Paper-pushing paper-pushers pushing persons

Here's what's most wrong with bureaucracy. The categories of right and wrong are budgetary items, not human concerns. Where the budget allows for discretion, no process is necessary. Through these little items, a world can be changed without accountability or transparency or process.

I spoke again to a Parks and Recreation deputy about the placement of the ping pong table in Tompkins Square Park to find out what their decision process was. Recall that Parks placed it right smack in the middle of the seating space that is used only by either a mixed group of homeless people or low-income people of color. It was uniformly avoided by the mainstream, the middle-class, the young white gentrifiers. For the homeless especially, this was a space to socialize with the only people who want to socialize with them, who like and respect them, identify with them: other homeless people. Socializing is an essential need for a social species. For some of these folks, it seems more important to them even than a home. The park is public; they have every right to be there. They are not criminal or disruptive; they are not less human than anyone else, or less a part of the public than anyone.

This was the second Parks deputy I've asked about the table. From his answer, it seems no one in the Parks Dept. knows that there even was a second ping pong table. They are in good company. The local Councilmember was not informed of it, neither was the Community Board. The Dept. deputy said that a ping pong table addition is a minor item.

That's evident from the lack of process, consultation with the councilmember and the community. I tried to explain to the deputy that while from the perspective of the Dept. it is minor, it might be an important matter to people, you know, human beings that are supposed to be served by the park and its administration. He responded that this was a minor decision. I tried again to explain that from the Dept.'s budget or definitions it may be minor, but for the people affected, it may be important. He responded, no, this is a minor decision. Then he complained that if the Parks Dept. consulted on every minor decision, nothing would ever get done.

In other words, they are clueless as to what decisions effect important changes in the park because they evaluate major and minor only through the budget lines. Driving the homeless from their socialization space is not a budget item in the Ping Pong Category Line. Social control has found its hiding place in the paper-pusher's pile.

The month before, a different Parks deputy suggested that the choice of placement was intended to drive away the homeless. That certainly is not minor. It's probably illegal to identify a specific, non criminal demographic for exclusion from a park without any process.

So either Parks is clueless or it is conducting gentrification and displacement through unaccountable means. Here's the map I presented to the Community Board. You'll notice the top right section "USELESS" indicates a roughly 2500 square foot space that is not only empty, but unused by anyone. no one goes there because there's nothing there, it's a dead end, it's not in a crosswalk. It's just a large, dead space in a park. It's an embarrassment to the administration. It's large enough for two or three ping pong tables. All it needs is a barrier -- row of benches, say -- to prevent ping pong balls from running into the basketball courts.

Authenticity in the East Village

I was also asked at the Columbia Urban Planning class to comment on the East Village as a semiotic neighborhood -- a neighborhood representing its image to attract clients, both residential and commercial. The circumstances in the EV couldn't be more different from those in Chinatown.

The East Village was once an ethnic enclave -- actually several ethnic enclaves interwoven together: Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican and American-born Black ethnicities each had staked out their blocks, streets and buildings. Today it is a typically gentrified and much more homogeneous neighborhood. Its commerce caters to a different quantity of disposable money and, equally important, a different quality of money. 

Old ethnic shops are one-by-one being evicted as their long-term leases come due. The greater quantity of money available in the neighborhood drives up rents, but it's really the quality of the money that makes the difference. If the local hipster were willing to pay a high price for, say, authentic pierogies, the pierogy shop could jack up its price to pay a higher rent. But the hipster search for authenticity is compromised by the search for the new and discriminating that traditional pierogies can't supply. Vegan gluten-free wasabi peirogies are not within the range of the traditional. The quality of the money -- the kinds of purchases its possessor is interested in paying for -- determines the profile of the street commerce.

Hipsters prefer new commerce run by fellow hipsters -- or at least fellow middle-class young and attractive whites. Rich Ocejo pointed out to me the interest among hipsters in the authentic barbershop experience. But the old barber on Ave. C run by a 74-year-old Puerto Rican is way too authentic. Instead the barber has to be himself a hipster, preferably not hipper than the client, and comfortably downscale to provide just enough of a sniff of slumming "authenticity." 

