By: David A. Smith
[Continued from Wednesday’s Part 1.]
So substantive was December’s eleven-part post on the pending privatization (resident right-to-buy action) of Southbridge Towers that not only did it take up half the month’s posting, my excerpted month-in-review summary spilled over from Wednesday’s Part 1, as in four more parts I brought the story up to the (successful) vote, Part 4, “Ten more ballots than required”, Part 5, “You hit the lottery when you came in here”, Part 6, “We built the Little Leagues”, and Part 7, “If the city wants more affordable housing”, which set up the third big question:
Sorry, that’s not the question I’m asking right now
3. Is privatization a ‘bad policy outcome’?
Having explored whether the result is a windfall to the point where readers can form their own view, the question now arises: Setting aside self-interest of the co-operators, what should bystanders want to see happen? Although bystanders have no vote and may not have a genuine stake in the outcome, that the story made the New York Times indicates it’s a topic worthy of public interest. What then is the right policy outcome?
A courtyard in Southbridge Towers, near Pearl Street
3.A. What about rehab?
Properties age, and as they age, they both deteriorate (things wear out) and obsolescence (what was market before is below-market today); this is more true now than it ever was before, because housing has become technological. Consider all the following features that a normal resident would regard as necessities of the evolving modern urban home that would have been almost unimaginable in 1970:
Broadband
Green technology/ sensitivity
Cable TV
Home media rooms
Required environmental remediation of lead-based paint and asbestos.
Microwaves
Combine them all the home’s demand for electricity has tripled or quadrupled. Older properties also need new windows (energy conservation requirements are much higher than they were, plus windows age and leak air and water), new HVAC systems (thanks, Harbor Towers!), certainly new elevators (if not already replaced once or twice), and probably new roofs.
Besides interior gardens, a playground and a community room, Southbridge Towers has several commercial tenants, including a Key Foods, parking, a bakery and a restaurant.
While rehab isn’t referenced in the public reports (and it could be financed within Mitchell-Lama, but only at the price of extending affordability), it’s often a major impetus for a financial transaction and a change in occupancy/ rent/ tenure patterns.
3.B. What is your ‘civic duty’? Do you have one?
Twarn’t nothing, ma’am
Civic duty is a normative concept – like greed, say, or indulgence – that we apply only to others, not to ourselves, and when those others have lucrative options we ourselves lack, we are quick to condemn them for taking advantage of their opportunities, as I explored in finishing up the post with Part 8, “People think you’re taking money out of their pockets”, Part 9, “Can’t continue as a middle-class complex”, Part 10, “Extremely unlikely…but it’s budgeted for”, and Part 11, “I think most people will tell you yes.”:
For most people this is big money and a big life opportunity:
[2009] Louis Trazino, a former board member, said he sees no downside to suddenly having a valuable piece of real estate in his name.
“Every week these people go out and play the lottery,” Trazino said of his neighbors. “They drop a dollar on something they’re never going to win. But here these people have already won the lottery, and all they have to do is have the courage to step into the future.”
Ownership of housing is forced and invisible saving, and that makes it a powerful lever of positive life change.
Trazino’s family has lived Downtown since the 1890s, but he would be the first one to own property here — and he said he wouldn’t want to miss the chance to pass on the apartment to his two children, 11 and 13 years old.
Though I withheld my perspective until the post’s conclusion – a blogger who seeks to inform should do so first and then opine only after the reader has been properly informed – in the finale I added some personal perspective:
Is it too much to call this the American Dream?
For the shareholders who support the plan, privatizing provides options they did not have before. They can take out home equity loans to pay for college for their children, purchase and combine existing units to create a larger home, or sell and move elsewhere in an expensive city.
As current Board chair Mr. Dimson said it:
Mr. Altman significantly underestimates the power of equity to improve people’s lives. Taxes and fees are costs associated with conducting business in a market economy. The tradeoff is that the equity that Southbridge residents will acquire at no cost will enable them to secure their retirement, relocate, provide for home health care, or leave an inheritance to their children.
Wallace Dimson
People whose lives are improved are like this family:
“People say it’s closing the door and it’s true, but this helps generations to come for the people in Southbridge,” said Rachel Nash, 38, a lawyer who lives there with her husband and 7-year-old twins and supports privatization. “My children will have more financial security than they would have had otherwise. If it is helping me, it helps them even more so.”
Seeing the value of ownership
Actually, I expect the individual votes to buy co-op homes to be much higher than 67%. The reason is simple: when voting whether to privatize or not, you were hoping to influence the aggregate vote – but once that vote is lost and you know the privatization is inevitable, the decision you make is entirely personal, and your choices (as we just saw) are different; and becoming a tenant means, if I understand things correctly, that you forfeit the chance of eventual residual value in your apartment.
