Lobenthal.com

City Hall would be fighting the restrictions that prevent the City from itself building affordable housing, and give up the sham that working out sweetheart deals with the developers is accomplishing that.

It pains me to write this, because  I’ve dealt with a wonderful staffer at his office, but I’m shocked, although I shouldn’t be, by my Council Member Bottcher’s decision to betray the city by supporting the outrageous proposal to lift all caps on residential construction. This is an act of planning insanity and urban extinction.  

You cannot claim to be a progressive and be a toady for the realtors.

NYC has a a housing affordability crisis. It also has an overdevelopment crisis. Both of these crises will be exacerbated by this terrible provision.

Nobody wants to live there–44% of the units remain unsold. The gargantuan buildings sway in the wind. The apartments that sell are mostly used as occasional pied a terres by absentee owners. The apartments are deliberately under assessed by the city so the owners don’t have to pay what they actually should owe in taxes.

The scale and spirit of 57th street has been utterly crushed.  Almost every low-rise building that’s not landmarked has come down, including the former Rizzoli  and adjacent townhouses.  Low-rise landmarks like Steinway Hall and the Art Students League have become doormats for the supersized towers that rise above them–the Landmarks Commission has been disabled.  And there isn’t a jot of even “affordable” housing to be found. 

And this is what the developers and the politicians they bully and bribe envision for all of Manhattan, and why they want the height restrictions–which allowed these behemoths to be built–to be lifted entirely. It’s open season on New York City.

Another captured politician doing the bidding of the developers and Wall Street, lying about who benefits from lifting the cap on residential construction. It sure isn’t NYC residents who need affordable housing. Affordable housing will actually take a hit, because upzoning encourages the demotion of rent-regulated housing stock.

It’s a disgrace that Levine is using taxpayer funds to promote such an outage against the public interest.

One of the transparently fraudulent arguments used by the developers and their stooges in public office is that NYC must plan to house 12,000,000 residents, even though our population is 6 million and falling–and it will continue to fall, as the city becomes less and less affordable.

Lifting all caps on residential development in NYC will render our city unviable and increasingly unlivable.  Our elected officials and their paymasters in the development community are again plying their insidious “affordable housing” hustle to justify a winner-take-all pillage of the city by even more monstrous over-development that what has so far been inflicted. This has nothing to do with actual affordable housing for New Yorkers most in need, nor even with “affordable housing”–housing for those on the lower rungs of the 1 percent–which is as affordable as it gets with any new construction in Manhattan.

Despite their news division’s abhorrent attempt to ensure Trump returns to the White House.

He’s declared war on the United States, and he wants us all to make him Commander-in-Chief.

In her latest Orwellian blast at America, she questions whether  the robust employment numbers are actually a good thing.

Why didn’t Fox fire Bartiromo, even after she cost them millions in defamation damages? The very wealthy, self-styled fishwife did as much as ludicrous, loathesome Tucker to spread the Big Lie about the 2020 election. Yet she remains in place. It’s another key to the sick funhouse of Fox, where personal relationships to the ruling, authoritarian Murdoch family mean more than anything else.

As Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones in 2021, “It is Fox News that has torched the American political system over the past two decades, and it is Fox News that we have to continue to fight.”

Trump belches more attacks at Jack Smith, this time for exposing the delay & dismiss game that Judge Cannon is playing, devised undoubtedly by her and Trump’s attorneys.

This is the caliber of judge that Trump, McConnell, and the GOP-at- large inflicted on America. They could have given us genuinely conservative jurists. Instead they gave us ethically compromised right-wing radicals, all the way up to the Supreme Court.