Editorial

The Ratner-Bush Continuum

In every struggle there comes a moment when power is heaved against persistence. We are faced with two such struggles, one of which will be resolved by the National Election. It is not clear when the war against Ratnerism will end, but it is the same conflict.

Greed – the rapacious need to possess and control – is a perverse obsession. Getting becomes the objective rather than accomplishing. Owning more than others ultimately becomes the proof of power. With both Ratner and Bush, the question is whether wealth should be by the powerful because they are better suited to govern us than we are ourselves. Should these two men rule us because they are somehow endowed with vision, purpose and self-interest that will serve the common good as an accidental by-product?

Power is drawn to power. It is largely indifferent to where it comes from, how it is obtained, and the aftermath of its gathering. That is the definition of empire. It fits the concept of an “Ownership Economy.” Bush has been reduced to this oxymoronic snippet as a companion to “Freedom is on the March.” Economics is not about owning. It is about investing. The broader the public benefits of an investment, the sounder it is in the long term. Freedom may be on the march but if it marches over you in a tank, it is not freedom. It is empire.

Ratner is now testing the possibility of retreating to the Meadowlands. He has gutted his own basketball team beyond using it as a bargaining chip. We should not assume that means he has lost interest in Ratnerville on the Gowanus: The City of Irrelevant Dreams. Ratnerville is now being presented in yet another brochure that reads as though it were written by Boss Tweed, that misunderstood public benefactor of yesteryear. For example, Ratner offers ten thousand permanent jobs doing something, somewhere for somebody by someone. At the Atlantic Center the only permanent jobs are held by the employees of the DMV who are paid on the public dime. In such an ownership economy, what the public owns is the bills. The brochure assumes the reader is a child, unclear on reality and easily distracted.

The Meadowlands retreat may be a feint to blunt the energy of Ratner’s enemies. Very likely, it means that his investors are losing interest in the bait, the arena, which has been shown to be an economic disaster from the outset. Ratner is trying to buy off segments of the community with a secret community benefit agreement. Why must it be secret? If the deal is actually beneficial, why then does Ratner’s staff say the community can either take it or leave it?

Those in the Ratner Resistance have tenacity on their side. They cannot be defeated as long as their aim remains the wider interest of the community. The hole that is now the Atlantic Yards is not great, but shoddy Ratneresque solutions will make it worse. The present architectural wonders of Ratnerism demonstrate that. A concrete box the size of a small city is still a concrete box. You can paint it and cover it with faux bricks, but a box is a box and cheap construction is just that. Since Frank Gehry has moved on to numerous other projects and never seemed committed to Ratnerville in the first place, there is no reason to suppose that anything Mr. Gehry suggested would ever be built.

Empire is defeated by tenacity. For example, in its history, Poland has been erased from the map and its language banned, yet it is still there because the Poles would not give it up. The Afghans have defeated the British Empire and the Soviet Union. The Taliban, though nasty enough, could not have held on forever. When we have done making show and tell with the Afghans' internal affairs and pretending to hunt for Osama, they will go back to the same tribal configurations that have held sway there for thousands of years. It might not be our way of doing things, but why should it be?

The Right wing -- the Ratners and the Bushes -- can be defeated. There are countless stories of ill-equipped underdogs defeating the powerful by sheer tenacity. One of the best ones is about contentious colonists who without an army, an organized government, or a national treasure, shoved the British Empire off their backs. What they had was persistence on the principle of serving the common good.

For nearly three decades, the Right has advanced an ideology of greed as a public virtue. Now the results are coming to fruition before our eyes in the Ratnerisms already standing at Flatbush and Atlantic. Regardless of what politics they espouse, those who endorse wealth as the measure of one’s ability to govern, are supporting the Right. Whether they are impaired by zealotry like Bush, or cynics like Ratner, they are apostles of authoritarian greed.

We must remember two points. The first is that wealth is not the problem. Wealth can provide a fortress of economic stability against greed, and not be its handmaiden. Our society has been at times the model of that. By simply returning to the principle of a graduated income tax and the right of communities to participate in their development, that can be the case again.

