The video The Sprawl is showing us how change is not always good. All the music by Sonic Youth and Arcade Fire in this group of songs under this category of urban sprawl are really about the same thing. Each of the songs is about different aspects of the takeover of American spaces by business interests. That is what Fainstein is talking about in the article. Spaces for people are disappearing, especially the spaces for the middle class and the poor. The homeless are worse off than before because now they have no place at all. Seems like government is no longer for the people. It is for the money.
The songs talk about the disappearance of things we remember from youth. It gets faster all the timer because the governments want more tax money, so they want real estate to be used for business. They don’t make much money from spaces for people. Parks, playgrounds, and other free spaces bring in no revenue, while rentals don’t bring in much. Low rent housing is a loss to the government. So they want everybody to live in the suburbs and commute. So there are fewer and fewer places to live near or in the city. The songs talk about the change when the big stores open (like Wal-Mart) and people are urged to go buy-buy-buy. For American business, retail and entertainment are where the money is, so that is what they want to build in the city, like in Times Square. They also want office buildings, but homes and recreation for those office workers have to be far away from that really valuable real estate.
In all of these videos, the sprawl is where people live and do things and the urban centers are dead spaces where business happens and people go to buy things. But business is encroaching even in the sprawl because the stores are coming in to get the money of people who don’t go to the city. If you go back to a smaller city or a town where you grew up it will be so changed that you don’t know where you are. You cannot find the places you remember, because they are all gone, and in their place are stores and office buildings and parking lots.
Fainstein is talking about urban renewal projects that just make money for business and the government and the people who have been there for generations will be pushed out by “eminent domain” and their space will be converted to money-making real estate. It’s ideal for the city, because they will have fewer poor to serve, and that costs less, and less crime so less money is spent on policing. Fainstein talks about how it is a question of whose needs will be served in the redevelopment plan. It seems that money will win again.
I wonder what would happen if all the guys in the sprawl stop buying stuff if that could happen. I think that city spaces will be dead, without any real people, just commuters. That seems to be a really scary proposition. Will we all have to commute? I want to live within walking distance of my work. I think we need diversified spaces. After all, what will happen to the planet if we all become commuters? Can the homeless commute? Well, they are being pushed right into the sea, I think. There are more homeless than ever before with the rising costs of real estate and rising rents, even whole families are homeless in New York. So I wonder what will happen to our society. It seems like there are rich and poor and the middle class is vanishing. These are the people that support our society, but they either have to make more money or become poor.
We need to figure out how to take control of our government back from the interests of big business. Otherwise, we will become a nation of big cities where nobody lives and urban development of bedroom communities. Then the interests of the people will not mean the people with all the money. Maybe those people should not have all the money. Government has to remember who the voters are and the voters have to remember that what they hear and see maybe only sell them an idea, like the Times Square Redevelopment Plan. If the redevelopment plan is used, Times Square will be Times Square Business Park.