WHY NEW YORK COSTS SO MUCH
Shame on Jennifer Loviglio. Her column “They Will Come”
(July 5) is another example of why progressives have a hard time getting the
story to the public. As a journalist who describes herself as having “knee-jerk
lefty impulses,” where is the investigation, the search for the truth? Her
article indicates that she is buying the corporate-Business Alliance
agenda that we have been victims of for a quarter century.
She laments the high property taxes, the cost of workers
compensation and Medicaid, the second-highest energy costs in the country, and
powerful public employee unions. Let’s see: could high property taxes and
regressive sales taxes have anything to do with the destruction of progressive
and corporate income taxes at both the federal and state level?
Industrial Development Agencies like Comida helped to create
three times more poverty-level jobs in New York than there were in the 1970’s,
according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. Comida tax breaks have cost over $13
million in school taxes alone, just during the period 2002 to 2004, to create
poverty-level jobs or no jobs. And 27 percent of this money went to businesses
that eliminated jobs. Those who tout the magic of the free market seem to have
no problem grabbing our tax money to make their business viable.
Workers compensation: let’s see. Some of us believe that in
a state that pays workers the second lowest workers compensation benefits in
the country, other factors have something to do with the high cost. The insurance
companies that underwrite workers compensation pass on the cost of attorneys
that litigate and try to deny every claim. And they make a higher profit than
they do in any other state.
Add the astronomical costs of health care and you have part
of your answer on workers compensation, Medicaid, and the exit of good-paying
manufacturing jobs, over one-third of them lost in less than nine years.
Of course corporate trade and tax policies are innocent. In
the auto industry alone, companies have a $1300 competitive disadvantage —
not against the Third World but against First
World democracies that all have national health insurance.
We can not forget the second-highest energy costs in the
nation, where New York bought
into deregulation after Enron and their corporate buddies almost bankrupted the
seventh largest economy in the world, California,
with energy deregulation.
As for those powerful public unions — teachers, city
workers, CSEA, firefighters, postal workers: public-employee union jobs have declined
by hundreds in five years. In my own union, the loss of postal jobs here since
2000 — all to subsidize the rates of corporate mailers — has taken $20
million out of the local economy per year.
Come on, Jennifer, come clean: is Jennifer Loviglio really a
pen name for Jay Gallagher of Gannett News Service?
Jim Bertolone, Shady Creek Road, Rochester(Bertolone is president of the Rochester Area Labor Council,
AFL-CIO, and the American Postal Workers Union Local 215.)
BLAME THE SYSTEM
I’m fed up with men thinking they know so much about women
and their bodies (“Why We’re There,” The Mail, July 5). This guy talked about
women who get abortions because Planned Parenthood never gave them another
option. What about options for women and girls who are raped by strangers,
friends, and family members? What options did they have?
Most of the protesters out in front of clinics don’t want
women to make their own choices. And yes, it is about choice. I wouldn’t want
to bear a child that was conceived by a man who forced his primal units inside
me. The truth is, women are the victims, and the protesters are close-minded
people who don’t want to give women havens.
Women and girls are still going to abort pregnancies, with
or without clinics, so why not have a safe alternative instead of coat hangers?
He talks about teenagers coming out of clinics scared, but what’s the root of
teen pregnancy? Slutty role models on TV. MTV, cable… all these media sell and
promote sex. Why do you think 12-year-olds dress like hookers? Because of
what’s on TV, in magazines, and in schools. There is peer pressure to look like
pop stars and models.
Don’t blame the youth, the clinics, or the women. It’s the
system, the mainstream media, MTV, and the male-dominated world.
Olga Tzogas, Meigs Street, Rochester
DESIGNING MARQUETA
ยกViva La Marqueta! Sujata Gupta discussed a great and
necessary idea in “North Clinton Rising” (June 28), but as it’s playing out,
another failure appears to be on the horizon. The primary mystery is this: Why
in 2006 are we not able to do something that we did so easily in 1906?
Back then, Rochester
was expanding. People were organizing themselves into ethnic neighborhoods and
establishing community resources. Rich, middle, or poor, they all created what
they needed within a short walk. Churches, clubs … retail — exactly the
retail they required, appropriate to the cultures of that area. Financing for a
modest storefront building with an apartment above wasn’t hard to come by. The
bank was local, or the builder had his own profits to reinvest.
Have things really changed that much? From the suburban
point of view, yes. The automobile has changed everything and made that
population’s tastes and lifestyles generic. It centralized and supersized
retail, making buyers dependent on developers who operate at a large scale with
huge investments. Having so much at stake in each new mall/box/strip, an
inevitable homogenization rules the design and content.
But a city neighborhood is different. Built for a
pre-automobile pattern of life, an urban street doesn’t need malls, boxes, or
strips. It functions best with the various services built on a small scale, and
then replicated many times, all over town. You don’t have to jump in the car to
get a loaf of bread, which is great if you don’t have a car. (As Gupta’s story
mentioned, that’s the case for many city-dwellers.) Though it’s not exactly
thriving, we that pattern is still alive all around town.
Family-owned shops and traditional building types allow for
infinite variations and adaptations. If one store or restaurant fails, it’s not
a tragedy; someone else will try again in an easily reusable space. Contrast
that with the corner Eckerd. When it fails, you usually have to rip it down.
This is also the scale at which smaller builders can be
brought into the picture. Aren’t there Latino construction companies that can
build a building? And African-American, Asian, etc. community-based
entrepreneurs who can restore neighborhoods as years ago the Italians, Germans,
et al built them? They understand the needs, can build what is appropriate, and
can enrich and lead their own communities.
Maybe the most important element of all is the sense of
identity and belonging that such neighborhoods give to their inhabitants. Not
sealed in a vehicle or isolated behind lawns and hedges, people live in
community rather than exist in a place. That very thing was supposed to be
celebrated on North Clinton.
So, what about La Marqueta? Where a simple collection of
storefronts surrounding a little plaza would be just fine, here we have another
“development,” laden with inflated expectations, that requires a big
developer to finance. And among all the grandiosity, the original intention is
lost. What was supposed to serve the neighborhood is now expected to serve
suburbanites, too, as if the locals don’t deserve it on their own.
But that’s not bad enough. What kind of ethnically inspired
marketplace are we actually being offered?
A strip mall.
Strip malls do not build neighborhoods. Strip malls destroy
neighborhoods. Nobody loves a mall or feels at home in a parking lot. Replacing
a field with a parking lot will do nothing to heal the fabric of North
Clinton or make the people around it feel valued. No matter how
gaily you paint the building, whatever Latino elements you paste on it with all
the authenticity of a Taco Bell, it will still be an insult to the community.
Yet another blemish, another missed opportunity.
Turning the city into suburbia destroys the city. How many
times must this be repeated? Why is Rochester so anxious to allow this to
happen? Who benefits from this?
Given the eventual implosion of hyper-suburbanism, the
cities will save our society. In the meantime, we have to save our cities. To
do that, we have to restore rather than redevelop. It’s the traditional
neighborhood and street-scrape design that is the magic.In
20 years will we let the suburbanites visit our urban utopia? Maybe, if they’re
nice. And contrite.
Carl Pultz, Redfern Drive, Rochester
WRITING TO CITY
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This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2006.
