I'm a NIMBY for Toxic Mortgages

I was awoken yesterday by a pre-dawn ATF raid on a house behind mine. My dogs started barking the alarm as men with rifles walked across the neighbor's yard and started looking over my fence. Three more men armed with rifles were spreading across the roofs of the attached houses behind mine. Soon they crossed my fence and were asking if they could search my basement for somebody who had fled as they arrived.

This was merely the boiling point for a problem that has been simmering with that house for a few years. Neighbors have been concerned about the squatters. There was an ebike battery fire in the driveway a few months ago. I watched a raccoon crawl inside through a taped over hole in the broken kitchen window earlier this year. The neighbors in the attached and immediately adjacent houses have legitimate concerns about life safety conditions.

The neighbors contacted local officials, hoping for assistance to ensure safe conditions for their homes, but there have been no apparent attempts to address the problems. And if the conditions at this house and the complacency of elected officials and government agencies aren't troubling enough, I have also grown concerned about the deep problems brewing for the economy when you look into the property ownership.

Our neighbors knew the elderly lady who lived there before she passed away a few years ago, and they have a copy of her reverse mortgage and her death certificate. They also knew her boarder, who continued to live there until he also passed away shortly later. After he died, strangers took up residence, so the neighbors contacted the bank as well as their local officials. Nothing happened.

As the house came up again in discussion periodically over the past few years, I would check on New York City's ACRIS system from time to time to see if anything about the ownership had changed. Sometimes it did. The reverse mortgage has been sold from one bank to another a couple times since the death of the reverse mortgage holder.

These banks are not selling the house to realize the profit from the reverse mortgage. Instead, it looks like the paperwork is being traded without any concern about the real value of the underlying asset. Even after my neighbors contacted the bank, nothing has been done to sell the property or manage it in any way. Spread across the city and more broadly throughout the nation, this type of fraudulent commodification of residential properties can result in deteroriated houses and the ultimate loss of housing stock in the midst of a serious generational housing crisis. It can create unprotected properties that can be taken over for criminal operations, like the house behind me. And it may be setting the stage for another market crash that could destroy the livelihoods of many families and destabilize communities, like the Great Recession of 2008 when the bubble of toxic mortgages burst.

I am obviously concerned about criminals running guns out of my own backyard. Now I am also concerned about financial institutions eroding communities and threatening our nation's economic stability. 

A Buried Building

Beginning in 2016, I have been finding architectural fragments in the Bronx River. Chunks of brick, concrete, and a bit of terra cotta occassionally fall into the riverbed as the bank gradually erodes. 

When the Bronx River Parkway was built in the 1920s, the river itself was redesigned as a restoration and beautification project that included the clearance of hundreds of buildings from the areas along the river. Apparently the rubble from some of those buildings was used as fill when they realigned the stream, and now, a century later, a little bit of it has gradually been resurfacing as the forces of nature take their turn reshaping the river.

Among the fragments I have stumbled upon are four pieces from the same terra cotta cornice that surfaced years apart, two of which fit with one another. They are enough to piece together the design of this band of the vanished building's facade. 

The Grand Cavern and the Back Corner

I got around to visiting the new Gilder Center by Studio Gang at the American Museum of Natural History last weekend, and it's visually stunning. It's a grand cavern, with stairs and stadium seating at the focal point. It's breathtaking. It's also a little heartbreaking.

Street Corner Campaign Stop

A campaign stop on a street corner is a politician's opportunity to connect with voters by speaking directly to them. When you draw a crowd, people walking by tend to stop to see what is happening. It is also an opportunity to produce images for campaign material, so the backdrop can make a difference in choosing the right corner.

In the Norwood neighborhood in The Bronx, one street corner stands out after a couple campaign stops:

It was great to be out in Norwood this morning with our dedicated team of volunteers! Looking forward to many more days like this as we work our way through every corner of our district. pic.twitter.com/Z0vRFIb00x

— Jessica Haller for NYC Council 2021 (@JessicaHaller) August 21, 2020

The mural creates a distinctive, identifiable place, while its bright colors lend positive energy to the scene. The wall without building entrances, combined with a relatively wide sidewalk, make it function well for drawing in a crowd to listen without blocking anyone.

Sitting on Public Stairs

They are a place to rest, to wait for someone you're meeting, to relax and watch the world go by. On a thriving city street, large public stairs are naturally filled with sitting people.

Steps at the New York Public Library https://maps.app.goo.gl/2mDZYiMqBh4AhmRH9

Steps at the Metropolitan Museum of Art https://maps.app.goo.gl/AUwfbgf6ENYpHErr5 

So when I see an image of a large staircase on a busy street with nobody sitting on it, something is wrong with the picture:

The Narrow Channel

This is the sort of project that makes people resentful of cyclists.

The bike channels installed on newly reconstructed step streets like this look like a useful upgrade to help cyclists who may have difficulty going around to power up the steep hills. A different design, however, could have been useful for more people, namely pedestrians with carts. 

People struggling to return home with their shopping can easily look at the money the City spent to rebuild their step street, consider the attention given to the needs of other people (the people with bicycles), and easily conclude that nobody cared about their ability to lug their basic necessities home. And they wouldn't really be wrong.

The Path of Restoration

Abandoned places in New York City are becoming increasingly rare. On a recent excursion with my son, I intended to go explore an abandoned place I hadn't visited for a few years. When we got there, I discovered that it had been reactivated.

The staircase down from the street had previously been walled off, but now the wall and the fence on top of it had been altered to reopen the stairs onto the sidewalk. The path that wraps around under the railroad tracks to the train station has been cleared and repaved. The vines that had covered the carved stone on the wall have been cleared off. A new fence closes off the train tracks, replacing the ruins of the old iron fence that had been broken and partially consumed by decades of tree growth. Construction debris that had previously been dumped in this area was gone and the place looks remarkably clean. We saw a couple people stroll or jog through enjoying the path and stairs while we were there.

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