The second is that avarice must be met blow for blow, because the avaricious will no longer have it any other way. The present polarization in this country is the conscious creation of the Right. They have battered at freedom, dignity, fairness, and justice. They have done so in the name of acquisition with posturing religiosity and ethical claptrap. It is time to beat them back.

GOING INTO THE HOLE WITH COACH BRUCIE

“As for Ratner, the Nets are merely a pawn for him to be the architect of an enormous redevelopment project in Brooklyn ... with the new arena for the Nets serving as the centerpiece.” So it’s official as of Mike Kahn, a sports commentator for CBS.Sportsline.com. The entire mess at Atlantic and Flatbush from the Atlantic Center to the Target Hulk to the Atlantic Yards Mutant City is a gigantic franchise hamburger stand disguised as a public benefit.

Throughout this process Ratner has indulged in a bathetic PR campaign of biblical proportions. They claim to be operating in the public interest while in fact providing Brooklyn, New Yorkers, the State of New York, and the nation with an under the table tax increase. The model here is the “Private Ownership Economy” being touted by the President as the solution to individual tax woes. If your pension fails, health care is beyond reach and affordable housing non-existent, the thing to do is to privatize these problems so they go off the books. They already do that with unemployment numbers. If you are out of work long enough, you cease to exist to the Bushites.

By the Bush model, industries like “real estate development” are not subsidized by investors, but by the public. They get to participate in the grand enterprises of the wealthy whether they want to or not through entities like the Ridge Hill Corporation that is being set up to funnel funds to Forest City Ratner. Did the dollars come from public or private sources? Who knows? Who cares? They went to FCR through Ridge Hill. Its all very nice and tidy. The bill for the Atlantic Yards Project is being tucked onto the public tab with the complicity of elected officials who should be protecting our interests.

Is this more alarming, surprising or outrageous than the notion that Forest City Ratner is building us, “A Garden of Eden” as they themselves claim? In fact they are already buying off the inhabitants of the garden and in return are receiving the blessing of total silence now and forever. Is this coercion, or does it finally become collusion with the people they buy off? The real point is that it does not matter because the issue is the reprehensible way in which the Atlantic Yards Garden is being created as a barren money pit.

The American Conservative view of government, as articulated by the Heritage Foundation, is that it should be made up of men who represent and serve the interests of the people. In so doing they would uphold the spirit and the letter of the law in a reasonable manner. If not they should be removed from government. It assumes a benign paternalism on the part of the rich and powerful. Would that be like Coach Bruce? Kenneth Lay of Enron? Anyone remember Ivan Boesky? Well, we busted Martha Stewart. She was the big fish all right.

The Liberal view of Government in the United States upholds the notion that it is the laws themselves that must be crafted and fine-tuned to fit the interests of the people. Neither model is being served by the corruption that is allowing Forest City Ratner to plunder the public’s wealth and undermine our legacy to the future. Ratner is building a bad debt as he has elsewhere in the country and as he did with the Atlantic Center. He as an array of second string political hacks on his team rather like the sorry bunch that will be left on the Nets when he is done giving them his own version of a blue light special.

Basketball, however, is a symptom of Coach Bruce’s willingness to obfuscate with cheap sentimental nonsense. Not long ago the Daily News ran this:

Some 100 Forest City Ratner Co. employees cut out of work Friday to help spruce up several central Brooklyn neighborhoods and Fort Greene Park.
Under a clear, heather-blue sky, lawyers, mail clerks and executives for the development firm landscaped and painted 21 buildings, painted park benches and weeded portions of the park.
On Fulton St. in Crown Heights, Brooklyn native and former Knicks player Bernard King courted passing African-American men to get screened for prostate cancer.
They joined about 900 employees of parent company Forest City Enterprises in 22 cities nationwide on Community Day, the first companywide volunteer effort.
I would not be at all surprised if once the money begins to flow from public and private sources into FCR, that it will be the last such exhibition too. It is nice to paint a bench here and there. The vision of lawyers in thousand-dollar suits driven cringing out into the sun to do actual labor is fairly gratifying. It is good to encourage testing for prostate cancer. It is venal nonsense to assume that such services are worth 2 billion dollars in public debt with about a quarter of that to be created before the doors of Ratner’s ruin even open on Flatbush.
There comes a moment though when the people responsible for their suffering are the victims. As the fall season gets underway in NYC, no one seems fooled anymore about what is going on here. They just seem buffaloed by the question of how to stop it. One way to do that is to get publicly, loudly, rudely, and relentlessly mad. Make it damn clear you are not going away. Then the important thing is to give money, time, effort, words, shoe leather and energy to getting Bush and his thugs out of office.

