a thaumaturgical compendium

Why was the left so mean when it went after Larry Craig, among others? Why, some said, would those who described themselves as broadminded be so adverse to a wide stance among their politicians? They failed to see that the issue was not Mr. Craig’s sexual orientation, nor even his relationship with his family, but his advocacy for policies that his experiences would seem to completely contradict. In other words, he was a victim of his own political positions.

It doesn’t particularly bother me that Elliot Spitzer, as the New York Times is reporting, made use of the Emperors Club VIP (”Every client is an emperor… ” even if he’s only a governor), a high-priced prostitution service. The public loves a sex scandal, and no doubt this will be front-page news for some time. There are lots of reasons Spitzer should be held to the fire for this. First, he violated the law when he was charged with enforcing it. I think that alone is the biggest issue. The cops in our neighborhood rarely bother to stop for red lights, even when it’s pretty clear they aren’t on their way somewhere, and I’ve seen a lot of near-misses for that reason. You expect those sworn to uphold the law to apply that to themselves as well.

The second issue, whether he violated the trust of his spouse, is chiefly, in my opinion, a private matter. The public does have a right to judge the character of their leaders, but how someone relates to their family is really only the family’s business.

I suppose you could suggest that the money that was spent was a waste of his taxpayer-supplied salary. After all, these were not inexpensive professionals (though the claim of $5,500 an hour seems to contradict the agency’s price list). But I don’t think this has a lot of traction.

The biggest issue seems to be that Spitzer made prostitution rings a special target of prosecution. This, to me, raises a lot of pretty substantial issues: most pointedly whether this group received protection in trade for their services. Even the appearance of this besmirches his office, his reputation, and the reputation of the state of New York.

What it doesn’t change is my opinion that prostitution should be legalized. I am perfectly capable of condemning Spitzer for hypocrisy and for breaking the law, and at the same time recognize that what he did shouldn’t have been illegal. Too bad he couldn’t stand up for what he thought was right, either by not patronizing sex workers, or advocating for legal structures (i.e., legalization) that would provide them with fuller access to the law.

I think the best place to live in Manhattan would be aboard a houseboat in the 79th street boat basin. That dream is actually not as far out of reach as some. For the first time in decades, the city is allowing new residential slip rentals, which average less than $500 a month. Moor something like this 67 foot live-aboard trawler in that spot, currently for sale on eBay for $50,000, and you end up with triple the square feet of most apartments in this area, at less than a twentieth of the price. All that, and two blocks from the subway, and four blocks from the Natural History Museum.

While my lovely partner and I disagree on few things, I would jump on this in a New York minute, and she is not nearly as keen on the idea.

Imrpov Everywhere strikes again, freezing for several minutes in Grand Central Station. They rule.

A Christmas wish appears in the classifieds of last month’s New York magazine:

WE NEED HELP BUYING AN APT
on the UWS, 3bd 2bath. YOU are a phil-
anthropic, wealthy person who would
not miss a million bucks and would be
interested in donating (or even investing)
in a highly targeted manner: to my fami-
ly. WE are a wonderful, hard working
middle class family who contributes to
our UWS community, is entrenched, hap-
py and desperately wants to remain on
UWS (lest the city lose yet another
wonderful family to the burbs). We can
afford 600-700K, so you see the
predicament. Can you help us?? Email:
PlsHelpUsBuyAnApt@gmail.com

I like a lot of Thorstein Veblen’s ideas. He’s often dismissed as a product (or producer) of the times, because of his focus on technocratic solutions to social problems, and his view that the economy should be managed by economists seems preposterous today. But central to his most popular book The Theory of the Leisure Class is the odd place of rent in society. In the idealized view of capitalism, someone accumulates capital by risking rather than hording material. This incentive to venture allows for increased efficiency, and everyone is happy. Although it would be difficult today to say that real estate investing carries no risk, I think it is fair to say that such risk isn’t particularly useful. What would it mean if rents were outlawed?

Who lives here?

