Rage Against The Eminent Domain Machine

Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. And now you do what they told ya:

For the past six years, Daniel Goldstein has been at the center of just about every rally, house party, concert and lawsuit opposed to the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn.

He wielded a bullhorn and had a lightning-fast e-mail response to every incursion by the developer Bruce C. Ratner on the 22-acre project site at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. As the project advanced, and every one his neighbors abandoned his building on Pacific Street, Mr. Goldstein remained with his wife and child, vowing never to be dislodged from their seventh-floor condominium.

But on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Goldstein, the last residential holdout in Mr. Ratner’s way, agreed to walk away from his apartment by May 7 for $3 million. Mr. Goldstein, 40, also agreed to step down as spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the main group opposing Atlantic Yards. And he said he would withdraw from any litigation and not “actively oppose the project,” although he said he held on to his First Amendment rights.

Here’s Goldstein’s statement: “My home was seized by the government to give to a private developer.”

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

The Ballet Of Candy Wrapper-Dropping Teenagers, Beer-Swilling Longshoremen And Punch Bowl-Pooping Sociology Professors

Not so long ago observers hailed the mayor’s foresight in updating the Jane Jacobs school of thought by both preserving a neighborhood’s character and allowing for smart redevelopment. Jane Jacobs herself seemed to disagree, but whatever — it became a useful campaign talking point. Contrarian voices questioned. Then they finally pooped in the punch bowl:

[Brooklyn College sociology professor Sharon] Zukin — whose own book, “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,” was published in December — peered through the window at rows of glass candleholders. “Tchotchkes!” she said. “Oh, the sheer ignominy.”

Ms. Jacobs’s continuing influence on the city is clear. As Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, wrote a few years back, “Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.”

But if Ms. Jacobs is much hailed as an urban prophet, Ms. Zukin is a heretic on her canonization. She views Ms. Jacobs as a passionate and prescient writer, but also one who failed to reckon with steroidal gentrification and the pervasive hunger of the upper middle class for ever more homogenous neighborhoods.

The pattern in places like Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Ms. Zukin said, is dreary and inexorable: Middle-class “pioneers” buy brownstones and row houses. City officials rezone to allow luxury towers, which swell the value of the brownstones. And banks and real estate companies unleash a river of capital, flushing out the people who gave the neighborhoods character.

Ms. Jacobs viewed cities as self-regulating organisms, and placed her faith in local residents. But Ms. Zukin argues that without more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning, neighborhoods will keep getting more stratified.

“Jacobs’s values — the small blocks, the cobblestone streets, the sense of local identity in old neighborhoods — became the gentrifiers’ ideal,” Ms. Zukin said. “But Jacobs’s social goals, the preservation of classes, have been lost.”

Observers also love — love! — irony, and any story about Jane Jacobs now carries with it requisite colorful there-goes-the-neighborhood details:

Ms. Jacobs, who died in 2006, waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks. Her victory in that fight was complete, if freighted with unanticipated consequences. The cobblestone remains, but the high bourgeoisie has taken over; not many tailors can afford to live there anymore. Ms. Jacobs’s old home recently sold for more than $3 million, and the ground floor harbors a boutique glass store.

. . .

Ms. Zukin recently acted as tour guide on a stroll through Ms. Jacobs’s urban village, where Irish and Italian grandmothers once watched from windows as children played on the streets, and milkmen delivered bottles as chain-smoking playwrights typed in grotty flats. It began just north of Christopher and Bleecker Streets in the West Village, once a working-class haven, then the black-leather heart of Queerdom, and now something like the back lot in a Paramount Studios version of New York.

There’s the Magnolia Bakery, where perpetual lines snake out the door not so much because of its excellent cupcakes as because of its appearance on “Sex and the City.” There’s Marc Jacobs, where the lines are no less endless. A Ralph Lauren, a Madden, and a children’s store with the most adorable petite $250 pants. Ms. Zukin sighed.

“It’s another Madison Avenue, or the Short Hills mall,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Really, did we need that?”

$108,371,685.01

Another Friday document dump from the Bloomberg campaign:

Mayor Bloomberg’s final tab for his third-term victory was a stratospheric $108,371,685.01.

The total, in documents released Friday, included millions of dollars in fat bonuses paid to his campaign staff, many of whom received victory gifts worth 20% of their salaries.

Campaign manager Bradley Tusk, spokesman Howard Wolfson and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris each made out particularly well — earning $400,000 bonus checks each.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

“Pest! Grip Lotion, Cross” Is An Anagram Of “Progress Not Politics”

Here’s a figure for you all — Bloomberg probably spent $100 million to win a third term with about 550,000 votes (about 200,000 fewer than he received in 2005). That’s somewhere around $180 a vote. There’s your mandate.

The Bloomberg victory speech was horrifying in several ways, not least of which being that the mayor conflated his “squeaker” with talk of a Yankees ticker tape parade. Talk about wishing bad luck on oneself:

Thank you. Gracias. What a week this is turning out to be. Tonight, a hard-fought victory in a very difficult year, and — who knows? — maybe in a few days, the biggest victory parade that Broadway has ever seen.

Thank you, Jimmy Fallon, that was maybe the nicest thing a Red Sox fan ever said about a Yankees fan, and I appreciate it.

. . .

Will the Yankees win Game 6? You better believe it.

The problem here of course being that Jimmy Fallon only became a Red Sox fan after running around like an idiot for that one movie, and his true allegiance is basically disputed. No matter — baseball, like politics, is full of bandwagoning idiots.

But Jimmy Fallon aside, the mayor really needs to purge Howard Wolfson from his mental space (I need to purge Howard Wolfson from my mental space) — the spin of this being “a very difficult year,” which Wolfson also tried using last night, is especially specious. The mayor’s narrow victory wasn’t because the economy sucks, it was because he overturned the will of the voters without a referendum and poured $100 million into a campaign. Be upfront about this. Quit bullshitting. The election is over.