[2009] Joe Scelso, 81, said that even if his maintenance charges go up because of higher taxes, the benefit of owning Manhattan real estate without putting any more money down far outweighs any short-term costs. Also, he pointed out that under privatization, residents would be allowed to give their apartments to family members or leave them to family members in their wills, which is not allowed now unless the relatives already occupy the apartment.
And remember, to buy the apartment takes no cash; it just means a change in your potential monthly occupancy cost from the increased real estate tax assessment. I can see a resident remaining a tenant if he or she is very old, or very poor and with no family, but any resident with family honestly, if you have family, whether you’re poor or not you’d have rock in your head not to buy your apartment.
Can we buy apartments here?
Personally, I’ll be quite curious as to what Mr. Hovitz, Mr. Altman, and the other opponents of privatization will do. If I knew them, I’d advise them to set aside their commitment to abstract others and do what is more appropriate for themselves and their families – namely, buy their co-op homes. In my view that’s not the slightest bit inconsistent or immoral, so I hope they do it.
“If you have an opportunity to have ownership of a piece of Manhattan real estate in one of the fastest growing areas, does that outweigh any of these negatives?” Mr. Dimson said. “I think most people will tell you yes.”
A man for whom the positives outweigh the negatives: Board chair Wally Dimson
Cities, let us never forget, are formed by people taking their money and their labor and building the it upward for the private purposes and in hopes of their own private gains.
Even as that one mega-post consumed half the month, the other half also dealt heavily with issues of development, starting with the seldom-mentioned reality that except for reclaimed or new land, every site on earth has already been used for something else, so any development of the new necessarily means digging up or plowing over the old, and that disruption of the now-romanticized past rouses otherwise placid people to dudgeon, as in the case of the curious cemetery, explored in three parts, It is for us the living, rather: Part 1, To be dedicated here, Part 2, We cannot consecrate, and Part 3, Shall not perish from the earth:
A final resting place, or just long-term storage?
Rob Roy’s grave in Stirling, Scotland
Our resting places are never final, because we are never here forever.
Opponents acknowledge that Guite, who paid for the archeologists, did the grim work with more care than was required, but they say that’s not the point. “We’re only here for a short time,” said Mowry. “I don’t have the right to undo something that should be there for the next generation.”
Is then everything in the past sacrosanct? Or are the only acceptable human actions the ones done before us?
All over places like Hartland, out-of-towners “bring all their ideas with them from down country,” said Gordon Richardson, chairman of the board of selectmen and a lifelong resident of his family’s farm.
I wonder, does Mr. Richardson’s opposition to new ideas extend to (say) the internet, to the cell phone, to electricity, or to motor cars? All of these were once new ideas, and I dare say Mr. Richardson uses them every day.
Hartland and I-91, which its denizens undoubtedly use
Sanctifying a mythic past is a tricky business, because the past we selectively remember may not be the past that actually happened.
One thing the researchers found, and this is an important detail to Guite, is that the site had already undergone a significant number of small changes, disturbances and alterations that undermine the idea that the human remains interred there had been left undisturbed.
Simplicity is a fallacious stereotype we moderns impose on any past (including our own) because we were not there and the records and memories preserved are but a fragment of that lost experience. Anthropology, whatever else it may do, allows us to restore some of that granular texture, and what it reveals invariably changes our modern interpretations.
Such alterations cannot be surprising, and I understand Mr. Guite’s sense of vindication at the discovery.
Some of the gravestones had been moved by previous caretakers, while two of the children’s bodies had been dug up and removed, probably at the behest of family members who had moved away.
Eventually, for all that we wish it to be eternal, a dead body is just a collection of bones, and the person who inhabited it just a collection of memories and media.
Nature, too, played a role.
“I’m pretty sure woodchucks got involved and had scattered remains pretty far afield,” Kenny said.
On behalf of woodchucks everywhere, I object!
To that end, preservation groups successfully pushed a change to state law that made it more difficult to move a cemetery, said Charlie Marchant, secretary of the Vermont Old Cemeteries Association.
Mr. Marchant has taken his hobby and made it a commendable passion:
Marchant, 70, drew national attention 10 years ago [i.e. 2004], when he found a wrought iron gate in a Newfane, Vt., antique shop and, after a dogged investigation, returned it to the grave of American poet Emily Dickinson’s father in an Amherst, Mass., cemetery.
That is dedication.
Among the new restrictions — passed too late to apply to Guite — is a requirement that the move must be made for public good, not private benefit.
Tell that to the woodchucks.
The dirt ain’t been dug that can hold us
[Continued Monday in Part 3.]