The 145 Project is a thousand-unit development coming to 145th and Lenox. Roughly 30% of those units are earmarked for affordable housing — calculated using an AMI formula that allows someone earning nearly $100,000 a year to qualify. Meanwhile, native Harlemites make $30,000 to $50,000 a year. They’re competing for the same units.

One question kept coming up: affordable for who?

Part 3.

You say the password. Someone walks you in. You don’t ask questions.

This is Part 2.

(Featuring music from New Arcades!)

This is me going back out — older, slightly less stupid, and for the first time in a long time, not running from anything. Just driving toward something I can’t name yet.

First stop: Detroit. I knew two things about it. RoboCop. Beverly Hills Cop.

This is Part 1.

I left when I was 18. I didn’t really go back.

Last month I did.

I was convinced I was going to find bike lanes and cat cafes and a neighborhood that had been quietly handed off while I wasn’t looking. What I found was more complicated than that — and honestly more depressing in ways I didn’t expect.

This is a 16 minute gonzo walk through the neighborhood that made me. It’s about gentrification, Mamdani, the classy Black women of the Harlem Renaissance, a minister who came to serve God and somehow ended up in my building, and why “affordable housing” is a promise that lands differently depending on who you are and what you’re starting from.

I just want to make sure people who want to stay here can.

(Video below for paid subscribers)

Well, they finally got me. After seven years building products at eBay, Kayak, and most recently a company that just discovered private equity, I got the 15-minute calendar invite from a skip-level I’d never spoken to. You know the one.

This is the first episode of Tech Bro Confidential — not a place for Festivus styled grievances, but not quite a LinkedIn inspirational post either. Just the honest and occasionally profane truth about what it actually means to be a content designer inside product organizations that may or may not know what content design is.

In this episode: what the role actually requires, the internal politics nobody posts about and a VP who told me during a kickoff meeting we’d ‘do text later.’

Read more

This one’s about what we’re losing, what’s worth keeping, and a NYC Tuesday morning in September 2001 where I learned how to carry impossible things.

Why don’t you date Black women? Why do you talk like that?

So before I keep going — and I’m going to keep going — I want to tell you exactly who I am and where I come from. 147th and Lenox. Calhoun School. Dad in prison. Bar mitzvahs on the Upper West Side. A cousin who died young because he didn’t have access to the resources my classmates took for granted.

That’s the view I’m working from.

I was wearing a tartan-patterned flannel shirt, light wash denim jeans and polarized Wayfarer’s special ordered to be the exact extra large size Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. I remember because I took a selfie, somehow knowing, that this was the beginning of the end of Fun.

Over the years, the smiles, spontaneity and over-indulgence gradually became more muted amongst my friends and lovers. The timbre in usually vivacious voices shifted a few octaves down—a cancer scare, death of a parent, the loss of something more ephemeral made the text message response time gradually slow. The willingness to meet up waned and suddenly I was 40 with not a lot of people in my life. Granted, there were many justified reasons for this that weren’t solely the fault of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China—and Democrats—but I couldn’t help but feel robbed of my mid-30s as I struggled through this dark time of Apex loneliness. Stalked by the consequences of my emotional ambivalence towards women and comrades I should have given more respect towards.

Concurrently, I’d have to assume, the young Gen-Z children locked in their rooms doubly-affixed to their screens developed a more potently warped view of reality and interaction than I ever could of nightmared. We, the Elder Gods, saw both the before and after of an Analog World. Where phone calls were the norm and suddenly—were not. In this primordial isolation, deprived of tactile seductions in the form of awkward finger-fucking and sweat drenched dance parties at absent affluent parents abodes, they crafted unrealistically socially distant pristine versions of themselves through Snapchat avatars and Instagram political posturing. It was existence without risk in a reality where the outside world was fraught with it—why wouldn’t they eschew the directness my generation was so familiar with? Clapping? Too aggressive, use your thumb and index finger.

Still, they possessed a quiet indignation that seemed to dominate the political discourse. Quick to accuse and demonize, but rarely willing to plant feet and lock antlers over an issue unless it was in a digital landscape where gotchas and whataboutisms equated victory—or simply screaming when your point made too much sense. Too cold, pointed and penetrating of their affirming blanky of digital moral righteousness. Seldom could you hold direct eye contact and ask them to explain their perspective in any nuanced form without triggering a reptilian low-road fight or flight response. Molded, as they were, into an algorithmic structure of right and wrong, which curiously ran contrary to their multi-variant world of gender fluidity to which I cast no shade, just…curious. I type these words and I sense you and their eyes glazing over as the neurons deploy to that long lengua in your head to fire forth, “Okay boomer” (an idiom already dated as of this writing) or worse yet an indictment of being “a moderate” which was back in the analog days was simply what we called…Logical.

But I couldn’t just blame those damn kids. It was my contemporaries too. A trillion concurrent narratives firing through our neurons at once like a pollack work painted in brain matter. I remember lively political discourses—okay they were drunken sloppy screamfests at a cocktail bar in Kingston, New York. Still, underneath it all there was an underpinning of Good Sport. A match. A game with rules we were all loosely aware of. Now, those same people, merely attempting to ask a question to better understand the subject matter which I doubted they were anymore acutely versed in than I, resulted in pursed lips and narrowing of eyes flanked by a few more wrinkles than the last time we did this in 2017, Helen. Politics were so coiled around our spinal cords like freshly hatched Xenomorphs that any attempt to extricate the self from the ideology made it squeeze tighter. Choking the joy out of the thing I valued most: conversation.

