Kingstonian Supporters: “It’s All About Me”

Believers fall for trickle-down trickery painted as new housing for them, new spending for Kingston.

Background

The Kingstonian is a proposed $57 million development consisting of 143 apartments, boutique hotel, garage and retail space. In hopes of securing a $30 million tax break, the developers produced an assortment of job creation and economic activity projections. In response to public outcry, Ulster County officials brokered a new agreement that reduced the tax giveaway to $28 million and raises total payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) to about $5 million.

January 18, 2021

A flurry of letters to the editor in The Daily Freeman last month gave insight into the thinking that animates support for the $28 million Kingstonian welfare-for-millionaires tax giveaway. As I scanned the letters, I wondered at the presence, verbatim, of developer buzzwords, and how each letter highlighted one of the many deceptions that the developers knew they would find someone to believe. It crossed my mind that the developers or their PR expert had crafted or collaborated in these letters, a suspicion bolstered by a gaping hole in the meta-content that made sense if the letters were not, let’s say, entirely authentic.

Absent was the notion of civic virtue, or the public good, or any sense of obligation to the community in its totality. In our small city, nothing demarcates the line between winners and losers more than the Kingstonian. Those letters were devoid of any such recognition.

One letter writer opined the project “will help the majority in the community,” but without concrete examples, the claim carries no weight. Just as the Covid slogan “We’re all in this together” cannot conceal that the virus disproportionately hits POC and the less-privileged, no amount of unsubstantiated spin conceals that $27 million siphoned from the public will disproportionately victimize the less-privileged in Kingston.

No, we’re not in this together, and the Kingstonian is not for the entire community, or the majority, or even a substantial minority. Economists point to a K shaped recovery, where the rich bounce back and others sink deeper into poverty. But that’s really the story of the last five decades. Let’s call them the K-shaped decades, where two worlds have diverged, in Kingston and country, where Kardarshians wear Gucci and Hermès and the working poor pick hand-me-downs from donation racks at food pantries.

Supporters have said the developers deserve the $28 million because they work hard and are local. What about the shopkeeper on Wall Street who has to move because her landlord hiked the rent past what she can afford? She works hard, she is a native of Kingston, but where is her $28 million?

Nothing will sharpen these divisions more than giving public money to a luxury housing development that will offer a private pool for the wealthy while a few hundred yards away is a public pool for the rest of us. (And let’s hope there’s bedrock under that pool.) A private pool is no big deal, right? Harvard Law Professor Michael Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good, would disagree. “One of the ways we learn humility and gratitude and the sense of sharing a common life is by living in the kind of society that does not separate us,” he recently told a podcaster. “I think the seed beds of this kind of civic education and humility and gratitude and the common good, requires that we try to re weave the fabric of a shared civic life.”

Perhaps a private pool really is no big deal, but it serves as a metaphor for the notion of shared civic life that was notable by its absence from the letters. Where can we most easily support that shared civic life? In the school system, which would be the biggest loser from this PILOT.

LETTER No. 1

One writer  said, “This project would bring vibrant economic activity that would generate very significant additional tax revenue to Kingston.” FALSE! As tax specialist Bruce McLean wrote, the annual tax revenue lost to the city from the Kingstonian is a hair under $300,000. For Kingston to make that up, almost $67 million in local additional sales would have to take place. Economists have shown time and again that these spillover benefits do not materialize. Consider the math if each of 300 new residents spends $30,000 locally, and that the multiplier is 2. (Both assumptions are unrealistically high.) That would produce only $18 million in spending. And let’s take a closer look. Do purchases at Hannaford’s stay local? Hannaford’s is owned by Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch behemoth whose largest shareholder is BlackRock, so no, most of that does not stay local. Where does Hannaford buy its food? Haven’t we all seen the US Foods trucks parked outside? That money doesn’t stay in Kingston either. And the low wages at Hannaford’s? Those workers pay much of their salary to landlords, who are increasingly not local, and the rent from Hannaford’s itself goes into Brad Jordan’s pocket. By now, you should be getting the picture. The multiplier effects are fiction, and even when you include hotel, garage and residential space, the math still wouldn’t add up.

