All those luxury condos you see going up around the city, the ones where studios are often priced above 400K, guess what, they're subsidized by your tax money. In one of the gravest ironies of the this red hot real estate market, subsidies that were designed to spur development during the '70s are being exploited by developers to build today's high end residences that would have no problem selling sans subsidies. Budgeting 101 says when the government forgoes a tax payment, it is the accounting equivalent of an expenditure. When the value of the mortgage interest deduction is added to direct giveaways, tax abatements, and other breaks, the amount of welfare that goes towards the real estate of today's middle and upper classes dwarfs what is spent on public housing programs. Further:
"There’s no catch to the 421-a subsidies. Unlike other city handouts, developers receiving the tax abatements are not obligated to include affordable housing in their projects — except in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where a recent upzoning to encourage residential development included an affordable-housing component."
Read the rest here.
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The masses----well, they are pretty much asses
that's a jem. I have to use it.
Most of our tax dollars go to military spending and social security payments. The food stamps program is one of the few programs that receives a very small fraction of tax dollars, yet by the way right wing pundits put it, you would think welfare queens are just raping the average tax payer. Dollar for dollar, there are plenty more tax breaks and hand outs going to business and upper middle class than food stamps programs.
As shotblock points, politicians just like to highlight welfare as a problem because it is a easy class of people to target. poor folk are not politically organized as other groups so there is no real backlash.
Moreover, even with awareness about who gets tax breaks and hand-outs, conservative people still prefer the rich/business class to get tax breaks over the poor. who cares about a single mom trying to feed her kids with food stamps? she is not some developer that will bring economic growth. the perception is that hand outs to the well to do will stimulate the economy more than hand-outs to the poor. it is garbage.
Feeding and sheltering poor people should not be an option. Politicians who vilify welfare programs that help the poor should be ashamed of misleading the public.
And that "exception" in Williamsburg/Greenpoint was due to YEARS of aggressive and incessant advocacy and mobilization on the part of community groups and residents. Developers don't pay attention until they're mandated to do something by law, and even then they're not paying attention, they just see it as a fly on the windscreen.
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