THE MARCH CONTINUES


As the summer marches to its conclusion, the Ratner team is trying to build a greater sense of inevitability that Ratnerville at Atlantic Yards is a done deal. Indeed in their minds it may be, but at what cost to us?

It has been pointed out that the deception being worked on sports fans is an important part of raising public awareness about what is going on here. This deal involves a gutted team that is being imported to an arena as a smokescreen for the larger project. The fans will not be able to get to the facility, much less park or even pay for the tickets given the numbers as they stand now.

More than that, however, the sports aspect of this deal is a proven catastrophe in the making given the way it has been financed and who will get the bill, the people of NYC and NY State. Lame duck governors and city pols with higher ambitions seem disinterested in the local impact. However, there remain two basic sets of facts about the Ratner Ruin that we are about to be “given.”

The first is that there is no way to pay for it. Olympics? Oh please. Salt Lake City is just now climbing out the initial debt they incurred from hosting the Olympics. NYC cannot now get its fair share of State and Federal funding to do business as usual. Why do we need a herd of white elephants to go with Ratner’s? Furthermore NYC is totally unsuited to hosting such a massive event in its downtown areas. We cannot host the Republican Convention without half the city being cut off from itself and the other half leaving town. What are we going to do with tens of thousands of athletes all of whom are from countries that are one way or another at war with someone in the “New World Order.”

It has been said that no legal action can be taken until actual debt is incurred which is to say when the wheels of construction are in motion. I wonder if that is true. Can you actually act with the intent to defraud a whole community and get away with it? Or are we the citizens of NYC really that much of a bunch of suckers? If so, its news to me. It is a crime to offer someone the purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge if you don’t own it because it is false advertising. Is it really legal to offer to build something that is demonstrably impossible to build and support within your means?

The second issue is simpler. Brooklyn has no place to put this goddamn thing as it is currently planned. Well actually, there are many parts of Brooklyn from Canarsie to the end of Atlantic Avenue that would benefit from such development, but not the Atlantic Yards. From fire protection to infrastructure and from sewerage to parking, the point has been made and made again that this is a dumb idea.

The factions are becoming clear as the summer haze thins. We must not get trapped into arguing the same position over and over again if it is not getting the right attention. Some are too dumb and others too venal to “get it.” The larger population of the city is indifferent because they do not think it effects them. We need to raise the stakes.

The first point is that we need to single out the political and business interests that will gain from the Ratner plan. There is nothing wrong with gain mind you, as long as it is not at the cost of others. Is your home worth the advancement that can be achieved by this Atlantic Yards Development? Is your community?

That has to be driven home hard to the electorate and the names of politicians and businesspeople need to be made very public as to who stands to profit. To do that we need to know who owns what and who gets paid. That may be less difficult than it seems. Then those persons, businesses and offices have to be hammered at every day until they make a face to face accounting of why their gain is more important than your loss. And we don’t have to start at the top to make it stick.

The second point is that Ratner cannot build anything that is humanly occupiable. The Atlantic Center by his own admission is a long-term hideous architectural error. It cannot be reached and why would you want to if you could? The new facility that houses Target has better accoutrements but the overall design is the same cheap urban construction as the earlier atrocity. The new complex is a big box store with a faux brick skin and a few curves. Traffic seems if anything more snarling and hostile than before. Another such facility will render the entire area an architectural excrescence.

Frank Gehry usually gets mentioned at this point. However, Mr. Gehry is not signed on the dotted line and Ratner is under no obligation to build what Gehry designs and is approved in any case.

If you need proof look into the planning for the new WTC and you will see that what they put on paper can always be changed by the developer in the name of financial exigency. FCR has a long history of doing just that.

