A Piece of New York: Real Estate in NYC

expertise is land use. If that sounds dry, our talk was anything but he kept presenting one surprising idea after another, and even though as you'll hear, we disagreed on some points, I found our conversation riveting. Then later in the show, I'll talk with Gothamist Senior editor Elizabeth Kim about retail blight, where ground level retail spaces go empty, a phenomenon only worsened by the pandemic. But let's start with Professor Schlicker. It's hard to find an issue that excites more passion

among urban dwellers than gentrification. For some, gentrification isn't just a policy issue, it's an urban culture war. Schlicker rejects that framing. He says that the real moral issue is the lack of housing at all levels in every neighborhood in every successful US city, And he says the blame for gentrification doesn't sit squarely on the people moving in the First thing that say is that in general, rich people don't want to move to poor eors. They want

to live where other rich people are. Right, so that if you ask a rich person coming to New York City where you want to live, they'd say Grench village, or so they don't want to live somewhere in Brooklyn. It's gentrifying, right. So the demand for gentrification is driven

by restrictions in existing developed areas. If we don't build a new building in some place which people still move there, they'll take the existing houses and they'll put up that neutral font on the front um and renovate the whole thing. And so demand to move into gentrifying area is driven by broader economic forces, not by new construction. What is

the other side of that. So there's a theory that a new building, even if it broadly reduces prices across the city, region or whatever, could increase prices in its neighborhood because it adds the whole foods, it adds a wine bar, and then yuppies moving. Research increasingly shows that that's not the case that in general, summarizing research by Evan Mast and others, even at the neighborhood level, building new housing because it adds supply, generally drives down rather

than increases prices in the area. Gentrification is driven by restrictions on building everywhere. Who benefits from the status quo in the New York real estate industry now as it currently exists, So landowners mostly, And so landowners can be big landowners or they can be small landowners like people own apartments. Um, you've seen we've seen a huge increase in the value of real estate, including individual apartments, houses, and big landholdings, and so restricting development as much as

we do. The people who benefit from that, given the huge demand to live here are people who have the scarce resource. What about the real estate industry itself? Are you saying they want slow growth because they want to keep values high? So developers these days are mostly lobbyists, right, So if you make it extremely hard to do something, it's actually quite beneficial if you're the only person who

can get something through. Right. So if you are the only person who can achieve the combination, weird combination of lots and hire the fancy lawyers to get something built. You're going to gain enormously, whereas someone who could build a small pop up on top of their building but can't deal with the politics won't see those gains. And so it actually is quite an interests of lobbyists to be the only winners in the system. Hudson Yards. Well, so Hudson Yards gets a huge amount of public money.

It's a little bit more complicated situation because the city wanted to build an alternative commercial center, a mall offices really like a third downtown. Was basically the idea at the time. I had recommended to see that they should build murray Hill there, and everyone said, everyone hates murray Hill. Why would you do that? And I said, New York has enough places to go to. New York needs more places to be from. And the mean, there's there's housing, bedrooms,

you need bore bedrooms, and there's housing built in Hudson Yards. Um. It is valuable that office space in Manhattan to the region because it's the most transaccessible place. But New York City needs a lot more houses. Um. And they could have built that with much less subsidy and it would have been more value because I went to horrible. I mean, it's another thing. Well, but I don't want to speak

ill of a specific project like Hutson Yards. But a friend of mine was working in that area when we took a walk through the shopping center, so to speak. The mall is what I call it, and it looks exactly like a mall like where I grew up on Long Island. I got this chill. It was empty, and I'm walking around and it's just Row and card Or after Carridor of shiny glass and fancy stores and names we all know. And there was nobody there buying anywhere. Yeah.

So one of the huge problems with Hudson Yards is that it's off the street grid. And so the street grid is a New York City's greatest invention as far as i'm cancer. The expansion of the street grid makes it easy to buy and sell property, It makes the city legible to outsiders. And the moving it off the street grid, you have to go in a building and go up an elevator, which was designed to make it exclusive.

