COLOSSOMINIOPOLIS

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

A reader of the New York Times last month may have recognized this theorem at work in the calculated publishing of three articles about city real estate.

A Sunday front page piece, “Sky High and Going Up Fast: Luxury Towers Take New York,” draws attention to the development boom of “ultraluxury” residential skyscrapers in Manhattan.  The article follows the construction of an 84-story tower on Park Ave and 56^th Street by developer Harry Macklowe, destined to become the “tallest residential building in the Western hemisphere.”  Reporters of news love the superlative like the ape loves the banana.  And the superlative, though a statement of extraordinary number, can always draw from a surplus of bananas.

“There are only two markets,” says architect Rafael Viñoly, “ultraluxury and subsidized housing.”

Manhattan is a pathological self-determinator, and may today operate as simply an island of business towers and the towers where the people who work in those towers live and have families or live before they have families and move out of New York.  A grid of expected livelihood, that to make New York attractive it must seem to be one step behind you, when in stark sublime horror one barely sees the city’s footprints, really and compulsively, ahead… tracked by street posters, press releases, and articles in culture magazines. 

The Times less plugs the new wave of ultraluxury than it draws attention to the staggering numbers involved:  $95 million for the penthouse of 432 Park Avenue…  “contracts for nearly $1 billion worth of apartments…. Total sales are expected to surpass $3 billion for a building that will cost about $1.25 billion to complete…” and that “median family income in the city had fallen 8 percent since 2008…”

Pedestrians thinking of creamcheese bagels and morning coffee and pacing the daily commute view and hear the racket of steelworkers and look up to find the tidy psychedelia of sheer splitchsplatch skyscrapers.

The closing paragraph notes the “lavish marketing campaign” behind the Park Ave. supertower, involving distribution of “an oversize glossy magazine” and “a short film that places the tower in the context of classic images,” including an appearance by Harry Macklowe dressed as King Kong.

This last appropriation of New York City myth seems especially misapprehended, since Kong was an out-of-towner brought to Manhattan against his will to perform on Broadway.  Kong was not properly fed and separated from his paramour, Ann Darrow, so naturally broke from his chains to eat people, destroy property, and with the pretty Ann in his arms climb to the top of the world’s tallest building, which Kong mistook for a romantic safe haven akin to the mountaintop hideouts on Skull Island.  Harry Macklowe might then watch out for the impending attack of the US Air Force.  According to the New York Times it ain’t beauty that killed the beast but the beast beauty... 

  

A few days after the ultraluxury piece, The Gray Lady published tweely on Manhattan “micro-apartments.” “Gulliver Seeks Rental: The Newfound Fascination With Tiny Dwellings” depicts Manhattanites living in dwellings less than 100 square feet, with refrigerators under desks and shoes stored with the dishes.  Some residents have made YouTube videos giving tours of these “Lilliputian” quarters which garnered millions of hits, and sometimes led to eviction as evidence of illegal subletting.  It is a human interest story about humans acting humanly to inhuman conditions.

Mention is made of an initiative by the Mayor’s office to build 250-370 square foot prefab “micro-unit” apartments for low and middle income New Yorkers in the East 20s.  People want to live in Manhattan that bad, or just would never live anywhere else, but clearly can’t afford it.  Why not offer a shoebox in which to make livelihood, noting the “robust market” for features such as “generous 9’-10” floor-to-ceiling heights” and “Juliette balconies,” sounding like a passage in Edith Wharton.

Some weeks later a profile occurs in the Home section by a “writer in New York City" who reminisces when she was “in her twenties” and moved to the city eager to buy a place.  She settles on a 260 square foot apartment in Park Slope for $169,000.  One wonders when writers in their twenties ever moved to New York zealous to buy real estate. 

The author installs a Murphy bed she sees featured on Oprah.  She enters her living space into “teeny-tiny” competions, like Apartment Therapy’s “Small Cool” contest.  The piece brims with quaintness.

New York squeezes people out by the devices of either money or crime.  People go back to Pittsburgh or get a house in Jersey in desperation because they are sick of the fear of getting mugged everytime they leave the house.  This was the New York of cops shot by the Black Liberation Army, Bella Abzug living in the Upper Westside, The Dictators and crack and the building of the World Trade Center.   

Otherwise, New Yorkers hit the road because they are sick of attacks by the bank, the Dept. of Taxation and Finance, the restaurant menu, the price of alcohol and cigarettes, tailors, health insurance, movie tickets...

The Rent Guidelines Board is set to raise the rents on rent-stabilized dwellings.  The increases are based on informative housing research reports.  In 2011, the average rent-stabilized rent collected by landlords was $1,016.  Excluding “Core Manhattan” south of 110^th Street where rents are highest, the average was $943.  Landlords and management companies are belabored by rising costs like any average schmuck.  But the RGB reports that revenues exceed costs, and that buildings typically earn a bottomline “net operating income” of $400. a month.  These numbers are determined by the annual Price Index of Operating Costs, which show building costs like Fuel Oil and Insurance have risen almost 6%, or about the proposed max range of a one-year lease renewal.  Tenants objected when public hearings on the increase were cancelled in the outer boroughs.  The sole meeting took place in Core Manhattan, and was attended by three mayoral candidates.  

Meanwhile, investigative news journal City Limits reports that rent-stabilized housing is under siege by the city’s “cluster-site” plan for New York’s homeless.  The complex program places homeless families in subsidized apartment buildings apart from the shelter system, pressuring landlords to rid existing rent-stabilized tenants in exchange for “maximizing property income paid through service providers responsible for the homeless.”

As a way to phase out prior homeless initiatives like Work Advantage and Section 8, “cluster-site contracts are on track to cost the city $59.8 million in the current fiscal year. The approach is a way of dealing with the surge in shelter population, which was nearly 49,000” in May, 45% higher than May 2002.

It does not appear that the program is saving the city money, and City Limits cites numerous instances of cluster-site buildings tallying up hundreds of building violations. "Though landlords who participate in the cluster-site program can make significantly more than from rent-stabilized tenants, it doesn’t necessarily mean they take better care of their buildings and reduce housing violations…"

Read the details of the issue at Bronx Bureau.

Ultraluxury, microapartments and cluster-site buildings serve to bullet point the realities, or ultra-realities, of living in New York City in accordance with one’s available budget and the valve of options upon the city’s housing map.  From the penthouse of an ultraluxury skytower, all buildings look like clusters of microapartments.

Glassine quadrangles super-installed for work and play; a character defined by absence of characters.  Manhattan is perceived as an island of the very rich and the very poor, maybe not by the survey of the individual, but the bright light scorch of the general. 

F. Scott Fitz again, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise…”  For example, Beastie Boy yuppie Mike D. and filmmaker wife showing off their new Cobble Hill apartment in the Times, a mawkish affront to any bohemian character left in the city while shamelessly validating the infestation of artless art-barnaclers whose personal and professional lives are never without quotation marks... they "live in Brooklyn..."