in between need to realize that if you dont belong in either category then work towards avoiding one and reaching the other.
Maybe it is true that we need a public discussion of 421-a tax abatements, but ACORN also needs to pick its fights better. As for the wicked Ms. Malone, I can see her now being dragged along the cobblestone street, kicking and screaming, as the angry crowd dips her headfirst into a scalding hot cauldron of Jacques Toures chocolate (with 71% cocoa content). Yummmmmmmmmy