Hipsterism has changed over time, becoming increasingly conformist, fashion-conscious, semiotic and commercialized. If you've read so far in these last few posts, you've got the point that the semiotic -- the use of objects to convey a cultural meaning -- because it is a form of communication, opens the door to deception. Utilitarian dress cannot deceive in itself. A hardhat worn by a construction worker at the worksite has a direct relation to its function. There's no room for deception. It's worn to protect from falling objects. To the extent that clothing is non utilitarian, it is available for communication as fashion. So rolled up jeans have no function but to identify a strain of hipsterism -- at the current moment. Similarly, the lumbersexual beard borrows the image of masculinity transferring it to fashion, contrary to the meaning of its raw, unshaven masculinity in which fashion purports to play no role. 

The constant search for authentic signs and the removal of the authenticity by recreating those signs as fashion is a characteristic of current hipsterism. It is not benign. Look at the ad at the top. Both men are conversing across the generations sitting on a shoeshine bench. The significance to the older generation man in the three-piece suit lives in a structure of meanings that belong to an old racist culture that assumed white superiority when black men served at the white man's foot. The significance for the hipster is merely a kind of play with fashion. 

And so fifty years of civil rights' struggle is effaced, erased, lost, dismissed and mocked, all in the interest of commerce, fashion and the search for distinctive identity (really just the new hipster conformism).

The ethnic, political, and artistic history of the East Village has similarly been effaced, erased, lost, dismissed and mocked. But where Chinatown is endangered by inauthentic representations of its ethnic economic base, the East Village is recreating its own new authentic economy -- the authentic search for the retro, the fashionable, the distinctive, the slumming of elitism coupled with its upscale revision of it, the clean, expensive hipster slum with great, exotic dining and deserts and diverse nightlife drinking options. It is sustainable because the hipster has sufficient disposable money to sustain it. The sole threat is the landlord who demands commercial rents above what commerce can afford. 

It's difficult to describe the restructuring of meaning in hipsterism as deceptive. There's no authenticity to deceive beyond the desire to identify through consumption and display.

See also in this series:
Semiotic neighborhoods vs the authentic and anti-fragile: prestige and its deceptions and betrayals
Prestige and distortion in Chinatown
Suits and betrayal in Chinatown
The Mobility Dilemma and the Clearinghouse Effect

Suits and betrayal in Chinatown

"It's so hurtful, it's just wrong!" said a Chinatown community "leader" to another Chinatown non profit director. They exchange mutual gestures of dismay.

Were they deploring restaurant management stealing hard-working waiters' tips? Complaining about a landlord allowing illegal conditions in his building so he could call the Dept of Buildings and evict all the renters overnight without any due process? Or the proposed legislation to exact punishing fines on street vendors for setting up in an illegal space instead of merely having the police ask them to move?

None of those moral crimes. They were deploring a labor organization calling a councilmember "racist." That's what upsets the suits in Chinatown.

White collar crime doesn't receive this kind of shock and dismay. A restaurant manager, donning a suit of clean and pristine pride for a photo op, stands next to a councilmember also in a suit, endorsed by the legitimacy of politics, governance and "leadership." They each lend the other its public display of respectability, shaking hands. Owning and controlling, they have nothing to complain or howl about, nothing ugly to say, nothing to taint the picture, nothing but smiles. And all the suits around are pleased.

But stealing tips -- stealing from low-wage workers who have no alternatives -- is nothing to smile about. It's vastly worse than calling a councilmember "racist."

The suit, like the semiotic neighborhood, is all about selling itself and selling out. It prides itself on its success at whoring itself, as if this were the only game worth playing.

There is no recognition among the respectable that labor stands at the bottom of the social scale, with little support, funding or clout. They have their voices and their unity, and that's just about all. To be heard, they've got to be more than loud in quantity of decibells. They've got to be loud in quality -- shocking, offensive, disturbing and disruptive, otherwise they are invisible. The cry of "racist!" whether true or not, is an honest, sincere, genuine and authentic cry about true management abuses and real living needs.

Forgive me for ranting on this, but I'm disgusted -- and I want those leaders to know that I'm disgusted -- by such displays of shock and dismay over labor tactics. In your comfortable easy chair, imagine yourself lying on the third level of a bunk bed, your only living room. Then imagine who respects your voice. Then, when you next hear "racist" yelled by labor, maybe, true or not, you'll cheer them for simply being heard.

Suits purport to be smart; suits purport to be educated. Then suits should know well the deep disparities of this world and should expect labor tactics to be loud and ugly. Here's how the game is played, and everyone knows it: power, in its echo chamber, will not listen to the disempowered unless the disempowered offend them. Then power deplores the disempowered for being offensive. I have no respect for anyone who deplores labor tactics.

