Category: Uncategorized

In Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, Elizabeth Blackmar explains how New York City property was established, became profitable, and the political conflicts in the city’s property system. The concept of property was produced by the British and Dutch colonizers of the land. What is now Manhattan became the site for trade, but not a strong internal economy. European residents on the “new” land were able to establish and own their own households and artisans could buy small pieces of land (Blackmar 15). While this continued for some time, both the Dutch and English used to the land to form connections with businessmen, endowing land to the mercantile elite. In the 1640s, the West Indies Company established gave half-free slaves “negro lots” just outside the fort to protect the company’s trade interests (Blackmar 16). This shows the role land played, as a tool for the elites to utilize. 

The land was a crucial mean for profits, but because the city was based on trade and not the use of land itself, it did not hold the same “intrinsic” value it does today. Yet as the internal economy expanded, the land became used more (Blakmar 21). While this process was already underway, the economy turned a corner, shortly after the industrial revolution. From 1785 to 1800, the population increased from 23,000 to over 60,000 people. Because the economy was increasing, as well as the sheer number of people, the land became a means for profit itself. Between 1795 and 1815, the real land costs in New York City became eight times the price (Blakmar 38). The land was no longer a place for the economic outputs to occur, as the artisans used their land or how the West Indies Company used the fort for trade. Rather, the land itself was the cite for economic transaction and growth. The financial value was in the land itself.  

This can be seen in the regulations of land emerging at the time. Henry Rutgers, a large landowner in Lower East Side, set strict terms on his lease’s, such as not building backhouses, to maintain the value of the property, even though they were against the practical use of the occupants (Blakmar 41-42). Similarly, in the early twentieth-century real estate largely backed limitations to housing because it could be used to protect their own land values, which could fall if skyscrapers, like the Singer Tower, were built (Revell 29-30). The property-based economy because the lens for decision making, as profits became a goal within itself.

As the land became profitable, the issue of land ownership became not only a question of unequal distribution but also unequal power. As independent proprietorship fell, working-class people became trapped in wage labor and rent. According to Blakmar, by 1850, the working class had lost their claims to the city’s resources and their own labor and life value. Here Blakmar compares Marxist understandings of the worker-capitalist relationship to the tenant-landowner relationship, as landowners exploit their tenants for rent. They are able to do so because they own the land, the means of production This is particularly true for the increasing tenement population in the city. Dumb-bell apartments were first constructed in 1879 and became ubiquitous. They used almost the entire lot with a small gap in the back along each side. For residents, they were largely inhospitable, with little light and access to air. But, for the landowner, they were the most efficient means for exploitation (Revel 7-9). The use of land underwent a striking transformation into modern-day property. By looking at this history, we can learn that the current state of property has been produced and is not a natural state.  

Throughout this week’s readings, we get insight into the origins of how New York became the real estate hub it is today, taking us all the way back the collection of private property by wealthy white British settlers in the 18th century, setting in place the system we have for collecting rent that we have today in Blackmar’s “Manhattan For Rent,” the consequential public policy of the early 20th century in Revell’s “Regulating the Landscape,” and the realities of how the city has failed its working class and immigrant communities in De Forest and Weeks’ “The Tenement Problem.”

While it was certainly interesting to see the influence of labor relations (from facilitating a redistribution of property to the middle class to the shift in dependency on slavery in the city, as well as the Haitian Revolution providing a disruption to the Anglo-American understanding of property rights), what I find more compelling is the story told by “Regulating the Landscape” and “The Tenement Problem.” It is truly heartbreaking to see how attempts were made throughout the years to better regulate the tenements in which New York’s labor class lived in that were continually abandoned, leaving many to suffer, while real estate magnates were able to essentially seize control over dictating the formation of the 1916 Zoning Ordinance to their benefit. 