In other words, we have to take this fight to their level. If inevitability is the question, then let’s make sure everyone understands what is inevitable if the Atlantic Yards project is built as it is currently planned. It will be a genuine source of urban blight as was the Atlantic Center which still sits there being shored up by renting it on the public cuff to the DMV. A few local developers will cash in and a couple of people will make a good deal on their condo or house. The rest of us will be left holding the can and there won’t be a nickel in there when the Nets leave town for a better deal.

RATNER’S PLAYGROUND
 
The political horizon is full of smoke and mirrors these days.  The key factor in Karl Rove’s current efforts to re-elect Bush is misdirection.  Losing a war?  Get some right wing whackos in Congress to huff and puff about gay marriage.  Bruce Ratner, the K-mart master of spin, has adopted the same sort of nonsense. 

Losing the public’s shirt with public subsidy of your real estate  scam? Divert attention back to the hopelessly inane subject of basketball.  Now before all the sports fans pile on, it’s not the game that’s inane, it’s the subject. Basketball is great.  The Nets have their ups and downs.  NONE of that matters. 

The Nets were not doing all that well before they became the blue light special of the NBA. Now however Ratner is giving away the store to save money.  However, he wants to own the Nets right? He wants to win, right?  So why get rid of their top players, the guys who make them win, who get public attention, who are the draw?  Last month he wanted to buy Shaq.  This month he is on the cheap.  What's next?  Who knows, but it won't be something that addresses the core of the problems with the Atlantic Yards Project.

The answer is simple.  We are back to talking about the Nets when we should be talking about the arena and the complex around it.  We are back to the weirdly simplistic notion that pro basketball will create jobs – as opposed to massive public debt – in Brooklyn.  Players he can buy later. Bruce is not hurting for dough and besides, he has “partners,” right?  Whoever they are, right? So what does he want now? Time.  It’s time he needs to buy now by getting everyone excited about the Net’s when that is not the point.  Time creates inertia.

 
We are back to talking about basketball instead of talking about the economic disaster to the taxpayers of NYS and NYC -- not Forest City Ratner -- which is the arena and its appended megalopolis. 

We are STILL not talking about the economic viability of this office complex when office space in Manhattan is sitting empty and firms are moving out of the City.

We STILL have no figures to demonstrate what FCR thinks is a viable rent for middle income housing in Brooklyn. 

We are STILL not talking about the problems of traffic, garbage, public transportation, roads, parking, police, fire, EMS and sewerage that continue to linger in the balance as costs that will paid way, way, way, way, way beyond the plump pockets of Forest City Ratner. 

We are in fact still back at the wrong end of the bull, but that suits FCR just fine.

Veronika Belenkaya reports in The New York Daily News that Ratner’s spokesman, Barry Baum, is feeling put upon by Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James because she has opposed moving the Nets to Brooklyn from the outset. 

That may be because Ms. James has thought some of these embarrassing questions through in advance and is willing to ask them out loud.  She does not want to talk about the lunatic fantasy that basketball is the returning ghost of  Dodgers' baseball.  She does not see the Garden of Eden rising out of the LIRR pit.  She wants to do a cost/benefit analysis in the company of adults, and that does not include Mr. Baum.

In fact Mr. Baum makes an excellent low-budget version of Karl Rove when he says, "You really have to wonder why Ms. James has tried to sabotage this project from the start. In the beginning, she worked with New Jersey to keep this team there. Now she's going on about [the trading of] individual players. Give me a break."

Therein lies the second factor that Mr. Ratner has his spokesmen employ which could be called the “Aw Shucks, why ya pickin’ on me?” strategy.  We have been treated to a mire of rhetorical nonsense from,” The return of Brooklyn’s Glory in the form of the Nets? Dodgers? Whatever?” ploy.  Mr. Baum apparently thinks we are all in the same mental league with Homer Simpson.

