Samuel R Delany's book on urban development issues, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York University Press, 1999) brings his astute and engaging science fiction writer eye to the topic. He has a kind of Victorian erudition coupled with all the tools of post-modern deconstruction and political discourse.
He relates his experiences over nearly thirty years in Times Square talking with the homeless and the hustlers, the small businessmen and their customers, the denizens of the porno theaters he frequented and makes a strong case that the "redevelopment" that has pushed most of these folks out of the area is based upon a fear of contact (as opposed to networking) and especially any contact across class lines. By remaking Times Square into something like a mall that is always tourist-friendly, Delany believes that all of us will become tourists even in our own communities. As a black homosexual, he has an unique perspective based upon his survival observations of a mostly white, heterosexual culture.
(pages 149 - 152) The generally erroneous assumption about how new buildings make money is something like this: A big company acquires the land, clears it for construction, and commences to build. After three to five years, when it is complete, the company rents the building out. If the building is a success, all the offices (or apartments, as the case may be) are leased, and the site is a popular one, then and only then does the corporation that owns the building begin to see profits on its earlier outlays and investments. Thus the ultimate success of the building as a habitation is pivotal to the building's future economic success.
If this were the way new office buildings were actually built, however, few would even be considered, much less actually begun.
Here is an only somewhat simplified picture of how the process _actually_ works. Simplified though it is, it gives a much better idea of what on and how money is made. A large corporation decides to build a building. It acquires some land. Now it sets up an extremely small ownership corporation, which is tied to the parent corporation by a lot of very complicated contracts - but is a different and autonomous corporation envertheless. That ownership corporation, tiny as it might be, is now ready to build the building. The parent corporation also sets up a much larger construction corporation, which hires diggers, subcontracts construction companies, and generally oversees the building proper.
The little ownership corporation now borrows a lot of money from a bank - enough to pay the construction corporation for constructing the building proper. The small ownership corporation also sells stock to investors - enough to pay back the bank loan. The tiny ownership corporation (an office, a secretary, and a few officers that oversee things) proceeds to pay the parent construction corporation with the bank funds to build the building. It uses the stock funds to pay back the bank. Figured in the cost of the building is a healthy margin of profits for the construction corporation - and for the large corporation that got the whole project started - while the investors pay off the bank, so that _it_ doesn't get twisted out of shape. Meanwhile both the ownership corporation and construction corporation pay the parent corporation as their controlling stockholder.
Yes, if the building turns out to be a stunningly popular address, then (remember all those contracts?) profits will be substantially greater than otherwise. But millions and millions of dollars of profits will be made by the parent corporation just from the construction of the building alone, even if no single space in it is ever rented out. (Movies are made in the same manner, which is why so many awful ones hit the screen. By the time they are released, the producers have long since taken the money and, as it were, run.) Believing in the myth of profit only in return for investments, public investors will swallow the actual cost of the building's eventual failure - if it fails - while the ownership corporation is reduced in size to nothing or next to nothing: an office in the building on which no rent is paid, a secretary and/or an answering machine, and a nominal head (with another major job somewhere else) on minimal salary who comes in once a month to check in ... if that.
Two facts should now be apparent.
First fact: The Forty-second Street Development Project (I use this as a metonym for the hidden corporate web behind it) _wants_ to build those buildings. Renting them out is secondary, even if the failure to rent them is a major catastrophe for the city, turning the area into a glass and aluminum graveyard.
A truth of high finance tends to get away from even the moderately well-off investor (the successful doctor or lawyer, say, bringing in two to four hundred thousand a year), though this truth is, indeed, what makes capitalism: In short-term speculative business ventures of (to choose an arbitrary cutoff point) more than three million dollars, such as a building or civic center, (second fact) the profits to be made from dividing the money up and moving it around over the one to six years during which that money must be spent easily offset any losses from the possible failure of the enterprise itself as a speculative endeavor, once it's completed.
The interest on a million dollars at 6.5 percent is about 250 dollars a _day_; on a good conservative portfolio it will be 400 dollars a day. The interest on ten million dollars is ten times that. Thus the interest on ten million dollars is almost a million and a half a year. The Forty-second Street Development Project is determined to build those buildings. The question is: How long will it take to convince investors to swallow the uselessness of the project?
