http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/12/08/081208ta_talk_paumgarten
(...)
"A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washington Mutual’s cashless vestibules or the bare aisles of Circuit City. (((Make that jerry-rigged *circuits* in the cashless vestibules and you're straight into Favela Chic.)))
“What will it look like?” is a question of the hour, as people try to visualize the ways in which life will change in New York as a result of the financial and economic crisis. In the mind’s eye, we tend to populate our recessionary streets with squad cars painted green, cat’s-eyed ambulances, and other anachronisms—“Fort Apache, the Bronx: The Remake.”
But, really, the city will probably just look the way it does now. After an extraordinary era of construction and renovation, demolition and replacement, there will almost certainly come a long period in which little to nothing gets built.
Putting aside the long-discussed public projects that are endangered or doomed (the Second Avenue Subway, the West Side Railyards, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Moynihan Station, etc.), dozens of private undertakings have stalled or died. The calls go out to the architects: pencils down. We have inherited, from the good years, a glut of housing, almost all of it of the unaffordable kind—condos galore—and an increase in office space amid a sudden, steep decrease in the need for it.
Throw in the high cost, or total unavailability, of capital, owing to the credit freeze, and you have a New York that may be frozen in time. The skyline, which has been very dynamic recently, like a stereo’s equalizer display, should sit still for a while. The clothes in our closets today will be the ones we’re wearing when we’re old. (((No they won't. Buildings might well go empty, but the means of production for clothing have changed permanently. In any case fashion moves on a much faster cycle than infrastructure.)))
Keep an eye on the construction pits that developers dug to make way for the foundations of new buildings. The town is pocked with them. The real-estate boom fostered grand schemes, which, though they are in many cases now stillborn, began with holes in the ground.
The expiration, earlier this year, of a tax-abatement law, 421-a, encouraged residential builders to dig quickly, to achieve grandfather status and thus better financing. Hence a sudden spate of new pits, some that builders may have had no intention of filling soon anyway. In some cases, if a developer hasn’t already paid for the steel, he will be inclined, or forced, to walk away. Buildings that are halfway built tend to get finished, although they may wind up being what are called “see-throughs.” (...)
