Hurricane Sandy: Income inequality writ large
Power outages didn't divide New York. It's always been a city split between the haves and have nots
Topics: Mike Bloomberg, FEMA, JPMorgan Chase, Reuters, Occupy Wall Street, AlterNet, Hurricane Sandy, News
After an explosion at a power station cut off power to Lower Manhattan, photos showed a stark divide in Manhattan between lit-up uptown and downtown blanketed in darkness. The image was gripping, but when the inevitable posts went up declaring that “New York is now divided,” I had to laugh. Because it’s not the divisions we can see after a storm, but rather the city’s giant unseen fissure which makes events like Sandy so threatening.
Witness this piece from Gothamist, in which a citizen sleuth checked out what was happening in parts of Downtown where the poorest residents live and wrote in with his findings:
There is no running water or flushing toilets for people living in the Jacob Riis Houses and surrounding NYCHA buildings on the Lower East Side. In my estimate, this is roughly 20,000 people. One family I spoke with is packing their bags and moving to Brooklyn until services are restored. But it did not appear that all residents were evacuating, even as their toilets did not flush.
6) I did not witness a single Red Cross Truck or FEMA Vehicle or in lower Manhattan. Recall the assistance these agencies provided after 9/11 – this is NOT HAPPENING. There are bound to be hundreds of elderly people, rich and poor, who live on the upper floors of buildings with elevators that are now disabled. IF POWER IS NOT RESTORED, THIS WILL MOVE FROM BEING AN ECONOMIC DISASTER TO A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER.
Compare it to Max Abelson’s gem of a piece about Wall Street’s coping mechanisms:
JPMorgan, which sent out more than a dozen hurricane updates to its employees featuring detailed weather maps, kept parts of its 270 Park Ave. cafeteria open yesterday. Danishes and scones were available near the salad bar, and the bank’s deli had sandwiches with grilled vegetables. The dumpling bar was closed.
The dumpling bar was closed! Alas. It’s positively Dickensian, isn’t it?
This tale of two cities within one city’s border is explained further in a widely-circulated story by David Rohde of Reuters summing up the city’s gaping divide:





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