[From interview]
Q: In the past, rich, poor and middle-income New Yorkers lived in the same integrated buildings. What do you think of the current mutation to a rich door/poor dynamic?
It’s one of the most complicated problems we have to solve. I am not a politician, and it is a political problem to some extent. I think methods of subsidizing apartments in buildings which have higher-income people in them is a good way. But it does have certain limitations . . . Manhattan used to be a place where you had very rich people along Park Avenue, then you would turn a side street in the 80s or 90s and the incomes would decline over towards York Avenue. There was a cross-section of class and social groups. We’ve lost some of that. There are still a lot of tenements, but they need to be rehabbed.
Q: As for the rich doors/poor doors . . .
The “poor door” and “rich door” is kind of a silly argument. Say I live on West End Avenue and someone else lives on West 70th Street around the corner. If they have a nice apartment and they can afford it and it is a safe building that’s well managed, they don’t have to enter the same lobby. I have no problem if they come in the same lobby with me either. You can have it either way. I have no answers but I am not unmindful of the seriousness of this discussion.
[. . .]It’s one of the most complicated problems we have to solve. I am not a politician, and it is a political problem to some extent. I think methods of subsidizing apartments in buildings which have higher-income people in them is a good way. But it does have certain limitations . . . Manhattan used to be a place where you had very rich people along Park Avenue, then you would turn a side street in the 80s or 90s and the incomes would decline over towards York Avenue. There was a cross-section of class and social groups. We’ve lost some of that. There are still a lot of tenements, but they need to be rehabbed.
Q: As for the rich doors/poor doors . . .
The “poor door” and “rich door” is kind of a silly argument. Say I live on West End Avenue and someone else lives on West 70th Street around the corner. If they have a nice apartment and they can afford it and it is a safe building that’s well managed, they don’t have to enter the same lobby. I have no problem if they come in the same lobby with me either. You can have it either way. I have no answers but I am not unmindful of the seriousness of this discussion.
We have these housing projects all over the city which were the best in the world when they were built in the 1930s to the ’50s, but they did isolate low-income people away from the city and certainly away from people of other income groups. Then I read about the banlieues in Paris and putting the poorest people outside and of course, the richest people live in the center of Paris, so I’m very nervous about these ideas. I’m very suspicious of the efficacy of these ideas.
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