Class 10. November 13. Neighborhood economy 2: Real estate economics (industrial, commercial, residential)
Methods: understanding the financing, construction, and sales of real estate developments
Due: Working draft of website project
(Friday, November 15: construction, marketing, tenanting of 365 Bond Street)
Expert: Hugh F. Kelly, commercial real estate economist
Readings or applications:
Amanda Wasielewski, Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Arlesford, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2018), selection TBA.
Manuel B. Aalbers, 2019. “Financial Geographies of Real Estate and the City: A Literature Review,” Financial Geography Working Paper Series, KU Leuven
Christopher B. Leinberger, 2017. “The Future of Finance and Investment for Real Estate Development and Investment: Changing Approach for a New Structural Era, “ Chapter 15 in Graham Squires, Erwin Heurkens, and Richard Peiser, editors, Routledge Companion to Real Estate Development. New York: Routledge.
A&M and JRT, 2013. Commercial Real Estate Competitiveness Study. New York City Economic Development Corporation
David J. Madden, 2018. “Pushed off the map: toponymy and the politics of place in New York City,” Urban Studies 55(8):
David Madden’s “Pushed off the Map,” is by far my favorite reading assigned so far in this course. His focus on the political aspects of typonomy and its impact on place making and belonging put into words trends that I have observed since moving to New York in 2003. In particular, he highlighted the instrumental dimensions of typonomy as “tools for struggles between various groups and institutions” (3). Inherent in the practice of typonomy of neighborhoods is a power dynamic between the current value of the neighborhood and its potential for revitalization — and this power dynamic is exacerbated by those who have the power to rename. I found the case of Dumbo to be quite interesting — I hadn’t realized that local residents, who were mostly artists, had a hand in choosing the name Dumbo. I had always assumed that the Two Trees development group was responsible for naming it, inspired by SoHo, NoHo, etc…. I also found it curious that, in choosing Dumbo, the current residents thought it would safeguard them from attracting new development. However, as was the case with SoHo and also Williamsburg, artists tend to be early gentrifiers and trendsetters for neighborhood revitalizations.
The neighborhood I live in is currently named Prospect Leffert Gardens (PLG) but when I meet long-time residents they like to remind me that not so long ago, this neighborhood was called Flatbush and it had a reputation for rampant crime and violence. But after reading Madden’s piece, I was curious to learn more about the creation of Prospect Leffert Gardens. It turns out the typonomy happened in 1968 by the Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association (PLGNA), a community-based organization established by “residents who opposed unfair real estate and bank practices like redlining and wanted to form a working interracial neighborhood. One of its first projects was to document 300 abandoned and 300 deteriorating buildings within the neighborhood. In 1973, PLGNA became involved in a landmark legal battle to combat redlining” (PLGNA Faceboook page). It’s exciting to learn that, in the case of PLG, the naming of the neighborhood was done by a group of radicals with the expressed intent of protecting itself from predatory real-estate economics. While the neighborhood is currently undergoing massive real-estate investment and it has undoubtedly felt similar effects of displacement as other gentrifying neighborhoods, I have also observed that PLG is developing in a different way from its neighboring Crown Heights. There is a distinct feeling of ownership of the neighborhood from long-time residents who want to continue to build their community with those who have recently moved.
Finally, Madden’s piece got me thinking about what will constitute the neighborhood of Gowanus once the rezoning plans have gone through and the redevelopment is underway. Given that Public Housing has been explicitly cut off the map of the rezoning process, can this be understood as a backhanded way of saying to NYCHA residents, “Gowanus is no longer yours.” Just like the resident from Faragut said in the Madden article, will residents of the Gowanus Houses have to say: “I live in the projects near Gowanus”? I also think that it is interesting that once upon a time the neighborhood of Gowanus conjured up images of grime and seediness. But there is a reappropriation of the meaning of Gowanus today as cool, hip, creative and off-beat. In a Bakhtinian sense, there is an inherent dialogical struggle in the production of meaning and the new meaning of “Gowanus” is a perfect example of this.