The fourth quarter numbers are in, and the average cost of an apartment in Manhattan is up again, to $1.4 million. The median price of an apartment in our neighborhood went from $763K last year to $1.195 million this year, an insane 57% increase. Unlike much of the nation, there was very little bubble here. In part, this is because it is virtually impossible to get into an apartment in New York with “zero down,” and pretty hard to get into one without at least 20% of the purchase price. Moreover, as one real estate agent recently put it, Europe considers New York to be a 50% off sale, due to the weakness of the dollar. As a result, the market remains hot.

Admittedly, Manhattan is an island: there are only so many people who can live here. And they aren’t making any more land. But the expense seems well out of proportion to what any normal human can afford. In our neighborhood, the average household income is just over $70K a year, and the average purchase price of an apartment well over $700K (as of a year ago). How is this possible? It’s possible because most people still rent, a few in rent controlled or rent stabilized buildings, and our famous next-door neighbors, the Frederick Douglass Houses, a massive public housing project. The very lucky might win a low-income lottery to be allowed to purchase an apartment in a building where your neighbors are paying market rate.

As a practical matter, rent control means that there are people in our building who pay, literally, a tenth of our rent. One one hand, it seems really unfair (particularly the extreme examples, like Cyndi Lauper’s $989 place, or Nora Ephron’s $2,000 apartment in the Apthorpe). Some of these folks have lived in the building for a half-century, and it hardly seems fair that someone should have to leave their apartment, their neighborhood, or their city because the rents have gone through the roof. Of course, this is exactly what is happening.

Is rent wrong?

Most of the individuals and companies that own rental properties provide a service for a price–what could be wrong with that? I suppose my complaint is that there isn’t all that much risk in the rent game, at least in New York, and so why should their be such profits. The main source of profits is the fact that (a) property owners bought at a time when the cost of property was less, and (b) they have greater access to borrowed capital. In other words, they get to profit because of their entrenched position. This is exactly what profits are supposed to avoid.

So what if residential rent was outlawed? Many apartment buildings in New York are already co-ops, what if they all went co-op. Maybe you could make an exception for “second residences” like hotels, as long as people didn’t spend a certain number of days residing in the city. (This is more practical than it seems, since you already have to show what part of the year you spent in the city to determine whether you have to pay the annual city income tax.) The result would be a depressed residential real estate market–and likely business market as well, since owners of residential buildings would try to switch their buildings over to business rentals. No more lotteries, or rent control; every home has to be owned. It would probably change New York forever, since people would be less likely to leave and less likely to come. Maybe that would be for the worse, and maybe for the better.

Or maybe not something so extreme. In Mumbai, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resources (SPARC) has sought ways of helping those living in the slums to cooperatively gain ownership of residences. Co-ops in New York have a reputation for being exclusionary and established, but I wonder whether there are groups who have started “Yuppie co-ops,” collectives of first-home buyers in the city who purchase a building outright and manage it as a cooperative?

I finished my grading today, and so allowed myself a brief moment of apartment porn. No, I don’t mean browsing through Apartment Therapy, or Curbed, though both are always fun. I went straight to the mother lode, the New York Times Real Estate Section. I’m definitely not in the market. Frankly, it seems very unlikely that my partner and I will be ever be able to afford to buy an apartment if we remain in Manhattan, and we are disinclined to leave. But, it’s a good time of year for window shopping, especially when you find something like an apartment on Pomander Walk.

Locals, no doubt, know all about Pomander Walk, but I was stumped. On the Upper West Side? Really? Google Maps was helpful. Odd, I thought, I have walked that block a dozen times and never noted another road. The first photo to the right (from Google’s “Street View”) shows you what the “street” looks like from 94th. It’s a cool Tudor pair of buildings, with what looks like access to a gated spot for trash or something. In Harry Potteresque fashion, however, the gate hides a private street created in 1922 by the King & Campbell architects, in celebration of a popular play of the time, Pomander Walk. The apartments on the mew were designed to look like an English street, complete with varying Tudor façades. The street has an illustrious history, home to Humphrey Bogart (after he lived up the street from us on 103rd), and used as a set for Hannah & Her Sisters.