But that we see a kind of bias towards luxury in these things, is itself a product of exclusion, right, so that if you can only build one thing, it's going to be bought the person with the most money. And so the fact we talked about like is it luxury or is it not luxury? Well, lots of housing goes from luxury to not luxury, and the housing goes

from not luxury to luxury all the time. So I lived in Park Slope growing up, my father and mother dead, and um, a house was a luxury house when it was built, it declined, it was subdivided into apartments, and then now it's recomb the same house recombined into a luxury apartment. Is it Is it a luxury house? Is it not a luxury house? Luxury is either the finishings you know, which you can come and go, or it's a product of the supply and demand for the market.

And so among the downsides of the Hudson Yards project is if it declines, which you know, things have the habit of doing that, it's gonna be extremely hard to retrofit. So that's the one thing which is that thinking of like this is luxury and not luxury is the product of the housing market as opposed to anything else. What about people who are speculative buyers who are buying you just that they're renting out, or they're just going to sit on it and set them flip it eighteen months

or two years from now for a profit. Or people who have these luxury residence as we read all about, and they only come to New York for four weeks you're on a shopping speed. Then they go back to fill in the blank, some wealthy enclave. Overseas vacancies, you do see very localized periods of the and see so everyone's been to fifty seventh Street and sees these tall buildings with no lights on. Um. The actual vacancy rate

overall in New York City is not very high. People have this idea that the vacancy rate is driving housing prices, and that is not so. Blaming the vacancy rate or rich Russians for the housing market is a way for people to displace blame from themselves. We are the gentrifying class, right, So it's the group of people who are by we, I mean upper middle class professionals to lower upper class professionals.

It is the lack of housing combined with increased demand to live in the city that drives housing prices, And it's not about rich Russians. That's a localized no, no, no, there's been a very big increase in foreign ownership through LLC's of New York City real estate. Most of those apartments are rented out right. So the number of people who own houses and just leave them vacant, it's generally lower and high demand areas. It is not a major thing.

You want to see places with huge vacancy rates. It's vacation areas. That's the areas that have huge vacancy rates. Palm Beach, Florida has a high vacancy rate. Why because which people use in a second house? Right? Um, If you want to build affordable housing, if you even want to talk about building more affordable housing in New York wherever it may go, is that a conversation that starts

in Albany or in city hall. So you're talking about blow market rate capital, a affordable housing, not decreased price of housing. So those are two different concepts that people use somewhat interchangeably. Um. But the price of housing or how affordable it is, is something that's driven by broader supply and demand factors. We're talking about building capital as well.

Public housing or or subsidized housing of one version or another. Yeah. Um. In that situation, both the city and the state play both a funding and a regulatory role, and so these two issues are not completely distinct from one another. So the city builds a lot of housing through its h hpd UM, it does a lot through the inclusionary zone and build how much would a lot of the affordable housing that gets built is built by the city itself.

Was the last time they built affordable housing which is not public housing in the sensors, But they do a great deal of direct subsidy of construction. So every year they're doing thousands of units who the same people who are on the waitlist to get other types of public housing. Right, I'm just talking about housing for people who are earning unders a year. We give below market rate housing to

people who are earning way above fifty dollars a year. Right, so you frequently targeted in people earning a hundred thousand dollars for a family of four. Right. So the state funds and the city funds UM. The city is in charge of sighting for the most part, and that is where the land use piece and the funding piece come together. So the fact that land is so expensive to buy, even in the outer boroughs everywhere in New York and

makes different prices. But the city has to compete with private market for buying a piece of land, which it does. The cost of that piece of land will be higher if we restrict, then if we don't restrict, So then the issues are not completely distinct. I will say that it is certainly the case that the kind of ordinary construction market won't build housing for very poor people like that is obviously true, the same way that the market

won't provide lots of things very popular. One of the definitions of being very poor you can't buy things at the market, and so that we as we need greater subsidies through vouchers or what about the poor door to enter for the affordable housing units? Does that exist in the city. So it was a way to comply with inclusionary zoning requirements. Um it's been phased out under the Deblasia administration. There's a famous building on the Upper West

