Tag Archives: New York City

Places that represent America, in memes and other forms

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Ohio is a running meme in social media:

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According to Know Your Meme, treating Ohio as a joke started in 2016 after the meme “Ohio vs the world” went viral on Tumblr. User @screenshotsofdespair posted a photo of a digital marquee in an unknown city that read, “Ohio will be eliminated.”

At the time, the joke was Ohio was secretly plotting to take over the world, hence the photo calling for its silencing. By the time 2020 rolled around, jokes about the state had evolved…

Now, most memes about the state are saying “so Ohio” or “only in Ohio” about something bizarre or random. It’s usually tied to images, GIFs or videos that highlight something ridiculous. The memes imply that Ohio is a place where strange things happen. Ironically, it’s actually been named one of the “most normal” states in the U.S.

Describing the internet trend, Know Your Meme explains how the memes have essentially re-branded Ohio. Now it is “an American middle place, existing as a capitalist wasteland of chaos and mayhem, akin to creepypastas, lore and randomness, becoming an imagined epitome of American signifiers such as Breezewood, Pennsylvania.”

The Ohio memes have become so near-constant that they’ve taken on a life of their own. To date, the hashtag #Ohio has 33 billion views on TikTok, while #OnlyInOhio has about three billion. In some cases, people have made memes about the memes.

I am intrigued by this idea of particular places embodying America, whether normal or weird. Breezewood? I look forward to driving by it several times a year. The Midwest as the “heartland”? In the sociological tradition, how about “Middletown” and the long set of studies devoted to this community (which was Muncie, Indiana)? Or, what about the claim that Chicago is the most American city? Or, the idea that one can see real America at Walmart or at an emergency room on a weekend night? Perhaps this has a long tradition, even if it is now taking the form of memes.

And then there could be places and communities that are known but cannot embody all of America. Could New York City all about America or does its status as the leading global city and its particular history and character mean that it cannot embody all of the United States? (Perhaps normal American cities are Cleveland.)

Moving forward with a congestion tax for entering Manhattan

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A state board recommends vehicles entering Manhattan south of 60th Street pay the first congestion tax in the United States:

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Under the plan, passenger car drivers entering Manhattan south of 60th Street during daytime hours would be charged $15 electronically, while the fee for small trucks would be $24 and large trucks would be charged $36.

Cities such as London and Stockholm have similar programs in place, but New York City is poised to become the first in the U.S.

Revenue from the tolls, projected to be roughly $1 billion annually, would be used to finance borrowing to upgrade the city’s mass transit systems…

Officials say that in addition to funding needed transit improvements, congestion pricing will result in improved air quality and reduced traffic…

“The Traffic Mobility Review Board’s recommended credit structure is wholly inadequate, especially the total lack of toll credits for the George Washington Bridge, which will lead to toll shopping, increased congestion in underserved communities, and excessive tolling at New Jersey crossings into Manhattan,” Murphy, who filed a federal lawsuit over congestion pricing in July, said in a statement.

In the US city with the highest rate of mass transit usage, this makes some sense. The roadways are crowded. Mass transit systems need money. At least some of the vehicles entering the city can afford the fee.

At the same time, Americans like to drive free. Cars and driving are an essential part of American life, whether cruising down a highway or delivering many goods via truck. Many will not be happy to pay extra to drive down taxpayer roads into parts of the city when it used to be free.

If this goes forward in Manhattan, how soon until it comes to other American cities? Those places may have fewer alternatives to driving but the revenue – and other benefits – might be hard for other places to pass up.

Pilot ADU program in New York City

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New York City has started a small program that could help address the need for housing in the city:

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New York City just unveiled its newest effort, which will hand 15 homeowners up to $395,000 to build an additional apartment. This could mean an extra unit in a garage, basement, or attic, or a tiny home in the backyard. The idea is to boost housing density in a city in desperate need of new housing.

New Yorkers can apply online for the funding, but high-income residents aren’t eligible — the income limit for a family of four is $232,980, the New York Times reported. And the ADUs that are built will have a limit on rent: a one-bedroom can’t be rented for more than $2,600.

The city’s department of housing preservation and development on Tuesday unveiled the “Plus One ADU” pilot program, similar to a state-wide initiative with the same name that has doled out tens of millions of dollars to help homeowners across New York State build ADUs in their backyards…

The effort is part of the city’s sweeping new housing reform proposal, which seeks to pave the way for 100,000 new homes in the city by encouraging conversions of commercial buildings into residential, boosting density near mass transit, and reducing space devoted to parking. The proposal also aims to legalize ADU construction across much more of the city.

Adding 100,000 units would be helpful as the city, like many major cities, needs lots and lots of units to provide more housing options and address housing costs. But, how quickly can these units be added and how much can they ease the housing issues? It would be worth looking at the math on this; at what point do the government funds lead to long-term savings? Hopefully, this is part of a comprehensive strategy that tries to add housing units in multiple ways.