Not only is the street an anachronistic, Disneyesque throwback in the middle of a downtown area, it has other oddities, like external dumbwaiters for half the units. It was a declared an historical landmark in the early 1980s, and now there is a small two-bedroom apartment for sale. A unit sold in 2000, before the boom, for $200,000, but unfortunately, the real estate boom coupled with some renovations means that a a tiny, antiquated apartment (linkrot will likely kill that link quickly) now lists well north of $800,000. Those of you reading from anywhere other than New York or California will likely gawk at paying that much for an apartment that is probably less than 800 square feet, but that price is actually well below the average apartment purchase price on the Upper West Side. If I had a spare couple of hundred thousand dollars for the down payment, and didn’t eat for the 30 years it would take to pay off the mortgage, I’d be getting ready to move. As it is, I remain a happy renter.

Today the block is once again surrounded by trailers: they’re going to be spending the better part of the next few weeks filming Titanic II in my building. It’s funny, I spent a lot of time in southern California, and rarely saw movie stars, and in New York they come to my house.

I also kind of get why it is that people become attached to their buildings in New York. I’ve lived in a lot of places, and although some had a kind of a backstory–the former Navy barracks in Seattle, the former crack house in Buffalo–most lacked any kind of character. This is a 1929 building; not all that old by New York standards, but you do get a bit of the feeling of that history.

We don’t have doormen any more, since the doors are electric (leading to all sorts of interesting problems for our conservative Jewish residents), but we have “concierges.” Frank, our oldest concierge, retired last week after working here for 60 years. When he left, he gave a short talk, the text of which was left in the lobby. As part of that talk, he reminisced about some of the people who had lived in the building: actors, writers, musicians. It seems some people have been living here since the building was built, and are probably paying rent that seemed steep in the late 1940s. Some of the folks in the building are mythically old–Yoda old.

As for the rest, it’s the mix you might expect on the Upper West Side. Several professors and lawyers, as well as some writers. Next door is an opera teacher, and on weekends we hear arias. Sometimes these are in conflict with the musicals being practiced in two of our other neighbors’ apartments. As far as I know, we’re the only apartment on our floor without a piano.

It’s a bit strange getting used to living in the city. We lived for a short while on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a block from the main strip, and at the time, it felt pretty urban. This so trumps that. When I took the job up in Connecticut, I made a pitch for living half-way between, so that Jamie and I could split commutes. In practice, Jamie already had the long commute–in Japan she spent even longer on the train than I spend on my back-and-forth–and so now it’s my turn. Besides, this is the sort of place that we knew we liked right away, and has, over the last two years (!), started to feel familiar and, well, homey.

At this point, I think it would be hard to get us to move anywhere in the US besides New York City, back to California, or over to Hawaii.

I suppose I have to be a bit circumspect about commenting on local New York City politics, given that I am a relatively recent arrival in the city. But I am completely behind Bloomberg’s announced congestion pricing for downtown Manhattan. Anything that will reduce the smog and traffic downtown is a good thing.

There are plenty of arguments against the fee. To be honest, most of the traffic I see consists of a mix of yellow cabs and towncars, both which would be exempt from the fee. But the move to more hybrid cabs makes this at least a bit better. And after all, these are forms of quasi-public transportation. One of the major complaints is that this amounts to a regressive tax, making it only possible to drive in New York if you are rich. I really don’t know many people who can afford to drive in New York if they aren’t already rich–parking is already so difficult that it doesn’t make much sense. I think there is something to the argument, but not much. Even the very wealthy are generally smart enough not to keep cars in the city.

I also think they should exempt low-emissions vehicles from the fee. This may already be part of the plan, but I haven’t seen anything about it. (There’s a nice discussion over on WorldChanging NYC.) If you are driving an electric or natural-gas powered vehicle, this should be encouraged. And for those hybrids that have significantly reduced emissions, I think there should also be an exemption or reduction in fee.

Finally, no word in this article about the proposed opening of the East River to seaplane traffic. I really hope they allow for this, as it provides another route into and out of the city. I can absolutely see a healthy (although not necessarily for the environment) commuter plane business operating out of the East River.