I recently started reading Samuel Stein’s new book “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State,” and so much of this is introduced in the introductory chapter. Starting off with the memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the anniversary of which was this Monday, marking the death of immigrant women for the sake of capitalist greed, to the Grenfell Tower fire a few years ago. With 106 years between them, the one thing that remains true is the failure to prioritize building a city equitably for the working class, immigrants, and people of color. Although they are municipal  employees, Stein raises the question of how much they are truly able to help given the push to increase city revenue: “If the city is an investment strategy, are they just wealth managers?”

Capitalism, averse to limits being placed on their ability to exploit land and production, will prevent planning that affects this aforementioned exercise, as we examined in Revell’s piece, but we must work towards a place where we fight not for the Amazons, but for those who are continually being displaced, and are running out of places to go. It goes without saying that this will not be provided by the state, but I’m certainly interested in continuing to read Stein’s piece and seeing where he sees city planners fitting into this future, and the potential to right the wrongs of the planners who made way for the crisis of the tenements and the forming of the city to the desires of its elite. 

In the first chapter of Elizabeth Blackmar’s “Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850”, she writes that land was initially viewed by the Dutch and British Colonists of New York as an extractive resource. Arguably, the effort to extract the maximum value from New York land can be seen throughout history, down to the present day, albeit, in a very different way. In the early colonial times, land values on Manhattan were very low, as the city was only seen as valuable for its port. The valuable land was that which surrounded the Island, where the main export commodities, fur and timber were found in great quantity. Therefore, the area of lower Manhattan which comprised the port was granted and sold to those who had direct roles servicing and allowing the port to function. Outside of this, the ever present threat from the Native Americans to the north, made the city fairly unattractive and unstable. This instability characterized the New York City real estate market for hundreds of years, and played a role in depressing the city’s value. In fact, while contemporary developers often view regulation of property with contempt, historically, government regulation of real estate in Manhattan has been the catalyst for its explosive growth. It was not until the Commissioners Plan of 1811, which established the grid system and the created the 25’x100’ lots, that New York City began to move northward with any speed or regularity. With the introduction of the Commissioners Plan, speculative investment and development such as that described in Lawrence Veiller and Robert DeForest’s “The Tenement House Problem” could be undertaken. Prior to this, the uncertainty made most of the island unusable, as anything but farmland, in the absence of infrastructure or plans for infrastructure. Just over 100 years later, the 1916 Zoning Ordinance took this further. This revolutionary piece of legislature created, perhaps the strongest and most comprehensive set of planning and land use regulations in history. As described in Keith Revell’s “Regulating the Landscape: Real Estate Values, City Planning, and the 1916 Zoning Ordinance.”, this legislation resulted from the efforts of, primarily private entities, such as the Fifth Avenue Association. Formed of high end retailers, the rapid neighborhood change which Manhattan experienced throughout the latter half of the 19th century, largely resulting from the industrial revolution caused the private retailers to solicit public regulation to protect their considerable investments. Similarly, the disaster that was the 1915 Equitable Life Insurance Building, caused the city planners to realize the negative effects of private land use on both public and private space. Therefore, the regulation of both the use of land, and the physical form of buildings became a widely accepted practice. Throughout New York City’s history, the proactive approach to regulation of land has created a hospitable environment for the creation of one of the world’s most important property markets. This shows that while the imposition by the government on the rights of private property owners is often viewed as a nuisance by developers today, the stability, predictability, and regularity they create is invaluable and necessary for the creation of a functional modern city.

