Under the Bloomberg administration, developers have formulated an image for NYC development that is overblown, gigantic and completely callous to the wishes of our individual neighborhoods. From the West Side Stadium to the Atlantic Yards Project, gigantic development projects threaten our neighborhoods. The worst aspect of this threat is not the development plans themselves, though they are bad enough. The worst aspect is the threatened use of eminent domain that Bloomberg has held over neighborhoods that don’t wish to sell to his favorite developers. This threatened abuse of eminent domain is contrary to the very roots of our nation—our personal right of ownership of our property. By threatening to use eminent domain to transfer property from one private citizen to another, Bloomberg is destroying the very concept of personal property.

But there is another disturbing aspect of the whole development issue under Bloomberg. This issue is dividing the left. Labor is too blindly in favor of any and all development plans, even if they are directly contrary to the vision the neighborhood has for its own development, as indicated by neighborhood 197-a plans which the city approves then ignores. Labor is slowly losing its credibility with progressives, the very people who originally supported the labor movement in the United States. By blindly trusting Bloomberg and his developer friends, the construction unions are making a pact with the devil that will alienate entire neighborhoods as well as the progressive movement in general.

But there are even a handful of traditionally progressive organizations that, partly due to links to labor and partly due to unenforceable promises of “affordable housing

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