Far more important than whether the buildings can be rented out is whether _the investors think the buildings can be rented out_. In the late seventies, three of those towers were tabled for ten years. The ostensible purpose for that ten-year delay was to give economic forces a chance to shift and business a chance to rally to the area. The real reason, however, was simply the hope that people would forget the arguments against the project, so clear in so many people's minds at the time. Indeed, the crushing arguments against the whole project from the mid-seventies were, by the mid-eighties, largely forgotten; this forgetting has allowed the project to take its opening steps over the last ten years. The current ten-year delay means that public relations corporations have been given another decade to make the American investing public forget the facts of the matter and convince that same public that the Times Square project is a sound one. It gambles on the possibility that, ten years from now, the economic situation might be better - at which point the developers will go ahead with those towers, towers which, Stern has told us, _will_ be built."
(121) Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.
The class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world perpetually works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed.
While the establishment and utilization of those institutions always involved social practices, the effects of my primary and secondary theses are regularly perceived at the level of discourse. Therefore, it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for both the establishment of such insitutions and practices and, by extension, the necessary critique of those institutions and practices - a critique necessary if new instittuions of any efficacy are to be established. At this level, in its largely stabilizing/destabilizing role, superstructure (and superstructure at its most oppositional) _can_ impinge on infrastructure."
(123 -124) Contact is the conversation that starts in the line at the grocery counter with the person behind you while the clerk is changing the paper roll in the cash register. It is the pleasantries exchanged with a neighbor who has brought her chair out to take some air on the stoop. It is the discussion that begins with the person next to you at a bar. It can be the conversation that starts with any number of semiofficials or service persons - mailman, policeman, librarian, store clerk or counter person. As well, it can be two men watching each other masturbating together in adjacent urinals of a public john - an encounter that, later, may or may not become a conversation. Very importantly, contact is also the intercourse - physical and conversational - that blooms in and as 'casual sex' in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars, and sex clubs, on street corners with heavy hustling traffic, and in the adjoining motels or the apartments of one of another participant, from which nonsexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for decades or a lifetime may spring, not to mention the conversation of a john with a prostitute or hustler encountered on one of another street corner or in a bar - a relation that, a decade later, has devolved into a smile or a nod, even when (to quote Swinburne) 'You have forgotten my kisses/And I have forgotten your name.' Mostly, these contact encounters are merely pleasant chats, adding a voice to a face now and again encountered in the neighborhood."
(128 -129) There is, of course, another way to meet people. It is called _networking_. Networking is what people have to do when those with like interests live too far apart to be thrown together in public spaces through chance and propinquity. Networking is what people in small towns have to do to establish any complex cultural life today.
But contemporary _networking_ is notably different from _contact_.
At first one is tempted to set contact and networking to opposition. Networking tends to be professional and motive-driven. Contact tends to be more broadly social and appears random. Networking crosses class lines only in the most vigilant manner. Contact regularly crosses class lines in those public spaces in which interclasss encounters are at their most frequent. Networking is heavily dependent on institutions to promote the necessary propinquity (gyms, parties, twelve-step programs, conferences, reading groups, singing groups, social gatherings, workshops, tourist groups, and classes), where those with the requisite social skills can maneuver. Contact is associated with public space and the architecture and commerce that depend on and promote it. Thus contact is often an outdoor sport; networking tends to occur indoors."
(127) [Jane Jacobs] dismisses "pervert parks" as necessarily social blights (largely understandable in the pre-Stonewall 1950s when she was collecting material for her book, but nevertheless unfortunate), though she _was_ ready to acknowledge the positive roles winos and destitute alcoholics played in stabilizing the quality of neighborhood life at a _higher_ level than the neighborhood would maintain without them.
"I would recommend her analysis, though I would add that, like so much American thinking on the left, it lacks not so much a class analysis as an _interclass_ analysis."
Editorial Comment: Somewhere I should have notes on Jane Jacobs' _Life and Death of Great American Cities_.
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