Side that had this component. It's very upstairs, downstairs story define inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning is a requirement that as a condition on building you have to include a certain number of subsized or capital A affordable units. Of course, the broad question with inclusionary zoning of any sort is should it be included in the building or should you be able to build nearby separate building. And so the poor door was a combination of these two things. It

was building in the building but off site. The question is what's the point of inclusionary zoning? So is it to create inclusion in the building level? Is it important to have affordable units, capital A affordable units or blow market rates on the same floor as market rate buildings. Is it important that the neighborhood level, or is the goal just over the golden sax guys living down the hall from a school teacher, right? Is that the goal?

Or is the goal just increasing the amount of affordable housing? Because if the goal is increasing the amount of affordable housing, it's very frequently a more efficient mechanism to do it off site, because if you're building in the fancy, fancy building, you're going to include all sorts of amenities, the cost per unit is higher for the same number of dollars, you could build more affordable units off site, and so

isn't really beneficial. So the question it's just it's a it's a it's a benefit if you think of it, it's just a costly benefit. And so the question is like, how do you think that mingling at the individual building level? The goal, the mean justification for inclusionary zoning is uh integration of this sort right at the neighborhood economic integration um at the neighborhood level. And is it worth the trade off of fewer units if you're the goal is

like deep integration in the building. And you know, people can have their own beliefs about this. The last thing I'll say about it is that it's not any form of inclusionary zoning is costly right, because if you have to build non market units inside of building, it's like a tax on building. Um. We could fund public housing in other ways, so we could make everyone who owns

property pay for it through the general property tax. We instead tax building and so way of off floating responsibility for our fellow citizens onto the developers and on newcomers. It seems like it's free to say, if you're going to build X, you have to build a certain number of affordable units. But it's not free. It's just a targeted spirit of the income tax in the sense that those who have more money in the building, you're gonna

pay more. Well, that's true at the building level, but there are plenty of people who have more and aren't in that building, who are in the building that was built before. Right, So that if you look at I don't know, pick your fancy building in New York, a lot of people who currently own there are super duper duper duper rich, and we're not making them pay for affordable units. We're only making the landowner and developed who

that where the building is being built. And so we are taxing, and it's it is a tax um, but it is at tax that's targeted on developers, newcomers, and not on everybody else. Let's say you succeeded in securing the funding and just in this fantasy, I come up with a plan where I'm gonna build a hundred thousand units of purely affordable housing, real old school affordable housing, New York City Housing Authority housing. I'm gonna build building.

I'm gonna build a hundred thousand units over twenty years. I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start identifying pieces of land and we're gonna tear down this you know, this warehouse that's defunct and this old plant that's not being used more in the bronx. Is that the kind of thing the city needs to be doing. So the thing the city needs to be doing to address its broader housing problems is building in lots of places of all building types and market levels, right so that the city has

a housing crisis at all levels. The country needs to build more subsidized housing, some of which will be in the New York City region, but we also need more market rate housing. And they're connected in the sense that the cost or difficulty of building capital a affordable housing um is increased if we restrict market rate housing, because there's which one market for dart and so the city

needs to build a lot more we even market rade housing. Yes, of course, people who are rent burdened in New York is almost everyone. And further, New York City's restrictions on its broader amount of housing create an extraordinary amount of economic harm to the country. Zoning restrictions in New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley three markets, if they were relaxed to the levels of your average American city, there's areas would draw in lots of people wages are higher here.

