NIMV
As some of you know, I used to blog about density issues in Ann Arbor. After a while, it got a little monotonous because the opposition to any new project was completely predictable. You could play NIMBY Bingo:
- It’s “luxury” housing that will be out of reach for most neighborhood residents.
- It’s going to contribute to the homogenization of America, where every place looks the same.
- Donald Trump. (The anti-density equivalent of Godwin, this is equally effective whether or not Donald Trump is in any way connected with the proposed building.)
And so on.
Christopher Hitchens manages to hit on all these points and more in his Vanity Fair essay Last Call, Bohemia opposing the redevelopment of St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village:
The inaugural plans featured on one flank a vast new medical building of half a million square feet, standing 329 feet tall and 288 feet wide, and on the other flank a Rudin condo tower of luxury apartments, also consisting of half a million square feet … [They] look like a plan made by Donald Trump’s people on an especially uninspired day.
[O]n the day when everywhere looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only that but — more impoverishingly still — we will be unable to express or even understand or depict what we have lost.
The preservation group Hitchens links to uses exactly the same language as its Ann Arbor counterparts. The proposed development is “massive.” It’s “too tall, too dense and completely out of character with the Historic District.” It’s “out of scale with the surrounding area.” At least they didn’t complain that it makes it too hard to see the Michigan “M”.
Sure, labor unions support the new hospital because it will bring in a Level 1 trauma center and lots of jobs. Nearby public housing residents do too; it’s their nearest hospital. But what are the complaints of a few construction workers and low-income project dwellers compared to the outré glamour of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bob Dylan and the Beats?