Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

New York City is certainly a grungy place. Even in the best of times; which just recently ended by the way, it is full of filth , vermin, cracked sidewalks, potholes , garbage waiting to be picked up and garbage just laying around. I have often wondered if that is part of its charm. That may be counterintuitive to most especially those that beehive in the suburbs. It is always easy to spot when a film where the plot is supposed to be occurring in New York is actually shot in another ostensibly look alike location. Its missing the graffiti , the cracked curbs and everything else I referenced above.
Anyway I believe quite rapidly we will return to the Grungy New York of our youth – the 1980′s and 90′s. The typical approach for the senile elite in New York to solve an economic problem is to raise taxes to protect the special interests that in New York generally represent the ossified municipal unions.
That has the reverse effect of solving anything and creates more economic dislocation, decrease in economic activity , less tax revenue in the short to medium term and a cascading effect of decreasing municipal services. But it does create something weird. Artists like the grunginess and they flock to places that exhibit it to the greatest extreme ie Lower East Side, Williamsburg , The Bowery, and the cycle repeats itself.