There is nothing at all new about the vast disparities of wealth in New York City. We've always exaggerated the essence of America and capitalism; we're a set-piece for the highs and the lows, a paradigm of polarities, a model for economic extremism since Colonial times, right?
Actually, I think there is something new. You've seen the data - the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a degree that I don't believe Marx even foresaw. But that's not all. What's different about New Yorkers in the first decade of the twenty-first century is the noisome combination of extraordinary wealth and matching self-satisfaction. We feel so smug in our progressive values, our liberalism, our superiority over the Nascar-watching, Applebee's- inhaling, mega-church-swarming millions in the rest of the country that we allow our "values" to be just another wardrobe item, something to be shown off, a personal branding statement that confirms our moral stature and obfuscates our implicit acceptance of the decay around us.
What's brought me to these fulminations are two stories that appeared as virtual metaphorical bookends in the New York Times, that great disseminator and smugness reification engine.
The first story, which showed up on October "11th, deals with a change in New York City's regulations regarding homeless shelters. The old policy allowed families to stay overnight in shelters on an emergency basis, should their applications have been denied. Usually, such applications are turned down if the city believes the homeless can stay with a friend or relative. (Over the weekend, WNYC pointed out that when a homeless applicant claims that a relative won't take their families in, the city actually sends investigators to verify the report.)
Before the new regulations, homeless families who applied after five would be given temporary shelter. But, as the Times reports,
Some families using this emergency provision would keep their belongings with them and repeat the process, moving to a new shelter the next day, often late at night, the city said.
Families began to realize if they came in after 5 they could evade that accountability," said Linda I. Gibbs, the city's deputy mayor for health and human services. "What we are doing now is closing the loophole."
I find that sickening. Are loopholes only okay for the rich and well-connected? On Wall Street, billions are made by those wily enough to find the tortured path to wealth through interstitial opportunities; aren't computer programs that identify and magnify nano-market mispricings and inefficiencies just a loophole? Don't $800/hr lawyers get paid to find loopholes?
Who's closing those? On the contrary, the same city administration that is obsessed with closing this loophole is equally obsessed with the fear that New York's primacy as the world's financial market is being threatened by London, because we've got too much regulation (read Sarbanes-Oxley) and London is less regulated. In other words, it's in our economic interest to create a more porous business environment while we over-regulate the homeless.
The second story that inspired me to mount my high horse was more than a story. In fact, it was the entire Sunday magazine section of yesterday's Times. Themed "City Life in the Second Gilded Age," the content was entirely devoted to the vast pools of wealth that are sloshing around the city and have turned it into a Veblenian theme park, a Mammonsphere, Versailles with a co-op board.
Because the New York Times knows its audience (as my wife Flora pointed out when she spied an additional magazine-like section devoted to fancy watches) the issue was a paean to affluence, a catalog of the joys of gildedness, a consequence-less state that revealed nary a shadow of anxiety about the moral, ethical, social or political consequences of such economic grandiloquence. (By the way, if the Times had the same nuanced understanding of the pre-war situation in Iraq as it does of the difference between living in New York on $500,000, $750,000, and $1MM a year, they might not have done their part in legitimizing this catastrophe).
Even the normally astringent James Traub seems to have been caught up in the frolic. In his column "The Measures of Wealth" he references a poll that the Times did for this issue (a typical trick these days; you create the illusion of news via a sponsored poll, and then report on what you have manufactured) that asks if the city is "worth what it costs."
The result was not surprising. "Slightly less than half" believes so. That's not a surprise. We're so cool, so safely ensconced in our wealth and tightly bundled into our preferences that we're willing to overpay for the privilege of residence. Then Traub goes on to note: "They wouldn't actually move of course, that's unthinkable. But living here in the center of the universe exacts a terrible tribute, not only in dollars but in anxiety and envy - not so much of our suburban or country cousins as of the lucky few who glide above us on the sweet breezes of wealth." Gee, my heart goes out to those suffering the pain and suffering of the invidious comparison. I'm a half-bath and a terrace short of being at one with the universe.
The Times front-of-the-book section on Sunday, in which the Traub piece appeared, is called "The Way We Live Now." The description has always struck me as the kind of wink-wink pretension that is the Times at its smarmy worst. Who the hell is this "we" anyway? This strategic familiarity and the cozy sense of shared understanding creates a faux complicity between the newspaper and its readers that is at the toxic heart of the lifestyle journalism that the Times pioneered, if I can use that word.
It may be the way some of us live, or more importantly, want to live, but it isn't the way the people in the October 11th story are living. This is so obvious it shouldn't need to be stated, but the fact that the Times doesn't recognize the irony of their rubric, is telling commentary on their view of the world, a blinged-out trickle-up zone.
As New Yorkers we feel pretty good about ourselves. We celebrate our virtues and mock our negatives in a way that feels triumphant. We would shudder to think of ourselves as blind to the struggles and suffering of the poor among us. But the truth is, while we bask in our liberal pieties and strut as Masters of Our Cleaned-Up Urban Universe, we exhibit no outrage at our mechanistic Mayor Mike.
Are there homeless people clever enough to work the system? Absolutely? Should a city awash in wealth go after them with a Gestapo-like investigative intensity? You decide. For me, a city that is willing to put families out into the street in order to close a loophole that a few offenders are able to manipulate truly makes us a city that is not worth what it costs.