Not all New York City is as dense as Manhattan but it is a pretty dense American city. How dense are city residents willing to go? Like many cities, there are different clusters of housing units in different neighborhoods. Adding a housing in basements or backyards can only happen in certain places and these changes would add residents. ADUs might be less visible than other means of providing more housing units – for example, high-rises would not be welcome in many residential neighborhoods – but Is there a point where residents feel there are enough ADUs?

Is Times Square beautiful?

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While busking as Mario, one writer describes Times Square in New York City:

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Times Square is beautiful when you judge it by aesthetics alone. Yes, plenty of great American sights are more spiritually fulfilling than this Cathedral of Stuff, but if you’re willing to set aside those exasperating anti-capitalist ethics for a few moments, I recommend letting the financial majesty of midtown wash over you. There is truly no joy quite like becoming entranced by a particularly sublime Coca-Cola advertisement, or being inexplicably inspired to take a picture of the Disney Store, and letting your brain cells atrophy away in dumbstruck glory. No, the only problem with Times Square is the obnoxious people who occupy it, and as I stood under the scarlet glow of an H&M sign, dressed in full Super Mario garb, gesturing toward the young families hurrying by—who were doing everything possible to finish up their Manhattan vacation without getting hustled into oblivion—I felt as if I was finally doing my part to make this city worse.

It is for sure a spectacle. Lights, noise, crowds. Activity at all hours. A place to see things and be seen. Can feel like the center of a universe.

Whether it is aesthetically pleasing is a whole different question. How do we judge beauty in cities? I suspect we could ask dozens of New Yorkers about what they find beautiful in their city and get even more responses. Is the problem the people who get in the way of the beautiful modern capitalist tableau?

There is nothing “natural” about Central Park

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Humans like to cultivate nature in the city. Central Park in New York City is a great example. This 13 minute video from Architectural Digest explains.

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From the video:

Vaux and Olmsted’s design called for a radical departure in the thinking of what a grand civic garden should be. They rejected the idea of highly formal rigid gardens like those designed exclusively for the wealthy. Instead, they proposed a naturalistic setting, filled with meadows, woodlands, gurgling streams, and surprising vistas. The resulting work involved shifting over 5 million cubic yards of soil, planting over 500,000 trees and shrubs, and excavating more than seven lakes and other bodies of water, all done by hand. In fact, the boulders like this one, which the bolt is sticking out of are the only original pieces of natural landscape in the park, and even many of these were unearthed, scraped, and cleaned to appear as they do today.

It is hard to imagine New York City without this park yet it radically transformed the setting.

One of the world’s wealthiest men has a plan for Miami and thinks it could eclipse New York’s financial sector

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Ken Griffin has a lot of money and big hopes for Miami:

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“We’ll see how big Wall Street South becomes,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg News at the Citadel Securities Global Macro Conference in Miami. “We’re on Brickell Bay, and maybe in 50 years it will be Brickell Bay North how we refer to New York in finance.”

Titans of Wall Street have flocked to South Florida in recent years, attracted by warm weather and lack of state income tax. But Griffin, who moved to Miami last year, plans to outdo them all by changing the face of the city with a more than $1 billion waterfront tower that will serve as Citadel’s headquarters, as well as political and philanthropic donations ranging from a children’s hospital to soccer.

Griffin, who is worth $35.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, still has high praise for New York, where Citadel maintains a considerable presence and intends to build an office tower. Citadel is planning a massive new Manhattan skyscraper that could rise to roughly 1,350 feet (411 meters) with 51 office floors and seven terraces…

“Miami, I think, represents the future of America,” he said.

Griffin has a vested interest in this matter. He just came from Chicago, a place where his politics did not necessarily align with others. He suggests Miami is pro-growth. He wants to spend his money locally.

It is true that New York City does not necessarily have to be the global financial capital forever. Places change, statuses rise and fall, industries shift and move. But, it would take a lot of change for New York City to be eclipsed by Miami as a financial center. For example, one ranking of global cities does not include Miami in its top 30 and New York City is #1. And the financial center aspect of New York is just one part of a city with numerous features and resources.

This sounds like boosterism. Griffin wants to raise the profile of Miami. He wants others to come to join him. He and the city can ascend together. There is money to be made in Miami – and in New York and in Chicago and in numerous other cities.

Skyscrapers happened because real estate was really expensive

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A quick history of the Chrysler Building in New York City provides a reminder of a key reason skyscrapers emerged in American cities:

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Dominating the New York skyline brought prestige and publicity, but tall towers also resolved a more prosaic problem: As land prices climbed, developers had to build upward to turn a profit, pushing their projects as high as engineering, natural light and, eventually, zoning would allow. “Skyscrapers were a self-fulfilling prophecy of the heated real estate market,” writes Neal Bascomb in his 2003 book Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City. By the 1920s, with Europe in ashes after World War I, these buildings became brash totems of a new world order. Manhattan in particular had become the “harbor of the world, messenger of the new land … of the gold diggers and of world conquest,” wrote the German architect Erich Mendelsohn in his seminal 1926 book Amerika, published the year after New York overtook London as the world’s most populous city.

