Neil deMause: The Website

What do ocean trawling and mass transit have in common? unintended consequences.

There’s a word for it in the fishing world: “bycatch.” That’s the unfortunate tendency, when you’re trying to net one type of seafood — say, shrimp — to end up hauling in a lot of stuff you didn’t want or need — crabs, tuna, sea turtles, a Cousteau to be named later. It’s why eating wild-caught shrimp is considered the ecological equivalent of driving your SUV across the Alaskan tundra with the air conditioning on.

It’s also useful for understanding what the MTA faces in figuring how to raise bus and subway fares by 8 percent next year, to make up for the crash in tax revenues resulting from the popping of the real estate bubble… [read more]

More on the great Brooklyn supermarket showdown, this time with more thoughts on what the conflict means for hopes of a livable city:

The scene on Fort Greene’s Myrtle Avenue on Thursday was certainly bursting with cheap irony: John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket czar and likely 2009 mayoral candidate, being protested by local residents for taking away their only neighborhood supermarket. Catsimatidis, you see, is also a developer, and had torn down a strip of stores including an Associated (no relation to Catsimatidis’ Gristede’s chain) to make way for condo towers. Two years later, the site is still an empty lot; to add insult to injury, the demonstrators charged, the builder is now backing away from promises that the new buildings would include affordable housing.

If you live in one of the city’s supermarket-enriched zones, this might seem amusing — crying over Penn Station or Yankee Stadium is one thing, but an Associated?… [read more]

In part two of my debunking of overinflated economic impact studies, I examine the claims that New York City will see an influx of tourist spending as a result of the “Waterfalls” public art exhibit:

I was riding the B train across the Manhattan Bridge recently when an especially civic-minded conductor thought to point out Olafur Eliasson’s “Waterfalls” art installations visible out either window. One passenger near me got up to take a peek, then sat back down, shaking her head: “It looks like the Brooklyn Bridge sprung a leak.”

That seems the popular verdict on the $15 million project (mostly funded by private donations, though the joint city-state-run Lower Manhattan Development Corporation kicked in $2 million): This is a waterfall?… [read more]

The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is hideously behind schedule, but the bigger problem is what the city will end up with when it’s finally done:

Last week’s Port Authority report on progress (or lack thereof) at ground zero was a great moment for fans of political schadenfreude, with news of how virtually every aspect of the rebuilding is a shambles, with the new PATH station and 9/11 memorial massively behind schedule, and the whole project more than a billion dollars over budget. Meanwhile, the Cortlandt Street IRT station turns out to be inconveniently located mere inches from where two new skyscrapers are set to be built — who knew?[read more]

New York City is facing the prospect of bus and subway fare hikes again, but could there be another way to do this?

As if New Yorkers hadn’t been beset by enough bad news of late — foreclosures going through the roof, “The Real World” filming its next season in Brooklyn — last week the MTA chimed in with word that its latest round of budget woes would force it to “defer” planned service upgrades, possibly forever. With $500 million in red ink projected for next year, MTA chief Lee Sander declared, the authority needed to put off everything from renovating crumbling subway stations to buying new double-length buses - and still may consider another fare hike next year.

To blame is the MTA’s financing system, which draws roughly equally from fares and from a series of dedicated taxes… [read more]

More on the New York Yankees’ latest demands for city-backed bonds…

When the rich want to get richer off the public till, one trick is to make the theft so boring that only a trained accountant could understand it without dozing off. If Ken Lay had tried to pump up Enron’s stock by, say, floating rubber checks, he would have been tabloid fodder from Day 1; instead, nobody noticed until it was too late, largely because manipulating “stranded costs” and other nuances of the electricity markets made even regulators’ eyes glaze over… [read more]

It’s hard to find much to add to a story that begins with a young couple trying to evict 15 families so they can turn their apartment building into a mansion, but I give it the old college try anyway:

The Battle of 47 E. 3rd St. - the five-story East Village tenement whose landlords want to turn it into a private mansion - has everything: a five-year legal battle; architectural plans for remaking entire apartments into a home gym and nanny’s quarters; tenants and landlords duking it out by plastering dueling Web addresses (economakis.com and 47e3.org, for those interested) in their windows… [read more]

Soaring food prices, like soaring oil prices, are hitting hardest those who can least afford it, as well as the emergency food providers set up to help them:

With the price of a loaf of bread approaching that of a gallon of gas - isn’t it about time a refrigerator manufacturer follows Chrysler’s lead and offers a guaranteed price on groceries? - some in the media have begun to look at the effect on the nation’s 35 million people already suffering from recurrent hunger.

The unsurprising answer: “It pretty much sucks,” says Joel Berg… [read more]

NOTE: After I submitted my op-ed yesterday morning, Crain’s NY ran an excellent article with an in-depth look at how soup kitchens and food pantries are straining under the load. (Money stat: “The Food Bank For New York City, which provides the majority of food supplies for the city’s 600 pantries, is witnessing the sharpest decline in donations in a quarter of a century.”) Highly recommended reading.

The Metro website is still apparently running on autopilot, so you’ll need to consult the PDF version to see my column from this Monday. The topic, once again, is all the ways New York City spends money without telling anyone:

Last Monday, I noted in this space that while the city council is raked over the coals for handing out millions of dollars in “member items” to favored groups, the mayor doles out billions from the city budget with even less oversight. Over the next three days, the following news items appeared:

When Mayor Bloomberg and then-Gov. Pataki cut a deal in 2005 to give Goldman Sachs about $400 million for a new downtown Manhattan headquarters, they also agreed to give the firm another $321 million if there were delays rebuilding Ground Zero. No one involved thought to mention this to the public… [read more]

I neglected to post here about this Monday’s Metro NY column, but then, Metro has neglected to post it to their site yet, either. (Or update their site at all this week, for that matter.) You can read the PDF version here; a taste of what it’s about:

If you’re a New Yorker frustrated with the workings of our local government it’s hard not to be gleeful at news that lawyer Norman Siegel has sued for a judicial inquiry into the city council “Slushgate” scandal. The suit, based on a 19th-century city charter provision enacted after legendary account-padder Boss Tweed funneled half the city treasury to his cronies, is a longshot; still, it’s fun to picture council speaker Christine Quinn being hauled before a judge to explain why she thought allocating council funds to nonexistent groups was a bright idea.

Cheap thrills aside, though, many budget watchers say the council scandal is penny-ante stuff compared to the tried and true way for elected officials to spend money with little to no public oversight: the New York City budget… [read more]