Back In the NIMBY Saddle
On coming home to a hateful email and why Andrew Cuomo needs to go fuck himself
Whenever I get an email from my block association and the word “homelessness” is in the subject line, I reach for a bite stick.
NYC, the world’s capital, is pretty delusional about being a bastion of progressivism. However, what’s funny in a New Yorker cartoon is morally repugnant in a doorman building. I’ve now lived in Chelsea for just over a decade, but I will never be over the cognitive disconnect that exists between the identity politics and the fiscal mindset of this neighborhood. The wealth gap contained between 7th and 10th Avenues could aptly be described as a chasm. This is a topic I’ve ranted on before, in an essay I’ve included below, published almost exactly four years ago. (Here it is in published form, but I am including my final draft before edits, slightly longer and saltier, as I am wont to prefer.) It documents the brief stint I spent as a member of said block association, which is why I still receive their emails which do little more than inspire rage, grief, or an imagined Larry David scenario.
I am also revisiting this essay on the eve of a primary that is probably going to break my heart. I first posted about Zohran Mamdani on Instagram the morning after Trump won last November. Looking for some kernel of hope or simply some corner of this country to call mine, I wanted to tell all five of my followers to look to the mayoral campaign and to get involved. In the seven months since, Mamdani’s campaign is, I think, the only bit of politics I follow that has made me smile. His push for a diverse, affordable city and the kindness and competence of his campaign message staggers my jaded political imagination.
The knowledge that he is supposed to lose to Andrew Cuomo, who, like Trump, is a macho nepo-baby from Queens who has used tens of millions of tax payer dollars to pay his own legal fees and who, like Adams, might not even live in our fair city, is deeply upsetting to me. More upsetting still, in its own cruel way, are Mamdani’s surging numbers that, as they rise, only promise more pain and disappointment when we swear in a mayor who lied under oath about his pandemic dead, so he could strut his “Zaddy” stuff during lockdown. It makes me nauseous to ponder how I will feel on June 25, but I know exactly what I am doing on June 24, and I am thrilled to be in town to vote for Mamdani.
Since I wrote the below essay, I have shed the belief that I can stomach a compromise for federal rule by a pack of centrist whores while pushing for an uncompromising left closer to home. Yes, all politics is local. And, yes, the devil is in the details. However, the Democratic Party’s spinelessness this year and its inability to summon a shred of human decency for those who struggle here at home or those whom we profit from bombing abroad, has disabused me of that notion. I’ve more or less disengaged from national politics and, as it might be noted here, from spending too much time in this nation. While it is hardly news to say I don’t trust this country, the sadness I feel about it is only compounded by not really being able to afford to live in the city that is its purported “refuge.” All this brings me to the main reason I am still a registered Democrat: to vote for a Socialist on June 24.
Please research the primary on June 24 if you are a registered Democrat in NYC. Know that ranked voting does NOT mean you have to rank Andrew Cuomo. Please give Mamdani a hearing even if you don’t love the idea of a Socialist and please feel free to text me if you want to talk about it at all.
In the meantime, here’s a time capsule from the last NYC primary (which I’ll say we botched)…
Rude Health:
Notes On the Reopened NIMBY Economy
No one wants to talk about it, but it’s true: a lot of Americans had a fantastic year in 2020. According to Forbes, we can reliably place that number around 43 million, since 14 percent of American families are directly invested in the Stock Market. And, wow did it perform! As the financial capital of the world, New York City has a good many denizens riding high. But for the 20 percent of New Yorkers who live below the federal poverty line, most of whom are Black and Latino, the pandemic year was a catastrophe. At the beginning of 2020, before COVID-19 hit, New York already had a jaw-dropping wealth gap that saw the top one percent of the city’s residents living on an income 113 times that of the bottom 99 percent. The pandemic hit New York particularly hard, but it was Black and Latino people who suffered the most: they were four times as likely as their white neighbors to lose their job or die from COVID-19.
But these are not the issues that are propelling the mayoral campaign. As of this writing, Eric Adams, NYPD veteran and Brooklyn Borough President, appears to have the lead in the primary over a field of more progressive Democratic candidates—albeit one that is plagued by scandals. The law-and-order Adams seems to be the kind of Democrat only the Rudy Giuliani-loving New York Post could dream up (although it appears that Adams might live in New Jersey).
Adams pushed back forcefully against the movement to defund the police, even as he ran on a working class message of recovery that was largely aimed at Black and Latino voters. Yet as we come out of quarantine, I have to wonder why we need to fear-monger and play the hoary old game of focusing on crime when NYC is clearly awash in fiscal gains? How is the local economy suffering so horribly as the stock market—the one downtown in this very city—soars higher and higher?
Obviously rich Americans don’t like to share. But, I would argue that, in New York, this selfishness has a very particular flavor. We hear a great deal about Silicon Valley social progressives who love to hang onto their money, but what about all of these ostensibly progressive New Yorkers who require their many possessions to be so thoroughly policed? In New York City, a lot of these people were historically progressives. Frustratingly, they still think of themselves as such. Our local limousine liberals are known euphemistically as Brownstone Brooklyn, or may reside pretty much anywhere on Manhattan's West Side. They are proud registered Democrats who worship the holy trinity of The New York Times, NPR, and The New Yorker. They are New Yorkers whose grandparents were perhaps labor agitators who organized against sweatshops; or, perhaps they marched in the very first Pride parades not long after they moved to town. Now, after decades of gentrification and rocketing real estate values, they vote with their wallets. They will tell you that they still hold dear those values that animated their youth or their grandparents’ youth, but chances are they do not live their best liberal lives.