In The Tenement House Problem, attorney Robert W. DeForest and social reformer Lawrence Veiller call the public’s attention to the corrupt speculative system of building tenement houses. DeForest and Veiller observe that while the landlord is commonly recognized as responsible for the evils of the tenement building, the deceitful behavior of the building loan operator and the speculative builder goes unnoticed by the general public. For DeForest and Veiller, corruption begins with the building loan operator, who buys up plots of land which he then sells to a speculative builder, lending a certain of cash for the erection of a building on that plot of land in addition to the loan for the land itself. This speculative builder then seeks a secure permanent loan from fiduciary institutions like trust and insurance companies wishing to invest their capital, as well as a purchaser for his building at the earliest possible convenience. However, because New York State has laws in place mandating that such institutions not loan their capital on real estate exceeding 50% of the value of the property, a practice evolves in which the builder has the property over-appraised at a false valuation which then allows him to obtain larger loans from these fiduciary institutions and side-step the restrictions of the law. This false valuation also affects the prospective purchaser of the building, who is left under the impression that the property is worth significantly more than it actually is. In yet another instance of deception, the speculative builder often fills up his building with tenants immediately upon its completion, signing bogus leases so that prospective purchasers believe large rentals can be earned from the building. When the prospective purchaser does purchase the building, he often learns the property is worth significantly less than its estimated value, and that it was built shoddily and sometimes even illegally using what is known as the “lumping system.”
          The authors wisely recommend instrumentalizing public knowledge against the building loan operator and speculative builder, suggesting that building law violations be made public to ward off prospective purchasers likely to be victimized by this process. “Publicity,” as Veiller and DeForest put it, “is the one thing the builder cannot stand.” In addition to dissuading prospective purchasers from buying such a building, exposing the public to the corrupt practices of these two figures also exposes their relative needlessness. After all, as the authors remind the reader several times over the course of the essay, “The building loan operator adds nothing to the value of the property.” He and the speculative builder are merely middlemen, and could be eliminated from the process entirely if investors built tenement houses directly with their own invested capital.
           By deflecting attention away from the landlord and toward higher echelons of real estate corruption, Veiller and Deforest attempt to inform the public of larger systemic injustices. While they assert that “the investor,” at whose expense the building loan operator and speculative builder both profit, “must be awakened to a knowledge of the existing facts,” I believe that the essay also functions to educate the general public toward larger wrongdoings. The landlord is such a familiar figure to the average New Yorker. This narrative of the “evil slum-lord” is a convenient one, partly because it provides tenants with a visible focal point for their frustrations and partly because the landlord is the major authoritative figure of a property with which a layman interacts from day to day. In actuality, processes of corruption begin with the speculative work of the building loan-operator and the builder, two figures with which the public is rarely acquainted. Their relative obscurity to the public is exactly what allows loan operators and speculative builders to continue to profit from harmful practices. Whereas the landlord is certainly not faultless in many of these situations, the public should realize that attributing all corruption to a rather marginal figure in the overall process only detracts attention away from the public harm done by speculative builders and loan-operators.

Elizabeth Blackmar’s Manhattan for Rent, Lawrence Veiller and Robert De Forest’s The Tenement House Problem, and Keith D. Revell’s Regulating the Landscape: Real Estate Values, City Planning and the 1916 Ordinance all provide a historical backdrop for how New York real estate has developed its structure and policies of today. As a real estate agent in the process of acquiring an investment property, these texts currently contextualize my actions in shaping the built environment, which, as the readings show, influences essential livelihoods. Through these excerpts, it is clear how multiparty, profit-driven control of private property can manipulate livelihoods for the worst. On the same token, public regulation of private property can either behoove the community or fall into the hands of private interests.

As the readings illustrate, private interests have always dominated Manhattan real estate. The tenements described in Forest’s The Tenement House Problem were produced by multiple parties- the Building Operator, speculative builder, and investor- who wanted to profit through high density, low cost housing. Likewise, the wealthy proprietors and rentiers described in Manhattan for Rent controlled swaths of land first to preserve wealth and secondly to create wealth. Even the tenants of the rentier’s land wanted to turn a profit and would do so by subleasing out part of their land. Additionally, in Regulating the Landscape, proprietors actively pressed for limits on the heights and size of buildings, simply to lessen supply and maintain their own property values. Oftentimes, these real estate interests sought profit regardless of the ill effects to others.

Tenement houses are a prime example of how private property interest can be detrimental to individual livelihoods. The multilevel operation added significant cost to building the house, as every party wanted to make a profit. This took away funds that could have been spent making an actually livable building. As touched on in The Tenement House Problem and Regulating the Landscape, poor building planning and not leaving enough space for air, can even lead to health problems like tuberculosis.

