Another Year of Living Dangerously

It was late afternoon on New Year’s Eve and flurries were blowing in from Erie Basin, sweeping through the Food Bazaar parking lot and up Conover Street, pushing me into Sunny’s. Izzy poured me a generous Dewar’s and I hunkered down in the booth by the door to peck out my annual retrospective.

Oh what a wretched year. Pancreatic cancer swiftly took Virginia, my wife of 40 years and Trump even more swiftly turned our constitution into toilet paper, presumably because there was no way to rebrand it as his own or turn it into a crypto commodity (and as unbelievable as it sounds, my demonstrating on No Kings Day #1 in front of Trump Tower had no impact at all). Locally, large new unaffordable Gowanus apartment buildings started renting and the City thought it would be a good idea to double the population of The Back with unaffordable seaside condos: all to finance the revitalization of the decrepit Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a major cog in its new Blue Highway plan, unveiled on Halloween, a month after the seaside village of 6,000 housing units was approved.

Why do our City Planners never recognize an asset until it’s run down, marginalized and so unprofitable, only real estate developers can save it? Take the Interborough Express, first proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1996 when the economy was booming. Now it will cost 4 billion bucks but New York can only fund half of it. The Feds aren’t looking to throw money our way so that leaves the Developers. Already the New York Building Congress has calculated an “equity opportunity score” for the area surrounding every one of the proposed 19 IBX stations from Bay Ridge to Jackson Heights. Why do developers now frame their plans with language suggesting they actually care about social justice? So they can get progressive politicians to allow massive rezoning?

Duh. It’s all a dance. The rich get richer, political campaigns get funded (in a one-party town, mind you), the working class gets displaced into lotteries for “affordable units” costing twice what they paid in their demolished abodes and New York, already the densest American city, becomes ever denser with an infrastructure that can never keep up with the growth.

The MTA lost a billion dollars in 2024 due to fare beaters and as 2025 began, it calculated an operating budget shortfall of $500 million. And so the MTA spent millions to redesign turnstiles and gates, hire more troops including retired cops now deployed at major bus stops as “EAGLE” teams (short for Evasion and Graffiti Lawlessness Eradication…Holy Acronym, Batman!) – to prevent the huge loss that years of un-enforcement has caused. HaHa! I can hear a Rolling Stones ditty in my head watching this comedy: “Free, sister, is just a block away, a block away, a block away!” Ride the B41 bus along Flatbush Avenue from Mill Basin to Cadman Plaza as I did one morning last week and count the number of fare beaters coming in the back door. But wait! The MTA intends to implement proof-of-purchase checks. Yeah, right.

Sigh. I really truly want the IBX…We need the IBX!…OK, send in the Developers.

As we all await the Mamdani dawn, I wish him only success. If he succeeds, New York succeeds, and there are strategies his administration can deploy to add more apartments short of obliterating the sky in the outer boroughs. Step up HPD enforcement to prevent displacement.

Go after the warehousing of the 60,000 vacant rent stabilized apartments in New York. Note that landlords with 1,000 or more units own the majority of NYC’s rent-stabilized housing stock, and landlords with 100 or more units own 88% of all rent-stabilized housing. These owners aren’t keeping apartments vacant because they can’t afford to fix them. They aren’t mom-and-pop small scale owners scraping by. They’re doing alright and like all above-average Americans, they want to do even better, God love ‘em. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of legal leaseholders. If there truly is an historic housing crisis in the City, why not step up enforcement and prevent these vacancies, most of which have been caused by harassment, subtle or overt? And while we’re at it, let’s fix the thousands of barely habitable NYCHA units.

Then I woke up. HPD inspectional enforcement is a joke and NYCHA moves at the pace of the DMV sloths in Zootopia. Moreover, warehoused apartments probably need some well-crafted legislation to get them back in circulation and that’s when those afore-mentioned “equity” Developers can be expected to throw their considerable weight behind the status quo.

“Status Quo? British band. They sucked!”

I looked up and saw Chet peeking over my shoulder.

“They had one hit, Pictures of Matchstick Men in 1968 and I still have no idea what that song was about.”

I smiled. Chet could always knock me down to Earth when I got too grandiose – perhaps because he felt like he owned that adjective. And sure enough, here it came.

“So, Mr. Write Man, I got a hot tip for you that’ll blow all that boring apartment crap out of the Basin, clear across to Governor’s Island.”

“OK, I’ll bite.”

Chet sat down across from me and looked at my empty glass. “Ain’t it time for another round?”

Before I could open my mouth, Izzy was plunking down a refill for me and a boilermaker for Chet.

“Now,” Chet began, pausing for a long gulp, half-draining his whiskey-colored beer, “I’m sure you’ve seen the preview of Spielberg’s new summer blockbuster.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s all over the Internet! Disclosure Day it’s called and it’s about how THE MAN will finally be forced to admit the Reptilians are running the Government!”

“So? Spielberg made another Sci-Fi flick. Big deal. He also made Close Encounters, ET, and War of the Worlds. That’s your hot tip?”

Chet finished his drink and signaled Izzy for another round, pointing to me and making the universal scribbling on a check motion to indicate I was paying. As always.

“Chet, you better get to your hot tip before I run out of cash…”

“OK, OK, here it is. Spielberg is plugged into what’s been going on behind the scenes with these UFOs, drones and abductions. This movie isn’t Sci-Fi, man, its Sci-Non-Fi!”

Izzy arrived with another boilermaker that looked like a Jack Daniels with a head of foam.

I shook my head. “So Spielberg alone is privy to the Reptilians and now he’s spilling the beans? Shouldn’t he play his cards closer to the vest? I mean, once the Reptilians see the preview, won’t they shut the movie down?”

Chet bolted, stiff in his seat, color draining from his face. “OH. MY. GOD!” he shouted. “I’ve got to warn Steven!” And just like that, taking one last gulp, he was gone, replaced by a hefty check.

“Those boilermakers,” Chet explained, “contained five shots each. That’s why the beer looked so brown. Chet said you owed him for his drone exclusive a while back. Anyway, Happy New Year. And by the way, thanks for disguising my real name, with all due respect, in the crap you write.”

“Think nothing of it, Chet.”

“Believe me, Joe, I don’t.”

I hit the street. It was dark now and the wind was howling. I thought I saw three riders approaching but shook it off as yet another Dylan hallucination…although the hour was getting late.