Mr. Ratner prefers to be seen in the press as a remote creature of naïve almost saintly reserve. In keeping with that, we were informed in a handout (suitable in primary colors first-graders) that he was building us a “Garden of Eden.”  Isn’t that nice of him, Children? What we need here is Cartman from South Park to give him a proper response.  If you listen to Mr. Baum, Ms. James is trying to rain on their sandlot ball game.  Instead he and his boss want to saddle us with what they themselves admit will be a bill for at LEAST, five hundred million dollars in start-up costs.  The Profits?  Well, they are somewhere down the road and leaving town with FCR.  Ask the people of Newark about the bill for the Nets.

The outside estimate done by urban planners puts the short fall about four times higher.  1.8 billion seems an awful lot of playground to amuse a couple of overgrown schoolboys like Ratner and Baum.  Apparently if he brings the ball, the Borough President will be allowed to play too.  These numbers loom large against the consistent evidence that sports’ facilities are a financial disaster for the communities that build them.

As for Ratner’s financial team mates, it seems that it is a 'tradition' in pro sports that the partners can remain silent if they choose, and let the Big Ratner have the limelight. When Bruce has a go at the role of team owner for the press, he acquires an awkward, manufactured joviality. There is one partner, however,  that has been hoodwinked into this deal without a chance to say, “No.” That is the public, the people of NYC and NYS who pay taxes.  We have a right to know who we are in bed with here since Ratner and his silent partners want to spend our money.

The history of New York City is fraught with shady deals done by developers at the public expense.  These people have been caught in the act before they got started.  These are not beamish boys who just want to have a little fun playing round ball.  These are real estate developers who want to have a lot of fun emptying the public coffers.  There is more than a little megalomania involved as well. Otherwise Ratner would come to the table and scale this thing down to a size and form that fits its proposed location.  Ms. James is right.  The deal stank from the outset and the smell gets no better as the plans start to unfold under our noses.
 

THE BALLAD OF RATNER’S YARD


As the battle is joined over the Ratner Atlantic Yards Project, two important themes are beginning to emerge about FCR and its headman, Bruce Ratner. They should form the anthem for those resisting him. The first is that the arena is a stalking horse to draw attention from the larger project.

Does that signal that Ratner assumed people would simply say, “All change is bad,” and oppose the larger project? Or did it mean that he had figured out a way to sell an idea to those who might stand to benefit. They bought it on the assumption that it might or might not work, but he would be well out of it when the results were in hand?

What is not clear is who gets to pay the half billion that is now the anticipated debt for the project as reported in the recent study by urban research experts, Peebles and Kim. Is any part of this sum on FCR’s tab? One should then point out that all figures of any sort generated by anyone are being proposed against the value of today’s dollars and the current costs of labor and materials. Has anything ever been built anywhere without cost overruns? Well, what’s another billion here and there?

As Wilbur Mills once observed, “A million here, a million there; after a while it adds up.” He was talking about chump change. Kick that up a notch to a billion and even Bloomberg might start grabbing for his wallet to make sure it’s still there. However, the saps who pay taxes will take up the slack. Have no doubt of it.

The public – to the tiny degree to which it has been informed much less asked – has expressed a range of reactions from besotted enthusiasm to horror.

The Dodgers are coming back? Let’s have another beer! But no, they aren’t.

Who is going to pay for this? God. Didn’t you see that it is going to be the Garden of Eden? Does God have some visible assets as collateral? No? Well, I guess we get to take up his part of the slack.

Couldn’t this be a compound disaster on top of the Ratner disasters already before us? Here’s a nice big, fat envelope. And remember, Sunshine, don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice (or else…).

Between ever more expansive lunches with Bruce, BP Marty alternates between telling the nay-sayers they don’t matter, and being a recluse. You go to Borough Hall and yell up those long empty stairs, “Whadaya think, Marty, about the half a billion in the hole?” Sometimes you hear a faint sobbing over the Dodgers. Other times you can just hear a low whine of, “Stop picking on me.”

So we have the usual lack of leadership from our public officials when it comes to incurring preposterous, public debt. It’s not their money. It’s ours. What do they care? One member of a local community board has gone on an internet finger shaking campaign. Compromise, he argues, is the only hope for the victims of this boondoggle. They will get fleeced but that’s better than being served as lambchops. Follow him and you can be fitted for a skewer before you even find out who’s cooking.