That would increase the size of the US economy by people estimate somewhere north of eight percent. And she has some idea of what that would mean is that would mean creating Canada. So Canada is ring eight or of it. And so the effect of land use regulations in the New York region broadly speaking, New York City being a big part of it, but obviously not the only part. We're talking New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island, Southern Connecticut maybe

the worst. And then Silicon valiant ETI. You're talking about eight percent of the U s economy. It's an impossibly large descent. The number one obstacle right now to not being able to do that local regulations, for example, so limits on heights, limits of the Greenage Village Society for Historic Preservation is not someone you're a fan of. Oh no, they're the worst. They're the worst. But I mean, I'm a huge supporters totally to reach his own Do you say Tomato, I say, you say how you say Andrew

Bourbon hows it? But it's not just the Grand Village Historic Preservations is although they are a major but in a preparatory way, What kind of a building do you live in? I live in a Paul Building the Upper West Side and a rental apartment at all building. What do your pre war, post World war in a post war post war building? Right? And if you had your way, would the aesthetics of the building you live and be

of some significance to you? Would you like to live in the app Thorpe or the bell Nord or the elder san Remo used to live up there for years? So no, um, I mean they're very nice buildings, don't get me wrong and everything. But in general, in housing markets, just as in all other kinds of markets, new things are nicer than old things. Um. And the housing quality in New York, for just forgetting you know, is um extraordinarily low relative to places that allow ordinary building. So

you don't have central air. You go to the Dakota and their window units in the decent right, people have exposed radiators that the kids burn themselves on. But you but you're your kids are burning their hands on radiators in the Dakota. They do recognize that very fancy, right. It's the air that's blowing in and leaking through the rotting seam of the of the Friedrich air conditioning having the window since nineteen sixty nine. That window is a

window in the Dakoda Dada. It's great. Some people kind of dig the more power to them. And you know, I don't care what people like, um, but in general, uske of what I You know that in general, housing quality is judged by a variety of metrics, so like, you know, like energy efficiency and size of unit and quality of insulation and stuff. Uh in units just because they're new are frequently much better than old units, and so like this is the thing. People kind of all

sorts of aesthetic preferences. I think some new buildings are nice. I think some old buildings are nice. But you know, the idea that historic preservation is about historic preservation as opposed to being about aesthetics is probably wrong. We don't see, if we wanted to know what New York was like in nineteen sixty or nineteen forty, we would choose a random block from that period and allow no building. That's

not what we do. We choose the most aesthetically attractive ones, right, So we see there's unbelievably beautiful blocks in Grandwich Village or on the Upper West Side or wherever we do. And the question is these things have clear asthetic value, they're beautiful, and just has a cost to limiting them, right, So it's just that you make trade offs. But it's about aesthetics, not about histories. That is the central point.

The second thing I'll say is that I don't have any particular this block needs to be developed or that block needs to be developed. One of the reforms I've proposed and people have picked it up in a variety of different ways, is to suggest that city should adopt a zoning budget. They should say we need to build

X number of units this year. It could be designated by the city itself or by the state for the city, and the city could Then when you say someone says I want to build this in Soho and you say no, I don't want that built in Soho, the opponents have to say where else it should go, and that we are then able to have a real conversation about the variety of aesthetic or social or whatever merits of a given building project. In the context of acknowledg edging, we

need to solve New York City's housing crisis. So I love Grene Village as much as the next guy. It's beautiful. Um, the question is if we're gonna build near there or should we build somewhere else. Opponents of building in Greenwich Village should say, actually, you know, it would make a

lot more sensibuild in the upper east Side. That's a good place to build, and then the people in the Upper east Side said no, the other way around, and we could have an honest discussion about the reality, the kind of the non or should we be saying that people, you want to tear the building down, you've got to pass an aesthetic approval. No. No, they should be able to build all the old family woods line. New York is a town where we were ever teared down the building.

We always put up an uglier building. A city can't be all stellar buildings. It's just not the kind of thing it would work. I mean even aesthetics at the street level, like many buildings here where you're going to stories, let's have two stories of detail. When people propose very very attractive buildings, they get rejected by community boards and zoning approval, and when they prove ugly buildings they also do. On the reason or one reason people don't bother to

spend a huge amount of money in architects. Is that the people who oppose new building don't actually care that much, but they say they care, but they actually just don't want something built near them. And so in a building boom, we generally get a bunch of great buildings, right. And so one of the things that are modern boom has not created is a bunch of great building because we

just don't have that many buildings overall. Um uh. And so if it was in anyone's interest, if they really think they could buy off the neighbors by hiring Frank Gary to do it, they would because it's so valuable to be able to build that it was worth it politically to hire the schamanciest architects and the history of architects. They do it because it's so valuable to them. Why don't they do it because it doesn't matter that the people who are opposing it. Andrew Berman would oppose anything.

