September 28, 2009
The Monetization of Union Square
If one of the tests of a robust ecosystem is its ability to adapt to hostile conditions, the reshuffling of Related’s largest commercial tenants suggests something counterintuitive: Union Square has never been healthier. Rachel Meltzer, a research affiliate at NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, has been studying retail in Union Square since 2000, and has watched the neighborhood outpace the rest of Manhattan in attracting and keeping business. Foot traffic in Union Square has risen 59 percent over the past five years. Retail rents tripled between 2005 and 2006, from $100 to $300 a square foot, and have stayed firm since. (Some locations now command as high as $400—midtown and Soho prices.) Vacancy rates are hovering at a tight 3.4 percent. “I don’t think it’s considered a transportation corridor anymore so much as a destination,” says Meltzer.
There are about 15 paragraphs like this and about 10 words about how that effects the actual owners of the park, US. So the park is just there to improve business, but what about its value as a park, a refuge, a place to meet friends? What about its original design as an assembly area, what about its own purpose, should we rejoice that all these businesses are basically making money of our resource while our ability to use the park is more and more limited by the day?
Parks commissioner Adrian Benepe would rather limit the sprawl of artists, who operate under First Amendment rights and require no permits. “This is probably not what the Founding Fathers had in mind,” he says. “It turns the park into a flea market. All the space is taken up by selling.”
So if you ask Benepe, the problem is the artists! the actual people vendors making a living there expressing their first ammendment rights. And he is the one in charge of our parks. How sad.
Anyway please go comment at NY Magazine, at least we can qualify the economy and say what we think of it, since evidently NY Mag is so depoliticized and think bing pro business is nuetral.
Comments
broken laws, liability
Halleluaiaj, You don’t know how many times I’ve written to people and officials and have gotten no response; because what I say is very serious, and the press and its ripples, are very weak and not strong or able enough to assert the freedom; the press is enslaved, because it should focus on what is most important, like our constitution, and it doesn’t,
If something looks illegal, smells illegal, and seems illegal, it probably is illegal. And our system of local government sure fits this bill. When community decisions are made by a few officials, when the allowance is given to destroy field, forest and culture for crass population by a few local officials, when the citizens are usually against this, this looks illegal as sin, and it is; several constitutional laws are violated like the tenth amendment.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Local officials are neither the state nor the people, when they make any decision, particularily when they allow “building”. Our founders intended for free assemblies to be the mode where community decisions are made through aye’s and nays by those there. Thus Free Assembly is abridged and infringed upon so the first amendment is violated by municipal councils. As is the 14th which prohibits states from violating the federal constitution, and Title 42 Sec 1983 which makes officials involved in the oversite that allows the infections of unconstitutional practice liable to that charge; these are all big laws that are violated.
So I hope I’ve proven to you that if something looks and smells and seems illegal, it probably is, you just have to find the laws violated.
You may post this, I have another item to say.
The other item goes like this;
“So I come not to make the law, but fulfill the law.” I did note create the law, our founders did, create the law, but we the people forgot and ignored the law of our sensible communities, to discuss what we do and want with our time and life”
“There really is the Kingdom of God, I testify, and it really is cared for by The Kingdom of Heaven, and I’ll testify how this makes sense, and there really are moops, which is the heavenly life of the kingdom of god when their bodies pass away, which I can get more into late; Because my point being the universe causes the Kingdom of God, and thus Christianity leads us to a trail head even deeper in the wooded night of the universe, where of course there is not even wood.”
Now I am ready to help any interalia attempt required quickly and concisely exposing any judge and other party to how the basic foundation of municipal government is wrong, flat out illegal, and how we all need the basic humility and humblenss to betide this, in that our pride and vanity is holy defeated by the might of a law no one knew even existed or where---and yet the baeutitude of humility is seen beside the shining light of the lord, and humbleness takes us where pride fears to ago in the arrogance and paranoia of Pride----But if you know the kingdom of god, and know it is at hand, and the moops are here to help, and that part of them know the universe as I will never know, maybe, than you have no pride, because you know the humility and the law, far easier and simpler than pride, gets you farther, than attempts to believe in an illusion; because in the greatness of the power in the universe, you can not struggle to grasp at illusions, you’ve you can not struggle to grasp at illusions, you’ve got to grab the truth by the neck and strangle it untill you’ve got that something great and not good and tragic has befallen the human race, Ok, and it forgives all pride, and Jesus talked about it, calling it The Kingdom of God. But Jesus didn’t know much about moops, nor identify the universe as causing the Kingdom of God,
But my point is, I haven’t passed the bar, I am only pro se, I haven’t even taken the bar, costs 600 bucks and I need an exemption, I need a real lawyer who will answer my questions and follow my orders, for one hr a week for a couple weeks…….because he believes in me, and knows there is money in this assertion of law down the road.
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