I don't practice labor tactics -- I don't have the courage for it. But I recognize that, truthful or not, it gets justice. There would never have been a Chinatown Working Group were it not for the protests of Chinatown labor which included a lot of name-calling.

It's a shame, though no surprise, that in this upside-down and morally corrupt world, justice should have to be pitted against truth. But truth is merely information; justice is lived. Justice first, then truth will arrive in time. Without justice, truth will remain dressed in suits.

See also in this series:
Semiotic neighborhoods vs the authentic and anti-fragile: prestige and its deceptions and betrayals
Prestige and distortion in Chinatown
The Mobility Dilemma and the Clearinghouse Effect
Authenticity in the East Village

Prestige and distortion within Chinatown

The Asian American Federation, a social services and research non profit highly regarded within Chinatown, published a study of Chinatown in 2008 in which they found that East Broadway, the center of recent Fujianese immigration and a low-income area, was one of the most resilient, vibrant and successful parts of Chinatown, while much of the rest of the neighborhood was ailing commercially. Yet the study's recommendations completely disregard its findings of fact. Their recommendations all favor tourism with no recommendations that support the ethnic community.

Most telling are the recommendation that waiters learn more English (useless for local-serving restaurants), and the absence of any recommendation that managers stop stealing waiters' tips, a wide-spread practice among restaurant owners in Chinatown. Stealing tips removes the most easily available incentive reward for waiters to improve services like learning English. Without tips for improved service, AAF's recommendation burdens the waiter entirely. The bias in favor of management is evident: compel the waiter to learn English but still take his tips. There isn't even a recommendation for free or supported English lessons.

The power of prestige and respectability is pervasive. Growth is viewed as outward-looking towards an upscale mainstream culture, not expanding and supporting the base. So, for example, here are their findings of fact:

A number of changes in the mix of residents in Chinatown also has altered the customer base for Chinatown businesses. Over the past 20 years, growth of the Fujianese population in Chinatown, due to new immigration patterns, has generated demand for businesses supporting their food, entertainment and service preferences. Newer Fujianese-owned businesses have sprung up along East Broadway.... A lack of nightlife in Chinatown also makes it difficult for restaurants to attract evening business, and garment-industry job losses and relocations have reduced restaurants’ traditional customer base. However, restaurants catering to Chinatown’s growing Fujianese population report brisk business.... The decline in the garment industry has decreased measurably the daytime population in Chinatown, a key component of the traditional customer base.  As this traditional customer base shrinks, the growth in Chinatown’s Fujianese population and the influx of non-Chinese and some returning Chinese immigrants and retirees have created a demand for products and services catering to these markets. 

 And their conclusions:

A general lack of customer service reduces the appeal of shopping and dining in Chinatown. Limited English capabilities of staff make it challenging for people who do not speak Chinese to patronize Chinatown businesses. Gruff service from a few businesses hurts the image of all Chinatown establishments. Many stores and restaurants operate on a cash basis, which discourages those customers

 The customers mentioned are tourists with credit cards, not local recent immigrants. And "image" is a problem looking to outsiders, not to locals. The sole source for this claim of gruff service and bad image comes from the Zagat Guide -- a restaurant guide published in English for English-speaking customers. There is no Mandarin, Fujianese or  Cantonese Zagat for New York. If you look through all their recommendations, you'll see that they are equally outward, not inward, looking. And this is characteristic of many such studies of Chinatown. Whether they are positioning Chinatown non profits to obtain government funding for development or attracting private sector investment, they ignore the economic base and their recommendations threaten them with unstable, fragile commercial gentrification.

Image and money are tied together. Semiotic neighborhoods pretend with an image for sale, much as a suit allows its wearer to pretend to an image of respectability. The base of the economy is disregarded, dismissed and invisible.

Next: semiotics and deception among the suits in Chinatown, and the struggle up from the bottom.

See also in this series:
Semiotic neighborhoods vs the authentic and anti-fragile: prestige and its deceptions and betrayals
Suits and betrayal in Chinatown
The Mobility Dilemma and the Clearinghouse Effect
Authenticity in the East Village

Semiotic neighborhoods vs the authentic and antifragile: prestige and its deceptions and betrayals

(These remarks elaborate an informal presentation I gave as guest speaker at a Columbia University Urban Planning Master's Program class last year. I was asked to discuss Chinatown and the East Village as semiotic neighborhoods. The basic idea is that in ethnic enclaves, the commerce that serves local residents is more resilient than touristy commerce. 

