New York, the built city, miles of brick and steel crammed with impossible density on islands and salty lowlands, had a Dutch start as Nieuw Amsterdam. It may need the Dutch touch again, meaning, investment in clever-but-expensive water engineering to turn back the sea.
Is this good value? New York’s current Tulipo-mania level valuation in real estate isn’t based on the city’s economic productivity – wharves and shipping and warehouses and block housing and sweatshops and rail connections and bridges. These things, like the Erie Canal, are no longer the source of New York’s value. New York’s bloated sense of self – always a given – today means identical luxury spec condo towers built to attract and hold phantom wealth, like an aquifer for the central banks to hold their watery reserves. In this they are competing with Dubai and Vancouver and Sydney and Los Angeles and every other city on the globe.
The 1% may feel Manhattan real estate values are eternal, but much of New York is economically not productive. Its current demand value comes from the imagination of my generation: ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “42nd Street”, Gordon Gecko and Lillian Russell, ‘’Network’, ‘Stage Door’, Ellis Island, Frank Sinatra. The Rockefellers and the Goodfellas. Add Washington Irving and Walt Whitman, Franklin D. and Fiorello, Madison Square Garden and the Palace, George M. and George and Ira. Mix in ‘The Heights’ and Alexander Hamilton. Peter Stuyvesant and Donald Trump. Cruising and first-nighting. Kurt Vonnegut and Bennett Cerf, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Bernie Madoff. A place of, and for, folks with out-sized dreams willing to do anything to assert their genius and “make it.”
You can’t build a rubber boom around that stuff. And in another twenty years all those names listed above won’t mean a thing to anybody; with a few exxceptions, they’re meaningless now, to the cell-phone generations. New York will be sadly missed if it floods, or if it doesn’t.
The Valley Village View 