Suzan-Lori Parks

[Delano]

Hey @Troy are you familiar with her work. Ran into her at the St Mark's Poetry Project. Richard Forman was reading this wild piece of writing. I was laughing and she asked me if I was a writer. She would go on to write Top Dog and Under Dog which starred two of my favourite actors Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright. She also wrote Venus. MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, and in 2015 was awarded the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts. Other grants and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, a Whiting Award in Drama, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She is an alum of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College. Parks’ project 365 Days/365 Plays (where she wrote a play a day for an entire year) was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. 

[Troy]

Sure I'm familiar with her work: https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Suzan-Lori+Parks

 

You miss NYC, Huh?

[Delano]

The New York I knew no longer exists. In fact it was disappearing before I left. I am in Oz and life is good. 

 

Even while i was there I recognised the transient nature of the city. So i lived like a tourist and tried to experience the many sides of the City. 

[Troy]

NYC has priced artists out. Rents are property values are too high to permit a bookstore to open without it being subsidized somehow.

 

The famed 125th street has the same stores as a suburban strip mall except it is nosier, more crowded, provides poorer service, and is dirtier.

 

The Lenox Lounge to close. After I sold my Brownstone and Brought the place in Florida, I rented an apartment with ex for 7 years.  When we moved in the rent was $2,900 for a three bedroom, doorman building, with a patio, 1/2 a block from Central Park.  When we moved out the rent was $3,700.  It went up $100 a year, every year!  And you better not be a minute late or there would be a note on your door threatening eviction. 

 

It gave me a completely new perspective on what renters, in NYC go through. I also completely understand why people stay in substandard public housing for generations -- the options are far worse. 

 

By the way $3,700 is pretty cheap for NYC for a 3 bedroom apartment.  My place was in Spanish Harlem between a public Housing complex and the apartment build where one of the Central Park Five lived.  It was the same neighborhood I grew up in -- straight up ghetto.  It is gentrifying now and the realtors have dubbed community SoHa (South Harlem).

 

A lot of the apartment in NYC are unoccupied basically investments for the super wealthy. Meanwhile people are sleeping on the subway trains.  I got on a subway train during the wee hours during a visit just prior to the pandemic and it was like a flop house -- unbelievable!
 

During the pandemic, upper middle class people are leaving densely populated urban centers, this will probably put downward pressure on property values. Crime in these locations is beginning to escalate.  Throw in economic downturn caused by the pandemic, calls to defund the police Black Lives Matter unrest and things do not bode well, for poor and lower middle class people in places NYC.

[Delano]

... or anywhere else.

 

[Pioneer1]

The escalation in crime in New York is a DIRECT result of the purposeful and pretty much publicly announced refusal of the NYPD to do their jobs.

The police unions and racists on the force were so pissed off with those who were challenging them and holding them accountable for their brutality and injustices early on in the summer that they OPENLY conspired to not only allow criminals to do their thing uninhibited but BROADCASTED that they would do so on numerous media outlets over and over again to seemingly give criminals a GREEN LIGHT.

If you remember the riots that followed George Floyd's death only lasted a couple weeks and there were CALLS to defund the NYPD but those things take months just to discuss let alone implement.   
So far, the amount of funding and number of cops HASN'T CHANGED at all yet, so how does one explain the spike in crime that has been occurring for the past couple of months?

[Troy]

There are smaller cities, across the country trying to fill the void left by cities like New York, but as soon as they do capitalists come in an screw things up.  Austin TX is a good example of this, as is Brooklyn, NY.

 

All the upper middle class white folks went to their country or summer homes, police always do less police work when the people they are most interested in serving leave.  Plus crimes always increases during an economic downturn and this one will be longer and deeper than folks are willing to admit, so crime will continue to increase.