He would oppose it. If it was beautiful, he'd apposed it was ugly, he'd oppose it, if it was designed by now that he would oppose it, I think in his opinion. And the other thing I'd say about this is the same point I made about Hudson Yards a minute ago, which is that New York City need to house people to go to its offices. Like that's Ultimately, a city is a mechanism to connect people to retail opportunities, commercial opportunities, and then has a life that's driven by

the fact that people are close together. In an extremely characteristic but unromantic line, the Harvard economist Ed Glazier describes cities is the absence of space between people. The city needs to house people, and it is an economic and moral imperative to do so. Not doing so creates both

losses of output increases in an inequality. And you can point to all sorts of other factors statics, historic preservation, but the imperative that we allow the economy to grow and that we fight an equality through building more housing is sufficient that tradeoffs have to be made, and I would love for people to confront those tradeoffs openly. Professor David Schlicker, you heard his sharp critique of the historical preservation movement and the limits it puts on new development.

You also probably caught that he isn't a fan of Andrew Berman, a leader in that field. But i am Berman runs the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. When he came on the show, he argued that preserving neighborhoods doesn't mean stopping development altogether. There's areas of our neighborhoods where we've fought for new zoning that we thought would encourage good development as opposed to bad developments, which meant

the expectation was things will get built. Give us an example of an area where this came into play, for instance, in the East Village. So the old zoning would have encouraged big, tall towers. So we pushed foreign god a reasoning that said, yes there can be new development here, but the size and scale of it is going to be more like what you think of the East Village. Seven story building, six story buildings. This is what zoning does.

To hear my full interview with Andrew Berman, text Burman, that's b E R M A N two seven zero one zero one. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the thing. When it comes to real estate here in New York, we tend to pay a lot of attention to the cost of renting or buying a place, but the real estate market is broader than that, and so is the draw for living here. That's something that fascinates

Elizabeth Kim. She's a senior editor at Gothamist, the New York focused news website that's part of the New York Public Radio family. She's written a lot about real estate, including the hollowing out of the ground level boutiques that define New York neighborhoods. We recorded our conversation before the coronavirus completely changed street life and commerce in cities around

the world. There's a lot of talk about gentrification and housing, but at the street level, it's about the bodega, the bookstore, the bakery. It's about the erosion of these institutions because the retail defines the character of a neighborhood. You know. The New York City Controller Scott Stringer, he did a very comprehensive study recently. He basically looked between two thousand seven and two thousand seventeen, and he found that the amount of vacant space in New York City doubled. Why

do you think that is typically what's going on? Well, the number one reason if you talk to brokers, if you talk to small business owners, it's the Amazon effect. It's e commerce the way we buy you name it, shoes, books, clothing, mainly on the internet. Now, there are other reasons to One phenomenon that is really interesting in New York is this idea of retail blight in places like the West

Village and soho. And these are properties in which investors came in, poured a lot of money into buying these storefronts, wanted exorbitant rents, and then found there was no market for it, and rather than rent it at a lower price and take a hit on their revenue stream, they said they couldn't do that. They have to hold out. So these are stores that are just been empty for months and months and months that empty store. So I've

asked people that question. I've asked brokers that question, and the answer I uniformly get from brokers and elected officials is no. So this is basically what I've been told by brokers. When they're buying these properties, they typically take loans, and the terms of the loans state that they need to generate a certain amount of revenue. The terms of their loan is basically constraining them from lowering the rents. And there's this whole kind of adjustment that needs to