Representations designed to broadcast identity for outsiders betray the people and culture that it purports to represent, so there's a correlation between broadcasting outside and economic fragility, as well as deception and betrayal. Authentic commerce, by contrast, doesn't represent and is antifragile -- it grows stronger in a crisis because the locals have more needs in a crisis, and the local commerce serve them. 

Nevertheless, prestige and respectability are measured in mainstream cultural standards, far from ethnicity and authenticity, and are by nature hypocritical -- invested in presenting and maintaining themselves as prestigious, respectable and mainstream, regardless of the real ethical and moral defects of the apparently respectable -- so authority, including many city planners, administrators, financiers, developers and local community opportunists, scorns and ignores the authentic stability of the enclave's economy, endangering the future of the enclave. Although an ethnic enclave can thrive and grow despite outside catastrophes like terrorist attacks, hurricanes and recessions, it is vulnerable and threatened by internal and external authorities seeking to gentrify it. Already gentrified neighborhoods seek representations of authenticity that betray the authentic roots of the neighborhood. They are stabilized by luxury commerce dependent on upscale trends.)

What is a semiotic neighborhood? Simply put, a neighborhood full of signs. Any commercial street will be lined with signs that draw to its consumers. Delancey Street signs draw to the low-income residents nearby. Times Square draws to an international tourism consumer, advertising the entire city -- that's why the signs are so large, so bright, on-the-pulse and sexy. The signs can be read as an indicator of the character of the consumer.

But semiotics of a neighborhood is not just commercial signage. There are no commercial signs on Park Avenue north of 59th Street, but the stone and stately architecture, the spareness and cleanliness of the streetscape, the absence of commerce, all send a message that this is both a residential neighborhood and a wealthy, exclusive one.

Semiotic neighborhoods can be divided among those that broadcast their signs outside the neighborhood, and those that look inward. Broadcasting neighborhoods use their signs to create an identity for outsiders, an identity they can easily read. It can be a bit of a contradiction: an ethnic neighborhood can broadcast an identity that belongs to the outsiders -- self-stereotyping -- instead of being authentically ethnic. The purpose of the identity after all is not to be authentic, but to draw customers. So notice that it's money that leads to the fakery and the fakery is a betrayal of its own.

Inward-looking neighborhoods have no such need to create such an identity. They are not pretending with a show of what they are. The commerce there simply serves the local community that already understands it for what it is -- theirs. Inward-looking neighborhoods are characterized by authenticity.

In the literature of semiotic neighborhoods, inwardly looking neighborhoods are not even considered as semiotic -- they don't try to speak to the general public or communicate using the broader language of the culture, the recognized stereotypes; the motivation of their signs are restricted to the needs of locals, with no thought of trying to impress anyone with an enhanced identity. Ironically, they have authentic identity -- because they're not trying.

Local-serving commerce has low costs, since the customers don't have to be enticed and brought to the door. The locals are a bit of a captive market. As long as the prices don't drive the locals to seek a better deal, the local commerce can rely on having its customer. When there's a crisis, even a catastrophe like 9-11 or Hurricane Sandy, the local commerce actually thrives. The local residents have more needs in a crisis, not fewer, and the residents are even more captive without transport. They must find their needs served locally.

While the authentic neighborhood tends to keep prices reasonably affordable (the customer is not entirely captive) broadcasting a neighborhood tends to raise prices. The intent of broadcasting is to surpass the profits available locally, otherwise it would stay local and not bother broadcasting at all, since broadcasting incurs advertising and presentation costs. And advertisement and image-creation must be ongoing to keep up with outside trends.

In a crisis, a semiotic neighborhood can be devastated.This happened in parts of Chinatown after 9-11. Mott Street, which had been outward-looking with antique stores and Chinese souvenir shops, lost many stores, and has only recently recovered.

East Broadway, the center of the recent immigration and lined with local-serving stores, has not been devastated in the wake of 9-11 or even the Great Recession. It's been crowded and bustling, the commerce vital and thriving.

To be continued...
See also in this series:
Prestige and distortion in Chinatown
Suits and betrayal in Chinatown
The Mobility Dilemma and the Clearinghouse Effect
Authenticity in the East Village