As the city emerges from the pandemic and enters election season, we have a prime opportunity to address the chasm between the city’s purported values and the money that floods its economy, money that isn’t reaching enough people. I know this chasm well. Throughout the pandemic, I stayed in my apartment in Chelsea, a neighborhood that is home to the world’s most expensive art galleries and extensive housing projects. I had a front-row seat to this divide—and how my neighbors behaved around it over the turbulent past year. In March 2020, I became sick with a relatively mild case of COVID-19 and recovered within 10 days. Getting sick and recovering so early on put me in a state of enormous cognitive dissonance—in which I have remained suspended ever since.
In May, a mobile morgue sprung up a few blocks from my apartment in a long, white trailer; my 52-year-old cousin died from Covid alone in a Long Island hospital; and the police broke up a crowd of would-be diners lining up for $70 veal parm take-out at Carbone. As they used to say on Sesame Street: one of those things was not like the other! (NB: that final item marked the first and last time in my recollection of the pandemic that the NYPD molested a crowd of wealthy white people.)
Next came the civic education of June, the rage and the protests. I made my protest sign, and I did my share of marching. Rightwing pundits sneered that this was a pasttime for the unemployed; leftwing memes countered that capitalism is what keeps you down, too preoccupied with paying rent to raise a fuss. I would argue both had a point. When my own building was looted one night, I returned from the protests the following day to find the lobby under private armed guard.
So, I did what any tightly-wound, concerned New Yorker would do at such a juncture: I joined my Block Association. What happened next was the closest thing to a political awakening I’ve had in my extremely coddled existence. Not long after police wielding nightsticks broke up 2020 Pride, we had a meeting with the Tenth Precinct. Naturally, idiotically, naively, I assumed my neighbors were a little concerned by the cops. Most of the block association’s members are a generation older than I am. They had lived through another plague: AIDS. They had fought for their rights and watched their friends die. Surely, they would be on the side of these protestors?
Well, it turns out property ownership changes things a little. Apparently, they were terrified. Yes, the building had been looted, but even Captain Kevin J. Coleman, the commanding officer of the Tenth Precinct, assured my neighbors that the culprits were from the area known as Upstate New York and had nothing to do with the protests: they were opportunists from out of town. This explanation didn’t land. The captain apologized profusely, over and over again. This, mind you, was the same police force that had kettled me at a protest weeks earlier, a mere 12 blocks away; but on our block association’s Zoom call, they were basically my valet service.
Why, my neighbors whined over and over, were there so many homeless people—“unhoused,” the captain was quick to correct—and why did they have to come here? (I would like to add that some block association members were good enough liberals to learn the first names of the people living on the sidewalks.) When someone asked about the much-publicized summer spike in gun violence, the captain assured the block association that there had only been one local shooting and no deaths in the area—as long as you excluded the projects on Ninth Avenue, i.e., our other neighbors, the ones not in the Block Association. (Lest you think I am exaggerating, I do have a recording of this meeting in my possession.)
The members of my block association were not alone in failing to live according to their purported values. The shameful evictions at the Lucerne Hotel soon followed: tony Upper West Siders forced homeless men out of their temporary housing at a pandemic-emptied hotel, throwing them back into the vicious cycle of uncertainty with which the unhoused must contend. I’d bet good money that most of those uptown locals who lobbied for the eviction voted for Biden in November. And, hey, I’m grateful they did! But this realization, and the nail biting, gut-wrenching stress of the presidential election, made me realize that there was a very clear division of labor between local and federal government—especially as a New Yorker.
Simply put, after 2020, it’s clear we will not get anywhere if we frame progressivism as a national project. The Democratic Party defeated Trump. And, that’s a wonderful thing. But, pretending it has anything to offer with regard to the politics of wealth and policing and public health in New York City is absurd. On a basic level, what would a party that simply takes our state’s electoral votes for granted offer us in any kind of way? (The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo wrote an insightful column that describes the same feelings about the blue state of California, where he lives).
In other words, the Democratic party is merely a bulwark against fascism—nothing more, and nothing less. It’s utterly inept at helping anyone on the ground. I am completely cynical about the federal government yet bone-weary of false equivalency. I’ve come to accept that the US will continue to fight its abhorrent wars abroad, no matter who is in office, and that my federal taxes will be used to fund them. I see this as a mere tithe. But what happens in my city is of desperate and deep importance to me.
Right now, as millions of New Yorkers suffer from illness and poverty caused or exacerbated by the pandemic, the municipal government must help the poor. The rich in New York are extremely wealthy. They can literally afford to fight City Hall. If, on a national level, I’m fine shaking hands with a centrist or even a never-Trump Republican, I am basically a Marxist on a local level—especially in primary season. Right now, the subways don’t work, the school system is in chaos, and housing insecurity is endemic. Since the federal government will not step in, the local government must—even if doing so means entering into an adversarial relationship with the wealthy. I’m confident that anyone who thrived financially during the crisis can figure out how to eke out a living during the recovery. Surely, the rich have bootstraps to spare. They shouldn’t be the concern of New York City’s mayor.
In another context, I might use this conclusion to tell you why New York is the greatest city in the world. If you disagreed or complained, I’d muster enough local color to tell you to keep it moving. Instead, I’ll say this: I believe progressivism lives or dies in the details. Those details inherently vary from place to place. We can cooperate as a nation, but understand our needs to be substantively different at the local level. Perhaps we can find more unity on the Left as a country if we are able to give one another more breathing room on a municipal level. So, allow me to take the space in this conclusion I’d reserved for my civic pride and instead ask you to write this piece about your own city or town or village. I’d love to read it! After all, as Tip O’Neill liked to say, all politics is local.