Outtakes

Grad school applications are basically done now. There was a lot I wrote that hit the cutting floor solely for space, so enjoy this installment in mikebot history.

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When I got a chance to work for a non-profit in New York City in early 2002, I jumped at the opportunity and moved up here from Virginia. The job that drew me to New York was a grant writing position at a medium-sized quasi-governmental organization that worked to reform the State court system.

In planning for a project that would dramatically expand alternative-to-incarceration programs in the Bronx Criminal Court, technical constraints required our project to obtain a paper copy of the rap sheet for each defendant. The court administrator, more than willing to oblige, connected us to the police officer in charge of producing the rap sheet. “Here’s the thing, buddy,” said the officer, “we only have four-layer carbon paper in this dot-matrix printer and all four are spoken for. And they don’t make five-layer carbon paper.” This single detail nearly derailed the project and prevented thousands of people in the justice system from getting the help they needed. The environs of the courts, while depressing, showed me that every policy idea, no matter how brilliant, obvious or just, must be accommodated to the realities of dealing with politics and stakeholders.

I am particularly troubled by the growing inequalities that New York and most major cities are continuing to foster. Inequality has been linked to disparities in health outcomes and access to education; it is clearly connected to disparate political power. Because of new investment in Brooklyn, many of the people who worked so hard to seed positive change in their neighborhoods around cannot stay to eat the fruits of their labors. This is a recipe for destabilizing the entire metropolitan area.

As I worked in neighborhoods like Long Island City, Red Hook, and the South Bronx, I began to see the intimate link between joblessness and urban pathology. It had been drawn out on an intellectual level for me in Thomas Segrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis, but here I saw up close the consequences of deindustrialization; when the jobs move away from the people who need them, people suffer. I saw factories close, and the blue-collar economy was pushed aside by real estate pressures for an upscale community that has never quite materialized.

It was in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Brooklyn that I saw exactly what New York was losing in the underbelly of its real estate boom. A friend owned a small company that fabricated sets for musical acts and television shows. Here was a truly valuable enterprise that supported the local creative sector. During the month he lent us part of his shop to build a float for the Halloween parade, a sweeping rezoning was announced for the neighborhood to allow more residential development on 180 blocks. As a result, the business was evicted by the end of the year. In the three years hence, the 5,000 square foot factory that the company paid top dollar to rent has lain vacant with a sign asking for prospective buyers to contact “Major Development Corp.”

However, this experience led me to testify as a citizen at a city hearing about the rezoning, where I met my future supervisor from the New York Industrial Retention Network. Several months later I began to work for them organizing companies in the neighborhood that were at risk of being displaced by the changes in the real estate market that would result from the rezoning. This advocacy resulted in a couple of City-funded economic development programs that have helped to retain several hundred jobs in the neighborhood by reducing companies’ energy usage, making manufacturers more efficient, and constructing new affordable space for industrial jobs.