Overpopulation is oftentimes used as tool to suggest Malthusian policies when a more equitable distribution of resources could solve any issues overpopulation might cause. I’m here to say that New York City is one of the few rare places in the United States that is overpopulated and how from a leftist perspective we should deal with that.

NYC is facing a housing shortage, homeless crisis, private transportation woes, and all these problems all originate from capitalism. So let’s say we did all the things we need to do to fix them from an urbanist perspective. We ban cars, we ban landlords, there’s a mad rush to build new affordable housing, there is some capital flight from the big apple because honestly implementing these policies would make capitalists leave.

But let’s assume we did all that. We could maybe add a few million new housing units to a city that would rapidly deplete them, New Yorkers would move out of their roommates and parents apartments, white people would move back from The suburbs, whatever population is lost from the capital flight would probably be regained through newly arrived immigrants. What then? Under capitalism we are unable to reach the carrying capacity of the city, under socialism we reach it.

Unless we want to subdivide units meant for one individual into units for multiple thus decreasing individual quality of life, we will reach a point where we can’t cram any more people into Manhattan. Eventually urbanists will need to tell people to move to New Jersey and Long Island and the other boroughs. We need to recognize in a purely socialist system prime real estate should go to those with the highest social standing and not those with the most money.

It should be illegal to just move to the middle of manhattan as a transplant from Idaho, unless your like a heart surgeon you should be doomed to the periphery never to enter like Moses into the promised land, maybe your kids or grandkids could have a chance but not you because you ain’t local. Housing stock should go to primarily the locally disadvantaged communities first most threatened by gentrification. Of course in this scenario there would be no gentrification because socialism, but I mean the people would have been most affected by it should get first dibs on houses.

Finally this brings me to tell you why I wrote this, the governor of New York State canceled the congestion plan that would have mildly reduced traffic in order to pander to the suburbs. It’s a major loss for the armchair urbanist community, everyone feels great hatred to the working class aristocrats who “have” to drive everywhere, so now we all hate Long Island and think they are worth less than us as people. Was it a tax on the poor? Yeah but who gives a shit, americans aren’t poor.

Let us recognize that the city of New York illegally occupies stolen indigenous Algonquin land and the colonizers should leave. From the river to the sea could also apply to Manhattan apparently. You could solve all my problems I will still be angry. Why the migrants want to come here I do not understand, america is the great satan. From now on we shall call it turtle island. We all want to go back to the New York in the 70s before the aids happened. Maybe then you could afford an apartment. In a hundred years from now New York won’t be the city, it would lose all perstige, and until it floods the next big thing will Miami!

  • hello_hello [they/them, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    24 days ago

    Urumqi CBD from Hong Shan. (2019)

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    Urumqi is better developed than New York City at this point despite being in one of the poorer regions of China with challenging geography and ISIS spillover from Afghanistan. Socialism fucking works.

    I lived in NYC for all my life until very recently and the city has only sunk since then with each administration.