happen in the market. The banks need to rewrite those loans, and then then you know, the person holding the loan needs to revise their expectations. Then there's the small business owner who comes in and also needs to kind of revise their expectations of what kind of rent they can, you know, seek to ask of a landlord or or demand of a landlord. So basically the market needs to adjust in all these ways. And these are all things

that are lagging lagging indicators. You know, retail rents rose on average across the city over a decade, and in some neighborhoods the average rent increases were and it's rent that's often cited as the number one reason why we have so many they can retail space. We used to have commercial rank control in the city in the fifties

and sixties. What happened so I haven't been able to find out why it went away, And since the early eighties there's been a call to reinstate some form of it, and recently there is a Brooklyn Council member who has introduced a bill calling for commercial rent control. And the way it would work is basically, there would be a board of you know, mayoral appointees, and they would take a look at all the data that's out there on all the rents, and they would set what they feel

is a reasonable rent for a particular neighborhood. And if you're a landlord of a of a storefront or even an office building, you would not be able to charge more than that. Obviously, the real estate industry, I mean, they've been fighting these types of controls since the early eighties. I mean in the early eighties, the city Council talked about this for many many years. Can we help landlords and small businesses mediate a fair rent? So that's how they wanted to do it at the time. M that

will that bill was just talked to death. And actually that bill, believe it or not, it's still up for debate and there are very strong um supporters of that bill that still want to see that bills it was originally introduced by Ruth Messenger such as they're you know, they're just coalitions of small business activists. Where has de

Blasio been on this issue? And there is one plus terms in officer, so Mayor de Blasio has supported this idea of a vacancy tax, which would need to be done through the state legislature, and that's something that's been talked about a while as well. So if you have an empty storefront that's been empty for you know, X number of over x number of months, the idea would be to impose attacks on the property owner because, like we talked about, why our property owners able to keep

these storefronts vacant for so long? Don't they want to earn some kind of rent, even if it's less than what they expect it. And the theory is is that, you know, similar to the residential market, there's just been a lot of big investors that have swooped into this market. So it's no longer just Joe Smith decides he wants to buy this property. He's going to keep this storefront on the bottom and keep it occupied. But instead it's a private equity firm that's not just buying that one storefront.

He has maybe a portfolio, and because he has a diversified portfolio, he or she can elect to wait and maybe they have a sense that the market is going to turn they can afford to hold. Yeah. So that's why the idea of a vacancy tax is very interesting because you would think that they would no longer be able to absorb that much, you know. But when I've spoken to brokers and property owners, what some of them have said is, listen, we don't want it to be empty,

but look at what's out there. There are not enough can in the dates to fill these storefronts. And to a point, like you can kind of see that right because I've spoken to also on the flip side, I've spoken to small business owners who talk about how hard it is to have enough money to fit out the space because people have to realize if a bakery or a restaurant wants to come in, they're responsible typically for

fitting it out. I mean, in a weekend market like this, a landlord can elect to maybe chip in some money, but traditionally, yeah, the build out, it's on the small business owner. And then they start talking about the fifteen dollar minimum wage, insurance, all of these costs that they have to bear. It's not easy to be a small

business owner. So if you think about that, there's some credence to this assertion by property owners that like, there's not a ton of people that are beating down their doors saying hey give me this space for you know, just lower rent and give me this space and I can make it work. When I came to New York in nineteen nine, it was the big Soho Revolution, and there was an edict from the city in the state

that the manufacturing core may return. So all the cast iron buildings of Soho, we could not flip them into residential where the pressure was for more apartments in New York. And then finally everybody turned around and said, it's not coming back. Do you foresee a time when the same thing is going to be said of retail? It's not coming back, So we have to make it into something else. I think that's already being talked about. I mean, this

whole concept of pop ups. I mean, do you ever hear of something like that where basically it's a store or brand agrees to occupy a space only for like a limited time six months to a year. I mean, that's a that's a new idea to the Airbnb of commerce right there. So they're they're desperate for new ideas. Were ever involved in covering the residential market at all. So I cover real estate, and by real estate, that's anything to do with the built environment. So I cover housing.

