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The BOOK:  WHY CONDO, A document of a dramatic transformation in New York City

"..The emphasis is no longer on a group of people, a family under a unique roof, but on a couple set apart from and yet close to the world. The house requires a commute and takes time and effort to maintain. The single-family house, once a life-growing cell, full of activities, now seems a burden. The condominium-apartment is a place for withdrawal. This may explain why new residential developments, such as condominiums, advertise themselves with an image of a couple, in leisure time, in inactive poses, such as laying on bed, or reclining in a chaise. The young and successful, financially and romantically, live in a condo. ..The "condom" used as a primitive birth control method and since the AIDS crisis, used also for protection against sexual diseases. The "condo" is the equivalent to the "condom" scaled up to the size of your life.. The condo is convenient and safe, the other is available there without the hassle of looking for sex outside or being exposed to risky affairs..Love under control, not only in the sense of monogamy but of reproduction, commitment free, risk free.  The size of most apartments in "condos" are no bigger than a hotel room, they don't fit a family. Even when the apartments in "condos" are big, they resemble a hotel suite, spare decoration, a pleasurable space, and maintenance free, in which space is not modified by life.

..Bringing crime into the area was a basic strategy to enrich developers.  A more sophisticated and perverse strategy consists on a two-fold approach: simultaneously cleaning the streets of crime and bringing crime into the buildings targeted for speculation. On developed blocks, it is necessary to keep the new tenants of luxury or renovated buildings safe in a formerly risky area. At the same time, it is beneficial to bring crime into the buildings targeted for speculation in order to reduce property values so they may be purchased inexpensively by developers.

..Once an area is targeted for real estate development, it is going to be developed sooner or later. The length of the transformation varies from a few years to several generations. During the transition, from undeveloped to fully develop a few get rich; most get hurt. An agency that control transition is necessary...

...Buildings are number two in the ranking on places for crime.. that crimes involving the ultimate invasion of privacy are given a protective aura of secrecy in order to distance ourselves from the victim: the crime occurs in your home, not in mine. Each house is a different universe. Looking at U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, serious crimes in general have decreased. But while homicide, robbery and assault rates have declined, rape and burglary have remained stable for the last 15 years. Burglary and rape are crimes that occur mostly in or around the home. Burglary is breaking into a house or other building with the intent to commit theft. Perhaps the presence of police in the street has pushed crime indoors. Or perhaps police efforts are not directed toward domestic crime, which is less visible than street crime.

Jana Leo.  New York April 2008