Speaking of the narrow victory, I also think the media is to blame for making this out to be a landslide from day one:

Still, the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and the city’s political establishment, which had predicted a blowout. Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.

How no outlet could have honestly reported the closeness of the race in the weeks leading up to it seems particularly egregious. Here’s one example of bullshit spin from October 30:

The Thompson campaign keeps insisting that momentum is on their side in the closing days of the mayoral campaign. But a poll released Friday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion suggests otherwise.

The survey, like other recent polls, shows Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with a commanding double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller.

. . .

On Thursday afternoon, the Thompson campaign released the results of an internal poll that portrayed the race as much closer, with Mr. Bloomberg leading Mr. Thompson by just 8 percentage points. But internal polls are notoriously suspect.

In a news release on Friday, Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg campaign spokesman, dismissed Mr. Thompson’s poll, saying that it “gives new meaning to the term margin of error” and that every other reliable public poll done over the past month confirms Mr. Bloomberg’s comfortable lead.

There are so, so many other examples that it’s hard to pick just one. But a prime example of conventional wisdom appeared in the election day Times op-ed from Joyce Purnick. Purnick is someone who is very up on Bloomberg’s machinations, having just written a book about the mayor, and her tone — like the tone of nearly every piece written about the election — was that the result was always a foregone conclusion:

Memo to the 108th mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg: You didn’t have to do it. You didn’t need to set a new national campaign spending record. You didn’t have to become a one-man stimulus program, employing costly campaign consultants, ad producers and all those “volunteers.” You didn’t need that barrage of television ads, those wasteful glossy mailings or maddening robocalls.

None of it. You are the incumbent. You are in and destined to stay in after today’s mayoral election because — unless unduly provoked — New York voters don’t reject their incumbent. They’re pragmatic, even complacent, when their city is not in anguish. You could have spent more on your philanthropy and less on yourself and still be leading your Democratic competitor, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., in the polls.

Even columnists unfriendly to Bloomberg bought into the inevitability — again, pick any, but here are two I remember: Patrice O’Shaughnessy in the Daily News and Clyde Haberman, who while continuing to go after the ridiculousness of the Bloomberg machine, did it in a way that telegraphed a depressing inevitability.

All of which brings me back to the Phillies’ Game 4 meltdown in the ninth inning, after the team tied the Yankees in the eighth, and Brad Lidge self-destructed, giving up three runs and ensuring that Rivera would close out the win; yes, the game was only tied, but the momentum was there for Philadelphia. The series was so close to being evened at two games a piece, and was especially painful for Phillies fans to watch. So was this election. Thompson lost by about 50,000 votes with somewhere around 1.1 million cast. What if things went a little differently?

What if, for example, Cory Booker wasn’t bought off by Bloomberg? What if Obama hadn’t been such a pussy? (And all that Corzine support got him exactly nothing in the end.) And most importantly, what if the media had been a little less incurious about polls and not actively worked to dissuade voters from actually participating? It’s true that this would have cut both ways — I’m sure many voters supportive of Bloomberg were apathetic about voting in a landslide — but the inevitability of a Bloomberg reelection was overpowering to watch day after day, and had to have had an impact.

Going back to that disgusting Times article about the campaign that they only published last night hammers home two big points:

Mr. Tusk, extremely self-confident and forceful, talked about “taking the oxygen out of the room”: hiring so many staff members, rolling out so many endorsements, and tossing up so many television ads that opposition seemed futile.

A sky-is-the-limit ethos, unfettered by spending limits, infused the effort. Mr. Tusk told his outreach coordinator for Asian voters, Oliver Tan, to find him a Bollywood star to endorse the mayor. After weeks of transcontinental phone calls, he did.

“It was selling inevitability,” a campaign adviser said.

Selling inevitability — and everyone — everyone! — bought it. Maybe we need to look at ourselves a little bit, too. The other part, the oxygen sucking, is well illustrated with the Cory Booker quid pro quo. Thompson just couldn’t get a break with any free airtime of the kind that Bloomberg got over and over again. It wasn’t so much the endorsement that Cory Booker gave Bloomberg as it perhaps was Booker actually shepherding the mayor around to black churches in Queens on the Sunday before the election — that of course became a big story for Bloomberg. If Booker had simply sat this out — and not crossed party lines to endorse a Republican — this story doesn’t exist, and oxygen remains intact. But Booker going as far as actually campaigning in Southeast Queens with the mayor was just one of many non money-related examples of Thompson’s huge, huge disadvantage over the course of this race.

The whole experience — from the furtive talk about running for president through to the City Council overturning term limits to the obscene spending and consolidation of power during the campaign — was profoundly discouraging. But you know what really got my goat? That insipid fucking new Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling,” which was played before Bloomberg came out to speak; it’s lazy songwriting, tailor made for opening montages of televised sports events and, now we know, campaign appearances.

The other day I bemoaned the deleterious effects of this campaign on younger people. On our way out of the polling place last night, a cheerful high school student handed us one of the glossy pieces of Bloomberg campaign literature that this morning are littering the sidewalks of our neighborhood. The student insisted she wasn’t getting paid, though she did admit that a pizza party (Bloomberg spent thousands on pizza this campaign) was in the cards. I’m sure she was also angling for a letter of recommendation of some sort as well because, ultimately, everyone is in it for something. And that’s the real legacy of this dispiriting campaign.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

Admit It — “Spend It All” Would Sound Great At A Rally

There are strategies and then there are strategies:

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which supports Mr. Thompson, the city comptroller and the leading Democratic candidate in the race, has begun a cheeky, defiant advertising campaign urging the mayor to “spend it all.”