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High
Housing Costs Will Drive Working Class Hispanics Out of NYC
From Hoy
December 16, 2002
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his speech last
Tuesday at the Sheraton hotel [December 10th], promised to build
65,000 housing units in the next five years, of which 27,000 would
be completely new. The numbers don't add up. The number of homeless
people and poor people facing housing problems will only be reduced
if the mayor's plans are put into practice. The housing problem
has dragged on for decades and its possible explosion could provoke
the emigration of a large part of the working population from the
city, degrading the quality of urban life here.
If the process continues into the future, soon
we will be able to see a plutocratic New York, whose neighborhoods
are inhabited only by the upper-middle-classes and the rich. Neither
professionals nor the working class will be able to face the high
costs of rents, which have already begun to be prohibitive.
There is no doubt that, if the working class
is forced to leave the city, the process will reproduce itself little
by little in the farther regions of the metropolitan area, in places
like northern New Jersey. This will happen in such a manner that
the salaries of the few members of the working class who remain
in the city will be so high that richer people will begin to leave
the city to find cheaper vital services. This has been the cause
of the downfall of many cities, whose cost of living has become
so elevated that people leave the city for the further suburbs,
bringing down the center city and creating new centers of development
in the periphery where people can live and work.
One of the reasons for this migration away from
cities is the lack of adequate housing. A clear example is that
many families have bought houses in southern New Jersey while continuing
to work in New York. They face long commutes in order to enjoy the
lower costs and better conditions of living that they find in areas
as far as sixty miles away from the city. More and more Hispanic
New Yorkers are moving from the city to the south, in some cases
as far away as the Carolinas or Virginia, in search of better living
and housing conditions.
If the deterioration of the city is not dealt
with immediately with political courage, the city will continue
along the path of impoverishment. For instance, without workers,
the hotel industry -- one of the most important in the city -- could
collapse. Spending up to 60 percent of one's earnings on rent makes
the high salaries that one can find here irrelevant. If one can
live on much less and rent a similar house in Pennsylvania, Connecticut
or another place where there is work, people will move there. The
process is already in motion. Hopefully the mayor and those who
work with him realize this. There are many things to reform in order
to halt the entropy that threatens New York. The mayor's announcement
should be only the beginning.
Translated from Spanish by Jonathan Charnay
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