You know, I kind of moved into covering retail because after speaking to people, I began to realize that that is an integral part of the gentrification story, and it's one of the first indicators of gentrification is when you start seeing, um, the stores turnover like it used to be, like Starbucks. Right when you saw a Starbucks in what used to be predominantly lower income neighborhood, that was a

sign that this area is gentrifying. So that's why I find retail very interesting to cover because I almost think that more than apartments, Um, everybody kind of sees what's going on with the empty storefronts because it's so visible. Yeah, now, um, who's a person who you think is understanding what's going on? Not for profit, like from the ground up. I always like to talk to housing activists because they can tell me what our tenants experiencing right now in New York City?

Are the rents going up? What's evictions? Like, what are the housing conditions like our our landlords um treating them better or worse post new rent laws that passed this June. But you can't speak to the housing activists without also speaking to the property owners or you know, the real estate lobby. It's it's hard. Everybody has their particular perspective and you kind of always have to be aware what

their political agenda is. So that's why oftentimes when you're putting out a story, you have to get so many voices in. Now, Um, you grew up where I grew up in Queens. You grew up in Queens. So because because for me, I was wondering what was in your childhood a neighborhood. I grew up on Long Island, and you went to the commercial strip where I lived, with the same stores forever, this pizza place, this hair salon, this butcher's shop, this lawnmower repair and fertilizer shop. They

were the same people there. They were there my whole life, you know, and now we live in a city where everything is changing. Was it like that when you were young or was it consistent when you were a kid in Queen's I think it was consistent similar to your experience. I grew up in a neighborhood called Fresh Meadows and I lived within walking distance of a Bloomingdale's, and as a child, like that was like we were so proud to have it was like kind of like a middle

class neighborhood. Just the idea that as a as a teenager, that that me and my friends were able to walk a few walks and go into what we thought of as a really swanky New York City department store. You know, fresh Meadows in Fresh Meadows. Of all places, Bloomingdales knows how cool Fresh Meadows is. The Bloomingdals is no longer there. What's the store of the clothes that just really cut

you to the quick? The closure of Barney's to me is significant because Barney's, Yes, was it a very expensive luxury department store. It was, But if you also read about Barney's, you know that Barney's supported a lot of young and up and coming designers whose clothes end up being very expensive, but a lot of their ideas wind up trickling down to the gaps of this world the right, and these ideas kind of actually affect, you know, people

who can't even afford the clothes at Barney's. But there's still it's disseminating ideas about culture and art and fashion that do reach all of us in ways that we might not even realize. Fast fashion dies. I don't feel that bad about it. When I walked into Barney's. When I walked into Barneys, and every five feet and I mean that literally was a stanchion with a sign that said everything must go. They had signs that said everything must go, flooming and floating over every surface. You could

adhes the sign too. It was mind blowing to watch Barney's on life support and you just see the people hovering to pull the core. It's out of them and the wires of them, and they're dead. So Gothamist is compiling a list. Would you like to submit your nominations? When Street and when that Barnes and Noble closed the near Lincoln Center, I died. Yeah. It had the windows and the escalator and I loved that store and people

hung out there all the time. It was right next to the movie theater, so you just killed time, right the magazines. I have a coffee Tower Records of Tower Records Records and H and H Bagels between eight and seventy the seventy ninth Street coffee shop. Like I did this story on the closure of Dwayne Reads. Isn't that

an interesting phenomenon? You know, for a long time people hated Dwayne Reads because it was seen as this behemoth but now this behemoth, they're disappearing, and in this weird twist, you know, people kind of a saddened by it. Similar to Barnes and Barnes and Noble closed Shakespeare Bookshop on Broadway in the eighties. Everybody's like, you know, hey man, very uptight about Shakespeare Bookshop leaving and Barnes and Nobles

