Tag Archives: New York

New York and San Francisco rents fall, Detroit rises for now.

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Rents in New York and San Francisco are far less expensive than before the pandemic. It’s been a boon for the suburbs, the south and the midwest, one that’s likely to continue unless Biden steps in. Before the pandemic, rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom apartment averaged over $3700 per month. New York rent was similar. People paid it because these cities offered robust business and entertainment, the best restaurants and bars, the best salons and clubs, the best music, museums, universities, and theater. New York was Wall Street, Madison Avenue and Broadway; San Francisco was Silicon valley and Hollywood. These cities were the place to be, and then the pandemic hit.

Post COVID-19, the benefits of big city life are gone, and replaced by negatives. The great restaurants are mostly gone; the museums, theaters, and salons, shut along with Hollywood. Wall Street and Madison Ave have gone on-line, as have the universities. If you can work and study from anywhere, why do it from an expensive hotbed of Corona.

People of means left the big cities with the first lockdowns. Wall Street moved on line, with offices in New Jersey, and many followed, along with college students, and hotel and restaurant workers. New York’s unemployment rate increased from 4-5% to over 9.5% today, among the highest rates in the nation, 9.5%. It would be higher if not for the departures. Crime spiked; the murder rate doubled. To keep people from leaving, landlords have lowered rents and many will now forgive a month or two of rent to keep apartments full with some rent coming in and an illusion of exclusivity. This is good for tenants, but tough on landlords.

Detroit rent history, 2014 to January 2021. Rents fell a lot on election day, maybe because of Biden, or because we think the pandemic is over.

As things stand, the suburbs and smaller cities are the beneficiaries of the exodus. Among the cities benefiting the most are cities in the south and mid-west: states that are more open and are relatively low cost: Phoenix, Oakland, Cleveland, St. Petersburg, and even Detroit. Detroit’s rents were already moving up as auto manufacturing returned from Mexico, see chart. Between early 2017 and October 2020, they went from $500/month to $1250/month for a 1 bedroom apartment, according to Zumper. Detroit rents fell after election day, but are still up 20% on the year. The influx of wealthier working folk to Detroit is welcome to some, unwelcome to tenants who find their rents are raised. I think it’s is a sign of a healthy economy that people follow life-quality, and that rents follow people. Our landlords are happy, but there are a lot of Detroit renters who are not

Joe Biden has promised to step in to make things right for everyone. He promised to have the government pay people’s rent so they don’t get evicted. I presume that means paying about double to people in NY and SF as to those in Detroit. He claims he will shutter smokestack industries too, and create the good jobs of the future in computers and high tech. It’s a nice claim. I suspect it’s a bailout of big city landlords, but what would I know. I suspect that the US would be better off if Joe just sat back and let New York rents fall, while allowing Detroit to gentrify. Detroiters need not worry about rents getting too pricy here. We’ve1500 shootings per year, that 15 times more than NYC, per capita. Unless that ratio changes, Detroit will continue to be the lower rent city.

Robert Buxbaum, January 17, 2021.

1500 people shot in Detroit, 4/5 survive; some thoughts.

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There are two remarkable things about shootings in Detroit. One is how many there are. About 1500 Detroiters last year, about 0.2% of the city’s population. The other remarkable tidbit is that only about 1/5 of them died. More specifically, there were 1173 non fatal shootings. There were also 327 criminal homicides, but many shooting deaths in Detroit are non-criminal, as in self-defense, or police interventions, and there are also many criminal homicides that are done with knives or poison. Put this together and it seems that only about 1/5 or those shot, perhaps 327 out of 1500 total. The headline from June 21, 2020 reads: 1 fatal, 11 non-fatal shootings in Detroit overnight. You almost feel like getting these guys marksmanship lessons, but there seems to be more at play.

Even in photography, a fair percentage of shooters miss simple head shots.

The number of shootings are way up this year, and drugs – alcohol is to blame, here and in other cities. People have lost their jobs to COVID and globalization, more in Detroit than in most cities, but the government has offered checks that are used for alcohol and drugs. Most Detroit shootings begin as arguments that turn violent. There is also some gang shooting, enhanced by a bout of prison releases, because of COVID.

Drugs and alcohol help explain the low death rate. It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re drunk or stoned, and hard even if you’re not, as Alexander Hamilton found. In Detroit, many of these hit were hit in non-vital areas (I tell folks to avoid those areas :). But another part of the low death rate is lower caliber bullets. Military caliber bullets were in short supply this year, and as best as I was able to tell, a fair number of shootings were with 22 and 25 instead of the military cartridges, 9mm and bigger that were popular years ago. A 9mm cartridge is shown as the center picture below, between a 22lr and a 45. Big bullets make for big holes and high death rates.