Additionally, as seen in Manhattan for Rent, control of land oftentimes translates to control of production and labor. With sky-high rents, laborers and artisans may be priced out of working in a market. This ties back to Lockean theory and Henry George, who influenced progressives of the time who rallied both for and against private property on the basis that gross accumulation of land is unethical, workers have a right to their labor, and rent takes away fruit of one’s labor. Private property was dubbed evil in that a scarce property market restricted another’s freedom to work. At the same time, private property was advocated as essential to the freedom to work itself and the right to claim the bearing of one’s work.

To alleviate some of these qualms, New York public policy, as described in Manhattan for Rent and Regulating the Landscape, sought to redistribute land by breaking up large tracts and to regulate current building structures while planning for the future. The former helped redistribute land to the middle class. The latter helped provide for more air circulation, sunlight, public space, and urban decongestion.

Despite these positive effects, public policy did not always protect community interest as it should. In the case of tenement houses, building regulation was weakly enforced. In the case of the 1916 Zoning Ordinance, corrupt interest swayed much of the public policy, as at least half of the CBDR board was connected to the real estate industry. This essentially gave real estate executives the power to guide public action based on their private needs, while the initial goal was the opposite: for public needs to guide private action. The 1916 Zoning Ordinance still offered public benefits of providing order to the congested city; it simply was not as impactful as it could have been as it failed to deconstruct a history of property manipulation by colonial elites and simply built upon it.

Without the pressuring hand of private industry, however, public intervention into private property may be an adequate way to manage a system of unequal capitalist real estate interests. However, just because the private real estate market is currently managed by public oversight and driven by individual interest, doesn’t mean it will always be this way. Across countries like the UK and US, some individuals attempt to shy away from capitalism through joining co-op communities, where large resources, such as land and housing, are collectively owned. Although these communities are dwarfed by the rest of capitalistic society, they represent the possibility of blending public and private interests even past the cooperation that was seen with the 1916 Zoning Ordinance and current management of property and land.

Of this week’s readings, the one document that I resonated with was The Tenement House Problem. As a tenant in a Tenement building, I feel a more significant personal connection to the issue. From this reading, I firmly believe that when it comes to land and property one concept that must not be discounted, in any discussion within this subject, is that of the mass majority’s mindset.

In today’s modern world we operate in a society that places capitalism at the root of most actions. Everything is treated as a business, and the most significant influencer towards progression is that of the bottom line. How much does it cost to move forward? From the text assigned this week majority of the topics covered had a negative connotation to it. Things were wrong in the past, was the central idea that constantly repeated through my mind.

Take for example the text, The Tenement House Problem. On page 8 it states, “This hallway is nearly always dark, receiving no light except from the street door and a faint light that comes from the small opening upon the stairs…” Here we see how conditions in the past within tenement houses were terrible. However, we must understand the reasoning for why? This concept of why is by far one of the most interesting I got from the readings, and it is also what connects the past and the present.

From the text, Manhattan For Rent, by Elizabeth Blackmar one can trace the utilization of New York land as originating in production. However, over time the produce of the area soon became less profitable in contrast to the land’s usage. The question of how to take the products of the land and make a profit ultimately was shortened to how can said land make a profit. Thus, bringing to light how money is the driving factor to anything land or property related. The “why” to things being wrong is that the conditions are a product of peoples pursuit of wealth.

In today’s mass majority the mindset of many is that of money, capital, and profit. The one uniting theme that resonates with the past such as the colonial period up to the “modern day” that holds the issues of tenements is that of money. All the negative aspects of property such as the miss treatment of people all lie in cutting moral corners and doing what would make the owner the most money. Knowing this I firmly stand to believe that the future of what our land and concept of property would look like lies in what would create satisfactory levels of wealth. Regardless of what’s morally right or what’s morally wrong, the future of our land and definition of property would never lie in concepts of righteousness. Instead, the defense against moral wrongs and its prevention can only be achieved when a balance can be found between profitability and morality. The way to making the future better is not to satisfy righteousness but rather find room for it in a money-driven world. It holds second priority and profit is the first.