LETTER No. 2

Let’s leave aside for the moment that the letter writer is the daughter of an ardent cheerleader for this misbegotten swindle. Let’s leave aside for the moment that she was a successful student, an honor she owes at least in part to the luck of birth into a supportive family that nurtured her success. Let’s leave aside for the moment that her individual suffering will be de minimis if this money is lost to Kingston’s schools.

Much of her letter is about her and her future – not the future of the many who will suffer if the public is deprived of $27 million.

This young woman’s ominous prediction is that she won’t start her career or family here if there is no Kingstonian. (Note: There WILL be a Kingstonian, with or without a PILOT.)  It may be true that she won’t start her career or family here if there are no jobs, no opportunities for a better future. The developers have promised 14 jobs, of which 13 will pay $15 an hour. Tell me, will one of those jobs persuade you to start your career or family here?

In another canard from the developers’ PR playbook, the young woman equates the Kingstonian with progress. But true progress serves all humanity, not the privileged few who can afford luxury housing. The word ‘progress’ belongs to scientific breakthroughs that benefit mankind, to great literature, to great cultural achievements. Please name one Nobel Prize winner lauded for luxury housing.

This young woman also wrote that education systems are meant to help young people become contributing members of society, and that may be the one true statement in her letter. I’m all ears to hear how defunding schools will help them with that mission.

LETTER No. 3

And who could miss the exquisite irony in the letter of the former coordinator of homeless services for the Kingston school district, and who a year ago was quoted in Spectrum as saying rising rents were “creating homelessness.” I can only assume she is unaware that providing a $27 million PILOT will also bring about more homelessness. How? On one level, it’s $27 million less for local government to educate, to provide services, to fund shelters that fight the pandemic of homelessness and evictions that are upon us. On a national level, it’s Fed money that flows into assets like the stock market and real estate because business creation is at its lowest level since record-keeping began. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she doesn’t grasp the connection and that she fell for the empty promises of economic activity. This spillover activity will not materialize, and that has been proved time and again by economists – real economists, unbiased economists, not those who are paid to produce pre-determined numbers.

“When we sold our home, we … wanted a walkable neighborhood that was close to restaurants and shops,” she wrote. (Walkable is a developer buzzword, tipping me off to the likelihood that the developers had a say in the content.) “We were sorely disappointed… We finally moved out of the city.” Did she mention that she lives in Port Ewen, a few miles away?

“I can only assume [the Bd of Ed] did not consider the wider lens of recruiting new teachers with market-rate rental housing…” (With the PILOT not only will the school district not be able to pay new teachers, it may have to lay them off) “…or meeting the needs of the retirees.” (Since when is it the Board of Ed’s responsibility to provide housing for retirees? Moreover, are you aware that even without the PILOT, this project will go forward, and the developers have said so many times?)

“Will Uptown grow and flourish, or will lifelong residents and taxpayers pack up their bags and leave?”

OK, boomer.

Yes, if there’s a PILOT, lifelong residents will pack up their bags at an even faster clip, because siphoning $27 million means that homeowners will have to make up that burden somehow, and those who cannot afford those taxes – think retired faculty – will be forced to leave.

Are these letter writers so selfish that they can only see the Kingstonian through the lens of their own short-term interests? There may be another reason they fail to mention the true benefits to the commonweal: in their hearts, they know there are none.

Even though one writer failed to advocate for the homeless students once entrusted to her care, nor did the others plead for better economic opportunities for all, I will do so for them. In my heart I have to believe that if they understood the implications of the PILOT, the self-centeredness in their letters would prove a momentary lapse. In today’s exploitation economy, the opportunities that do present themselves for the most part consist of dead-end jobs at the likes of Amazon warehouses or the 13 low-wage service jobs the developers have promised to create. Funneling tax breaks to those warehouses, as Orange and Dutchess Counties have done, is not the answer, nor is funneling $27 million for luxury housing. That gift will only exacerbate the divisions that exist today.

The $27 million freebie sought by the developers fits with Michael Douglas’s famous line that “greed is good” when instead, we should be focusing on the common good. Trickle-down hasn’t worked in our country, and it won’t work in Kingston.

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