In a dense space like Manhattan, demand for land pushed prices up. To make more money from the same plot of land, skyscrapers offered more space. The addition of thousands of square feet of office space, even if it could be hard to fill at times, provided profit.

I would be interested to see analysis shows the profits of a skyscraper over a lifetime compared to other options builders, developers, and companies could have pursued. Instead of building up in major cities, here are other options they could have pursued: building underground; building dense and wide buildings (imagine ones that cover several city blocks at a height of ten stories or so); constructing large buildings in other parts of the city and suburbs; and pursuing multiple business districts rather than centralized locations where everyone wants to gather.

Even if there was profit at stake, there is also the matter of the prestige of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are important symbols in a city skyline. Were skyscrapers both profitable and status-enhancing or did the increased status mean that the absolute numbers did not matter quite as much?

Housing migrants amid a tight housing supply

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New York City does not have much available housing and this leads to problems:

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You can see it by looking at residential-vacancy rates, which have been as low as 2 percent in recent years. You can tell by looking at the size and price of rentals and homes for purchase: The average rent in Manhattan is more than $4,000, and the average home in Brooklyn costs roughly $1 million. You can see it in the shrinking of New York’s middle class and the stagnation of its population and the widening of its income and wealth inequality. Housing supply has simply not kept pace with housing demand, squeezing everyone except for the very rich.

The same forces shunting families to the suburbs are weighing on the migrants. The same forces driving New Yorkers out of unaffordable apartments and into homeless shelters are weighing on the migrants. Migrants cannot afford housing for the same reason that the city itself struggles to raise money for new facilities. New York really is full…

High housing costs have a way of making every problem a housing problem. A homeless person needing help with a substance-abuse disorder needs housing first. A migrant requiring legal aid more pressingly needs a roof over their head. And high housing costs, of course, force millions of vulnerable people into homelessness. “Our homeless-response system has turned into a crisis-response system,” Gregg Colburn, an associate real-estate professor at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, told me. “So many other systems have failed or delegated responsibility to it.”

The opposite is also true: Low housing costs make other problems simpler to solve. Cheap housing reduces the number of people who become homeless. It also allows the entities providing assistance to do more for less, because their overhead costs are lower. And it frees up lawyers to work on immigration cases, substance-use experts to work on substance-use issues, and mental-health counselors to work on mental-health issues.

It is enough to make one think that seriously and sufficiently addressing housing should be a major priority!

The problem is not just limited to New York City. Multiple big cities in the United States need more housing units and lower-priced yet good quality housing. Having a stable place to live at a reasonable price goes a long way to better life outcomes and opportunities.

But, adding a lot of good housing takes a lot of work and there does not seem to be political will to address it. Additionally, it can be easy to look for other solutions to some of the different problems listed above. Would building more good housing automatically solve these issues? No, but it could help a lot and make it more possible for people to live and enjoy major cities.

How much all the buildings in New York City weigh

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New York City has a lot of buildings in its 300+ square miles. All those structures weigh a lot:

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New geological research warns that the weight of New York City’s skyscrapers is actually causing the Big Apple — whose more than 1 million buildings weigh nearly 1.7 trillion pounds — to sink lower into its surrounding bodies of water.

Given the innovations that helped give rise to all of these buildings, can we expect innovative solutions to the consequences of all that weight? One approach would be to create barriers between the surrounding waters and the habitable areas. However, that does not fully address the weight and the ground under the buildings. Are there ways to prop up large structures?

Basing arguments on absolute numbers vs. rates of gun violence

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Can different statistics about the same topic support different arguments? If looking at gun violence, here is one conclusion based on rates:

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In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.

Similarly, a 2022 brief posted by Drexel’s Urban Health Collaborative shows big differences in per capita gun deaths in major American cities with New York at the bottom of the listed cities.

But, the data could be interpreted in another way. Rates are expressed in the number of occurrences per a set amount of population. What do the absolute numbers say about gun deaths? One compilation of data from The University of Sydney shows 804 gun deaths in 2019.

Or, here is a 2022 article in the New York Times looking at shootings in the city:

Shootings are twice as high as in the years preceding the pandemic, and the burden falls primarily on Black and Latino neighborhoods. More than 1,800 shootings were reported annually in the past two years after dropping under 900 in 2018.

The absolute numbers sound high and can contribute to perceptions:

But fresh anxieties have driven warnings about a return to New York’s “bad old days,” when there were many years with more than 2,000 murders. To some, the resemblance between the periods lies not in the crime or the data, but in the coverage.

Rates are often used because they help make comparisons across communities with different population sizes. New York City has more shootings but it is also the largest city in the United States by a lot. There will be more crimes to possibly report on in a larger city but that is in part because of having a larger population.

Of course, if we are at a point where people just want to find a statistical interpretation that fits their perspective, we have bigger problems on our hands than simply discussing what numbers best reflect realities.

(See this earlier post involving rates on whether Chicago is the “murder capital” of the United States.)