Ratner meanwhile is turning the Nets into a blue light special by selling off the players that are its draw. For a while there, he was covering this up with flim flam about buying Shaq O’Neil. Shaq seems decidedly uninterested. Does that remind you of the Garden of Eden? Or perhaps it is the mythic return of Brooklyn to glory by financing a pro team that is sort of the Dodgers but play a different game?

The glory of Brooklyn in 1957 was the tough, diverse, scrappy, persistent, vital people who lived here. They made the Dodgers shine, not the other way around. They live here now even though they may have different names and have come from different places. The Dodgers symbolized them and their resilient hard-working, come-from-behind history of creating goods that were shipped all over the world on ships they built.

We don’t need to go back to manufacturing and ship building for Brooklyn to be glorious any more than we need the Dodgers. We do need that spirit which will require good paying, secure, union jobs for the people of Brooklyn and not just the construction unions. We need affordable middle-class housing. We need planning on a scale and design that keeps life here in the realm of the possible.

We need to do something with the Atlantic Yards. It’s a hole in the ground in the middle of New York City. We didn’t need to sell it out from under the City building and planning regulations to get around them. We don’t need to run rough shod over the people who have built the community that’s there. Most of all, we don’t need to pick up a tab for a couple of billion dollars for a developer and a team who will leave town a lot faster than the Dodgers if they see more green on the horizon. What we will need, as soon as possible, is some responsible, capable political representation.

EVE ON THE STREETS WITH THE DODGERS

A couple of weeks ago, Forrest City Ratner issued a colorful mailing describing the Atlantic Yards Project as a Garden of Eden which they are growing in Brooklyn. From the sparse text, one is forced to assume that God himself is going to pay for it and deal with the ancillary problems it will create since no one else seems to acknowledge these issues.

Then again, perhaps Mr. Ratner has moved from ruling by divine right to being divine himself as he builds us this destiny of dubious perfection. What he omits from his treatment of the first book of Deuteronomy is that all the humans were driven from Eden by an appealing snake who offered a seemingly harmless apple. The apple represents the temptation that is so often the handmaiden of corruption.

It is hard to decide who is who in this Old Testament version of Brooklyn. Can we picture President Markowitz in the sleek and canny role of the snake? It is a difficult leap. Of late we have heard less and less from Mr. Markowitz, who I have come to think of as the Artful Dodger, lifelong baseball fan that he is.

Can we somehow contrive a basketball into the shape of an apple? That’s another tough fit given the difference in circumference. A baseball would suit better, but that game would require a stadium with more open, accessible space far away from the Atlantic Yards.

It is not so hard to find the Adams and Eves of this story. They are reported this week in the Post and other sources as having been tempted with deals to sell their homes to Ratner at what many believe are attractive prices. More power to them as far as that goes.

However, into the bargain it has been reported that these same innocents must agree to testify that they are “happy” with their deal and have been “treated nicely.” At that point one is not selling an apartment; one is being coerced into the sale of one’s soul.

Readers of “Faust” will remember that it is not divinity that goes about buying souls. No matter how tempting the deal or agreeable the customer, coercion is still coercion which I understood to be a crime.

Now if coercion is a crime and crime constitutes a fall from grace, then perhaps it is not these Adams and Eves that need to be driven out of Eden, but the fellow who is trying to buy their souls. For my money, he would be welcome to take his hissing companion with him.

WHO IS GOING TO CLEAN UP HERE?

As the Ratner complex is fine-tuned in official thinking, it is still not clear how the public service aspects of this are going to be covered financially. We have vague assertions from the Mayor that police and fire will be enhanced and reallocated to meet the demand. In fact his record is anything but that right down to neighborhood firehouses that disappear while he is planning a new bunker to protect whom? Why, the Mayor of course. Let’s hope they find a safer location for it than last time.

A more humble question is garbage collection. With thousands of residents, retail outlets, sports fans, an office complex and an arena, there will be refuse, trash, industrial waste and garbage a plenty to go around the area. As of now there is no reason to think it will go around to anywhere but right here. I have some precedent.