are now Barnes and Nobles getting squeezed. Everybody's like, hey man, right, because there was a sense of permanence. They were landmarks. It was going to be there for decades. You just figured. And now you can't take that for granted that they're going to have this extended lifespan in a community anymore. What do your parents do for a living? What did your dad and mom do for a living? My mom was a residential real estate broker in Queens and my dad,

he worked at a Japanese shipping company. Was just a clerical job, but he worked in the city. He worked in the Twin Towers. He was retired before night. And where did your writing career begin? So I graduated in two thousand and eight from the Journalism School Columbia. Yeah, they would often have employers come on campus and they would basically a hole up in a conference room and then you signed up and you would get interviewed. And at the time I had you been studying to be

a newspaper journalist and the industry was basically creating. And there was this one local paper that came, which was a paper in Stanford, Connecticut. It was called The Advocate, and um, the editor at the time named John Brunik came and I could see I could see I was waiting outside. You know, it's like a glass conference room, and you know, one after one people went in and talked to him, and I was like thinking to myself, Oh my god, you know, this has to be like

the last job in newspapers. So I sat with him, and he was very chatty, so I actually didn't get to say much um. And then I shook his hand and then I said, I need to I need to get this job. If I don't get this job, there's no job out there for me in newspapers at least. And that was really what I wanted to do. I wanted a very tradition anal journalism experience where I worked in a smaller community and got to learn the ropes that way. That that is what I wanted, and I

thought this was my ideal job. So I basically called him, like maybe a week or two after meeting him, and I just said, listen, I really want this job. What can I do to get this job? And he said, you know what, why don't you come in, we'll talk. We'll give you an assignment. So somehow, I like gave myself a crash course in driving, and I drove out there.

I was sweaty, I was a mess, and somehow I managed to do this assignment in which they had me drive around parts of rural Connecticut to cover some kind of school event, and amazingly I got the job. How long were you there? For? Seven years? I was so lucky. I was so lucky when it came time to leave there. How did you know it was time? Oh? You could see the writing on the wall. The staff was getting smaller and smaller, and the stories were getting thinner and thinner.

And I just realized that if I wanted to grow as a journalist, I couldn't do it there anymore. You know, when I started out there, they used to have this big they made a big deal, like everybody had to have this big Sunday enterprise story because Sunday was the day where it traditionally most of the advertising came in and everybody sought to have this big Sunday story. Well, those Sunday stories started getting shorter and shorter, and if you can't do that, if you can't do enterprise, I

just lose my interest in it. So from the UH publication called The Real Deal. So in Stanford, that's when I first started covering real estate because when I got there, the reporter who covered zoning and development was on um. He he had to go to the military, so he was in Iraq, so he wasn't there. So they asked me, They said, can you do this? And no one wanted that beat. Everybody hated covering zoning because it requires the

most number of meetings, the longest meetings. You were there just at the the hall, like for hours and hours. But I really didn't have a choice because I was new, so I said, sure, I'll do it. You know, you don't want to say no. What do you think it is in you that gives you the patience and the thoroughness to be willing to sit through these lengthy proceedings. What is it about you? That links. You're able to do that, Oh well, I see. I tell people that

I'm beat agnostic. I would cover anything. To me, it's about people. And that's why real estate is interesting, is because when you're talking about property, I mean like what engenders more passion then where you live than what you own or what you want to own. I love being able to walk into a neighborhood that I haven't gone to very frequently, and walking the area that I'm writing about,

and also meeting the people that I'm writing about. There's nothing more interesting about being a real estate reporter than getting to walk into somebody's home. There could be no more to experience. Years ago, when I was buying my first apartment in New York and you go and they say, well, this apartments for sale in this building or that building. And the people had died and they hadn't put a

dime into that apartment for forty years. You know, they raised their kids there and maybe they painted it, and that was it. And you thought, you know, you just to see how other people live and their personalities etched into how they right, and you think about all the stories at the dinner table and what was cooked in this kitchen. Yeah. Yeah, it's all of that. It's all good. Gothamist Senior Editor, Elizabeth Kim. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing