I walked by a TV in a bodega a few weeks back, and what did I see? A story on CNN about a(nother) luxury development in New York City; this one featured private vehicle elevators to carry you and your beamer to a palatial condo overlooking the Hudson from West Chelsea, and was designed by an architecture firm whose other down-to-earth projects include Abercrombie flagship stores in NYC, LA and London, and an estate outside Majorca, Spain. The city had just given developers the go-ahead, and construction of "200 Eleventh Avenue" is now underway.

To say the least, I was appalled when I saw that story. The monument to gluttony on 11th Avenue arrives at exactly the same time that thousands of families are losing their homes in NYC as part of the subprime lending crisis now sweeping the country. A comparison to the days of robber barons and penniless paupers couldn't be more apt.

Some background: the "subprime lending crisis" is one manifestation of the general economic downturn now looming over the United States. The term describes lenders foreclosing on loans they dished out during boom years--but not just any lenders, and not just any loans. In this case, predatory lenders target poor folks, communities of color and recent migrants, promising them deals that would normally be beyond their means to repay. The contracts often feature hidden clauses and exorbitant interest rates, thus earning the label "subprime."

Translation: when the economy was flooded with money, loan sharks started throwing money at vulnerable communities, promising them pie in the sky while attaching strings to their loans--so that sharks could bleed borrowers for cash in times of boom, or foreclose upon them mercilessly in times of bust. And when a global credit squeeze hit earlier this year, the foreclosures started to fall like rain.

Now the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project estimates that "by year's end, at least 14,700 homeowners in the city could be in default, mostly in minority neighborhoods" as a result of subprime loan-sharking (see NYTimes article.) At the same time, homelessness has hit a record high in NYC, with over 35,000 people on the streets and more than 9,000 families seeking shelter every night; that's the highest number since folks started keeping track (see another NYTimes article.)

And to make matters worse, the latest heartless Bloomberg policy forces shelters to turn away families caught "abusing" the system by seeking housing more than one night in a row (see yet another NYTimes article.) Yeesh! You'd have to be a scumbag (or a mayor) to think families seeking help from a supposedly humanitarian infrastructure constitutes "abuse," while demolishing a city's worth of housing to make way for space-sucking luxury condos is "development."

What kind of society builds palatial condominiums for the opulent few who can afford them--with elevators to accommodate each homeowner's individual car--while driving thousands of poor and nonwhite people from their homes and denying shelter to those in need? Such displays of crass luxury, in the face of widespread hardship and suffering, are an obscenity.

At this rate, the Manhattan of the future will look like a massive gated community, protected by thousands of murderous cops, and ringed with neighborhoods cleansed of their occupants by free marketeers and salivating developers, who usher in yet more colonies of the ultra-rich. The thought of it makes me spit!

But imagine instead if people and communities stood together to prevent the theft of their homes, and demanded egalitarianism in the face of greed. Imagine a city in which people defended their communities from ouster; in which abandoned spaces were seized and occupied before they could be turned into needless condos; and in which motherf---ing loan sharks profiting from peoples' suffering were driven out of town! That's the kind of city I'd like to live in!

And that kind of city isn't far off. Generations of people have fought for just such a home, like the Young Lords of the 60s/70s who built community power in El Barrio, or the squatters who held liberated spaces on the island of Manhattan in the 90s, or the attendees to this fall's citywide Encuentro for Dignity and Against Gentrification, which convoked a who's-who of kicking NYC organizations against home-stealing moneybags. In all of these, I think there's the glimmer of something brighter on its way.

Crossposted from Lines of Flight.