Those in District 2 still have garbage collection three days a week. Those in 6 have only two pick-ups. There is no Monday pick-up on Holidays. If one of your days is Monday, you will likely not get picked up more than once that week. The result is that by the second pick-up day after a holiday, your block is a wall of black bags and other debris. Think about that during peak holidays times like the winter holidays. It’s quite an enhancement to the season of giving. Why this lapse in service?

As the supervisors will explain, holidays create a labor shortage, and Sanitation is a big believer in any and all holidays including some no one else even knows exist. That also applies if it snows, or if there are politicians who want to have paper thrown at them in downtown Manhattan. That shortage is then distributed to the district selectively by not picking up the garbage. To date, that seems to be the only precedent to what will be done for Boerum Hill, Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. They will have reduced police fire and sanitation to compensate for the additional demand. What exactly is the precedent?

In the 1980s, Ed Koch (the Republican in sheep’s clothing) worked hard for the two-man garbage truck, a technological wonder of the time. Two men could do the work of three. Behold that not that long after, collections were reduced from three times to twice a week in many parts of the City. Did we have less garbage? No. We just did not have the political clout to interest City Hall. It must sound remarkably like the removal of small fire houses regardless of the delays in response times. Do not be gullible. Don’t believe that the City of New York will do more with less. It will do less for more people in areas that are less politically critical to Mayor’s and Borough President’s. President Markowitz is being fitted for his sheep suit even now.

In other cities like Paris, people complain that the streets need cleaning. People complain everywhere. New Yorkers are famous for it. However, a recent visit showed me that the City of Lights is in fact spotless by almost any standards. That is because an army of cleaners go in trucks, on scrubbers and on foot through every street and sidewalk several times a week and clean up every bit of trash and other effluvia. There are trash containers everywhere just as there are high tech public johns which you can use for about fifty cents. More importantly, Parisians do not throw trash in the street. There is a place to put it, and they know it will be collected before it spills out onto the sidewalk. Recycling is simple and convenient. Parisians bag their garbage neatly in little bags and toss it into bins that are kept out of sight. The bins are emptied before they commence to stink. It seems pretty obvious if you think about it. Parisians have a deep affection and a sense of ownership about their city because they get what they pay for.

The difference between Paris (which has many problems of its own) and New York is that Frenchmen assume they pay taxes for public needs to be met. No one builds anything there without having laid out how to meet needs like traffic, garbage, police and architectural compatibility in advance. They know how they are going to pay for it before they start, unlike Ratnerville, where the builders know, but don’t want to admit it. The French pay high taxes and insist that some things like garbage, police, sanitation, education, health and public transportation must work or they ditch the politicians who screw up.

Parisians bitch as much as New Yorkers but the garbage gets picked up, the fire department is prompt and you can’t build a hideous building without a hell of a lot of pushing and post-modern whining. None of this works perfectly in France, but it works to a much higher level of expectations than we have. Make no mistake, France has much stronger unions that we have here. So the usual administrative wheeze that labor is intractable does not apply. The French have agreed that certain needs must be met to have a civilized environment.

As a result, you can walk through all sorts of neighborhoods in Paris and there are no mountains of garbage bags, dead animals, and builder’s refuse nor do you see abandoned furniture, appliances or itinerant people waiting endlessly to be picked up by public agencies run by the Godot Administration. Fire damaged buildings are not left standing in residential neighborhoods for years. That is because they are a public hazard and attract vandals, crime and derelicts, right? on my block we are now approaching the end of year one with David Yassky’s office about a burnt out building. It was there a while before that. After all, the crumbling infested ruin is private property. We must protect that.

The people in Albany show no twitch of interest in how the public aspects of this deal are going to be met. The Mayor will be a comic memory like Steve Forbes when the bill comes due. The Feds cannot even seem to find the money they promised after 9/11. I cannot picture high rollers from Texas worrying about Boerum Hill’s garbage. Their version of the EPA will probably suggest we burn it in the streets.

It is telling that public hearings on these projects skate over these matters as though they were incidental. They are not. Either we have additional taxation to pay for the additional demands of the Ratner Complex, or our garbage will be left longer and longer in our laps. What’s the big deal? No one and nothing loves garbage as much as rats except perhaps roaches. Keep a nice big heap of garbage in front of your house, and you will have plenty of dinner guests.