NYC Construction Moratorium
What Will Happen to All the Empty Office Buildings and Hotels?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/realestate/empty-office-buildings-hotels.html
A moratorium on NYC construction, new buildings and alterations, sales, swaps, buys, planning and design proposals, property packaging for foreign investors to launder and hide wealth, could be, should be, a new beginning after the pandemic shock.
Return to the pre-pandemic would be thoughtless, perhaps demented, for sure a craven submission to sclerotic brainwaves unable to generate healthy aspirations after months of facing cessation, dire warnings, inactivity, existential panic, escapist delirium of battle fatigue of constant dreadlock-down.
City policy allowed construction to proceed but watching the sites reveals slow-motion workers, or completely still, sipping drinks, now and then going through the motions of productive work but not really doing anything except dutifully wearing masks and obeying the DoB manifestos posted at gateways.
Days upon days no workers show up, a foreperson or two chat with security personnel, crane operators take a smoke offsite, white hatted bosses stroll by not even pretending urgency of schedule, that's all covered by crisis insurance, government handouts, investors dawdling in summery seas.
What an uplift it would be to cancel construction culture along with other forms of social pathology for an extended period for sorting out what might be the best for NYC, to get off the pernicious treadmill of peddling maniacally in office zoos but going nowhere, daydreaming replacing mandatory corner cutting, upticking gains, post-job insensate.