“It’s literally genocide,” she said while we waited for the next round of Negronis.

“Literally?” I asked, in earnest. I didn’t know, I saw some posts and videos of mangled babies. It looked like a fucked war, but I didn’t know if or why Israeli’s hated Palestinians. Some twink at a lesbian bar, or maybe it was just a handsome transmasc, explained to me something about Palestinians and Arabs living happily—and gayly—in Israel or something. Were they disposing of them there too? Why not start at home first before branching out?

Now, I said none of this because the girl gave really good blowjobs and I was hoping she’d grace me with one of them again, but as her stare hardened into a glare and the Xenomorph coiled I realize this was going to be another evening of self-love.

So I stood in that field for a while and woke up in my late 30s having learned some painfully overdue lessons, trying desperately to inform my peers I was ready to be an adult—but they’d all moved on. Partying took too much of a physical toll, unpredictability induced too much anxiety and dreaming was a luxury only the most affluent of us could…well…dream to humor. I was dedicated to building a life where these things formed the trinity of existence, and in many ways, I had—a remote tech job, no wife or kids and a bit of residual twenty-something arrogance to keep climbing the comedy ladder. Unfortunately, this seemed to only engender resentment amongst those I still spoke to. Sideways glances and not so subtle passive aggressive retorts when sharing your remaining aspirations. M83, Radiohead, blah blah blah, all that good background music you never really paid attention to would now be your sullen lullaby as you drank alone scrolling through names on your phone you used to regularly hear from, squinting at the last text’s date and time—now too blurry to see without your Warby Parker readers.

Party’s over.

In Mayor Mamdani’s quest to collect the infinity stones of egalitarianism, his “Rental Ripoff Hearings” draw the most obvious contradiction in terms. It’s charmingly marketed as a throwback prize fight between his obscurely named “The Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants” and nebulously identified “Bad Landlords.” However, the pugilistics leave out one critical party: himself.

As mayor, Zohran is responsible for NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority), which is the federally funded public housing system that manages over 2,400 buildings across the five boroughs. As of July 2024, NYCHA had 610,000 open work orders and estimated capital needs of roughly $80 billion, according to the New York City Comptroller.

Repair times have ballooned from roughly 370 days last year to more than 400 days today, according to CBS News.

For mold complaints, a seemingly ubiquitous concern for hypochondriacs like myself, the average time according to THE CITY to complete a mold work order is 266 days—against a legally agreed target of 7 to 15 days.

And in 2022 and 2023, City Limits reported 85 percent of NYCHA developments failed their federal housing inspections, with “life-threatening” health and safety issues identified in nearly every development HUD inspected.

Still, the Mayor has decided to stage these histrionic tribunals targeting private landlords while presiding over one of the largest dysfunctional landlords in America.

Why?

On its face, calling out lazy, corrupt, ineffectual and or predatory landlords would be a noble enough cause. However, we have to look at Zohran’s proposals as a system of Democratic Socialist ideologies. Which is fine—if they work. However, creating the legal and optical pretext of highlighting “bad landlords”—while ignoring his own—under the shadow of the proposed COPA bill suggests a concerning battle strategy: Make it hard to own shit in New York City.

Which, sure, breaking up Blackstone and private equity firms who control large portions of the city’s rent-stabilized rentals receives no argument from me—but let’s walk it through. These entities have deep pockets and deeper connections. Whatever punitive measures the Mamdani administration attempts to enforce will be paid, delayed or outright dismissed through the court system. However, the majority of minority property owners in the city do not have the same resources to navigate this prosecution. Which raises an uncomfortable question—is this collateral damage by design?

Looking to Mamdani’s Tenant Czar and architect of his housing policy, Cea Weaver, who tweeted in 2018…

…might give us cause to think so. While she has since called some of her posts “regretful”—without specifying which ones—Mamdani was aware and appointed her anyway.

So like many ideologies of Democratic Socialism, this one ignores the impact and righteous ambition of minorities who want wealth and capital. The enforcers of these limousine liberalism policies often view themselves as “saviors,” removing the “burden” of homeownership from minorities who “shouldn’t” want to embrace the “evils” of generational wealth. Yet the 22,000 black residents who left Bed-Stuy between 2010 and 2020 and 11,000 leaving Harlem between 2010 and 2020 paint a different picture. These black residents didn’t all move to the outskirts of New York City and beyond for a better view. They were priced out, victims of deed-theft and the scourge of income-inequality: All problems this mayor and his Super Friends are well-suited to tackle yet seem to be afraid of engaging conversations on. Gentrification is the Gun Control of progressives—they dare not utter its name.

So instead of embarking upon this Emerson College sociology 101 homework assignment of performatively indicting the concept of capitalism, why not enable people to build and generate wealth? Create better SBA loan programs, tax breaks and incentives for minority and low-income individuals to claim our own destiny—rather than wait for another government program to fail us? If Zohran truly wants to confront negligent landlords, he might do well to look at the landlord in the mirror—without the cameras present.