Week 10 Blog – Neighborhood
After a quick google search on Brooklyn neighborhood names to see what odd nomenclature applies to our research site, the internet suggested “Parkwanus” – which everyone on the internet agrees is not a real thing. But still, the merging of neighborhood names, or rather, the extension of a gentrified adjacent area to envelop a stigmatized industrial canal zone signals, even in jest, that something specific is going on in Gowanus. (https://gothamist.com/news/welcome-to-parkwanus-the-new-brooklyn-neighborhood-nobody-asked-for)
In Madden’s “Pushed Off The Map,” he argues that toponymy is more than just real estate gimmicks to rebrand a neighborhood, undervalued and ripe for development: changing neighborhood names serves as a mechanism to “legitimize and naturalize displacement, gentrification, privatization and recommodification” (Madden 1) . In his specific discussion of the exclusion of NYCHA campuses from the “community,” he also names a tension that came up in our last meeting at the Gowanus houses: “to identify the neighborhood this way is to engage in social boundary work” (Madden 12).
So this makes the silly name of Parkwanus all the more peculiar to me. The rezoning intentionally excludes NYCHA as to reinforce this social exclusion despite geographic proximity. The redistricting, built upon by census data as we learned, serves as an official layer to the complexities of social life in the neighborhood. Yet as we explored in Wasielewski, the grit and post-industrial spaces that make Bushwick so desirable perhaps is present in the suggestion of merging Gowanus with its posh neighbor. Gowanus, in this sense brings these two tensions of excluding working class POC from neighborhood belonging, while continuing the urban trend of fetishizing industrial spaces: “appropriating the aesthetics of the white wokring class allowed urban dwelling middle class whites to discard the trappings of their white bourgeoisie upbringings and feel a part of an exotic underclass…simultaneously consum[ing] and appropriat[ing] disinvested urban areas” (Wasielewski 37). What do these conflicting and polarizing views tell us about the challenges for the proposed rezoning?
There is a lot to chew on this week.
I think I’ve mentioned before that the perspective of finance is in some ways a privileged one for the study of politics. “The budget,” Rudolf Goldscheid said, “is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” Joseph Schumpeter added that it involved “a collection of hard, naked facts which yet remain to be drawn into sociology.” Charles Tilly stated that it provided “a sort of CT scan for a regimes entire operations.” There is much to be said, also, for the view that the budget is simply a more or less important moment in a much wider set of flows that make up the public finances, but also finance in general. We know that little happens without finance. A Renaissance cliche has it that “money is in the body politic what blood is in the human body.”
I found the literature review on financial geography, then, to be especially enlightening. I didn’t quite understand a lot of it. I take it that since finance is very important lots of smart people have spent a lot of time developing a language for it and techniques that are not very legible. It is a specialization and therefore it constitutes an autonomous realm. The bibliography offered in the review will be useful to go through.
One thing that did leap out at me, though, is that a lot of the history of New York City is a history of making real estate legible to specialists in finance, in order to reduce it not only to an exchange value but also to a sort of money. The Manhattan grid, for instance, by standardizing slices of land made them easier to compare, evaluate, and quantify for trade and investment. The reading gestures towards an array of advances in real estate practice, in “advanced real estate valuation, benchmarking, categorization, market signals, rating,
calculative practices, and conventions,” which serve to “translate between scales and
sectors,” and thereby make real estate globally commensurable and, therefore, investable.
That seems to me – although I’ll have to read more to fully understand it – to be an astonishing finding. So much of New York City politics, bound up as it is in housing, rests on it. The gesture is toward a whole world of quotidian, professional practices that are hidden and insulated from this politics but simultaneously, profoundly underpin it.
The Prospect Lefferts Gardens naming by late 60s era radicals that Rebecca references – we get a glimpse of the process in Amanda Wasielewski’s Made in Bklyn excerpt. Almost in real time (although it already seems so dated in the gentrification-on-steroids that marks the slice of Brooklyn she focuses on, “Morgantown”), we see the divisive, cannibalistic politics of naming (up-and-coming places) – her account is structured by a whole slew of dichotomies (hipster/Makers, wannabes/artists, idealistic/neoliberal, sharing/self-promotional) that speak to the internal divisions among mostly white middle class, younger artistically-inclined “pioneers” and the also mostly white middle class, somewhat older professionals and others drawn to areas anointed with an extra dose of whatever coolness is. That gentrification occurs in particular places deemed to have whatever special qualities are sought after at the moment underscores that real estate speculation is only in part enabled by the abstraction of roughly similar gridded city lots. The other, dialectical component is the need for some places to stand out (artificially as in the case of otherwise generic Morgantown; perhaps more “naturally” in places with particular distinctive features). Speculation needs both the abstraction of “on-paper” sameness and the concrete specificity of “on-the-ground” distinction, especially if temporarily underpriced – “buy low (to sell high later)” is only possible if places have relatively different exchange values.