local boy

Fo the past several mornings, I have awoken to a series of news stories on WNYC (our local NPR affiliate) about the proposed re-zoning of the Williamsburg/Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Every time I hear anything about this topic, my heart skips a beat. Yes, that's right -- re-zoning gives me palpitations.

Why? Because mulling over issues like that makes me feel like New York is my city. I know where Williamsburg and Greenpoint are. I know a bunch of people who live there (unfortunately, they're the type of hipster artists who are contributing to the area's gentrification). Moreover, I work for a non-profit housing developer. Housing is on my brain all the time. Food and shelter. A living wage. These are the social issues I think about more than anything else. In other words, I've gone back to basics.

On the front page of the New York Times today, there was a picture of some Williamsburg houses with a view beyond of the Manhattan skyline. On the front page of the Times. There have recently been major stories in The New Yorker about Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to built a stadium on Manhattan's far West Side and about yet another proposed stadium in downtown Brooklyn. Does anyone in, say, Detroit or Los Angeles or London really want to read about these matters? Do they care about New York real estate -- in the outer boroughs?!

I haven't read the international news pages in months. Nowadays, I turn right to the Metro section because it feels like that's where the meat of the news is. That's where I'm actually going to learn something. (I apologize for the frequent italicization.) When I was in Oxford, reading the Times online, the stories I clicked on were all Afghanistan, Israel/Paelstine, Colin Powell testifies before the UN. I was imaginatively entering the corridors of world power and filling with righteous outrage at Bush, Blair and Sharon -- inscensed that a cabal of neocons was out to reconfigure the global balance of power!

I've been filled with rage and sadness reading about the casualties in Iraq and the bungled diplomacy in Iran and North Korea. I think I got burnt out on it. John Kerry's entire campaign was fueled by that rage (not in the candidate -- he rarely expressed any strong emotions -- but in the voters who backed him because they thought it would quell the rage). The election of 2004 felt cataclysmic, but no one can live indefinitely at that high a pitch. (Well, I guess some people can, but they become less than human -- policy wonks like Tom Friedman or like many of my fellow international scholarship recipients.)

2005 is an election year, too -- the mayoral election in New York City. And I have a status that I never really had in 2004: I'm a swing voter. Really, I am. This election is so interesting to me because it's cast in shades of gray; it's all about compromise. "I like this guy for this position but not for this one." "Well, he's got a good record on that issue, but what about the stadium...?" On the local level, elections are rarely about "the vision thing"; they're about re-allocation of funds, they're about courting union support, offering goodies to various ethnic constituencies and trying to please a whole lot of different people.

My vote is quite honestly up for grabs. I like Mike Bloomberg quite a lot. There's actually soemthing genuine about a guy who says, "Well, I ran a business pretty well, why not try to run the city?" I don't think anyone believes he became mayor to move onto higher office or to advance the interests of his fellow billionaires. He's done some totally unexpected things, not least of all investing an unprecedented amount of city money and energy towards the goal of ending homelessness (that's right, folks, ending it) through new supportive housing models.

On the left, you've got Democrats complaining about the stadium and calling it a kickback for business interests. Maybe it is, but most of these local Dems don't seem beyond handing out a few kickbacks themselves. I don't know what I think about the stadium plans or all of the other proposed re-development projects. I think it's important that incentives be given for the developers to include affordable units, but then you get into arguments about 20% and 40% and you get a lot of quibbling back and forth about what's really in the city's best interest. Balancing job creation with the preservation of housing for low-to-moderate income people. And those issues can't be resolved easily. There is no clear answer (as far as I know) about what exactly the best formula for economic development is. But they're asking that question. They're asking, "What can the government do to improve the lives of people in this city?"

I'm not set on Bloomberg but I do like the confidence of his vision. I've recently become intrigued by the unfortunately-named Congressman Anthony Weiner as a possible alternative choice. The whole race makes me want to attend a mayoral candidates' forum and to really listen to what they have to say. When was the last time you approached listening to a politician with an open mind, rather than knowing from the get-go whether or not you would wind up indignant after he'd finished?

So much of what I value has to do with community. The theme is a strong throughline in my life -- it comes up in the job I do, in the place and people I live with, in my understanding of my religion. And community is tied inextricably to locality. People come to New York to escape small-town life, expecting to remake themselves in a World Capital that is the equal of Paris or Tokyo etc. etc. But New York is also a small town. Decisions that affect all of us are made by small-minded, unphotogenic career politicians in City Hall or in Albany. No matter how much globalization shrinks the world, everyone will still have to live somewhere, everyone will still have a neighborhood.

Maybe it's because I'm from Boston, but I relate to things that are parochial. I'm drawn to those things in New York that are specific, peculiar, local and not noteworthy on a world scale. Those are the things that can really become yours. They're sized to own. And it seems like the community-level, the level of the parochial is where individual people can really make a differnece.

There's something to be said for thinking small.