Per capita, the Detroit shooting rate is about 15 times that of New York City. New York saw roughly the same number of shootings as Detroit, 1,531 in a city 15 times bigger, and 462 criminal homicides The cause does not appear economic. but social. When Detroit’s unemployment rate fell, the murder rate did not. Thanks to COVID, Detroit’s unemployment rate is lower than New York’s. My only thought is that the culture is the difference, that the culture in New York is such that arguments do not turn violent as regularly.

Size comparison; 22, 9mm, 45. Big bullets leave big holes.

Stricter gun laws will not help, I think. Michigan’s gun laws make it hard to own pistols with barrels less than 16″ long. The net result is that most crime in the city is done with illegal guns. In general, countries with strict gun laws have more violent crime, not less. I would like to encourage private citizens to choose smaller bullets for self defense though, 22 or 32, and not military grade, 9mm. As a private citizen, you have to bring in the criminal, or storm a building. Your only goal is to get the criminal to stop without harming yourself. A 22 will get the criminal to stop. It will killl too, just less often. A 22 caliber bullet killed Bobby Kennedy, and Reagan was nearly killed with one. A small caliber bullet is less likely to kill you in an accident, or to kill people standing behind the target. This year, some 11 police forces came to a consensus report on use of the minimum of force necessary; read it here. For a private citizen, that’s a 22. Besides, speaking from my own limited experience, I find it easier to aim a small bullet.

Robert Buxbaum, January 10, 2021

What happened to Jack Kelly of Newsies

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As my daughters are fans of the Disney play and movie, “Newsies,” and as I’ve taken interest in the early 20th century, they’ve asked me to find out what happened to Jack Kelly, the main character of the play/movie. If you’ve never seen it, Newsies is a musical about the New York newsboy strike of 1899. According to the play/ movie, as soon as the strike ends (the newsboys win), the strike leader, “cowboy” Jack Kelly goes off with Theodore Roosevelt, presumably headed to Santa Fé, New Mexico to become a real cowboy. But a simple search did not reveal what actually happened to the real Jack Kelly; here’s what I found. Noosies NYT

Without looking, I told my daughters that, if Jack Kelly had gone to Santa Fé in 1899, he would have found something very interesting: a cowboy school for young men. As it happened one of Roosevelt’s rough riders from the battle of San Juan Hill, retired to Santa Fé and set up a cowboy school for boys in the mountains above the town. He built a very outdoorsy operation in an area called “Los Alamos”. It ran until 1942 when the location was taken over to become “Site Y” of the Manhattan Project. This is where J. Robert Oppenheimer and co designed and built the first Atom Bombs. That Jack would have gone there would make for a nice, tidy story, but the truth appears to have been more messy, and more interesting. Jack got involved with William Hearst and George M. Cohan, the Titanic, a famous murder, and eventually with the fall of Tammany Hall. Here’s a picture.

Jack Sullivan

Jack Sullivan, head Newsie. He isn’t ugly, but isn’t Christian Bale either.

First, there was an actual newsboy strike in 1899; it was about raising the price the newsboys paid per paper, but the problem was that the price had been raised earlier, for the Spanish-American War, and not decreased after the war ended. The newsboys did win, and there was a leader named Jack, but according to the papers, the name of the leader was “Jack Sullivan”, not Jack Kelly or Francis Sullivan. The New York Tribune, July 22, 1899, lists Jack Sullivan as the leader of the strike Arbitration Committee and a leader of “the first group of newsboys to declare and demand their rights.” There are other leaders too: Louis “Kid Blink” Baletti, and David “Dave/ Yaller” Simmons. “Kid Blink” (he wore an eye patch and appears in the movie) got an award from the newsboys for making the best speech. I’ll guess that the Dave “the mouth” character is based on David “Yaller” Simmons, but it is not clear that he had any close relationship with Sullivan.

As for the movie showing Jack leaving with T. Roosevelt. it might have suited Roosevelt, but the real Jack appears to have stayed in New York, and appears to have taken a job as a bodyguard for William Randolph Hearst, one of the newspaper moguls who’d raised his rates and precipitated the strike. But it doesn’t end there. In 1904, Jack Sullivan, “the Boss Noosie” has gotten a charter for a Newsies Club to be set-up on 4th street in lower New York (the Bowery). A New York Times article (at left) includes an interview with Jack that fans should find pleasing, if only for his grammar. He uses the word, “papes” instead of papers or newspapers. I suspect this is a put-on affect for benefit of Times-readers, but who knows? It is sometimes the height of wisdom to appear stupid.

By 1909, Jack has lost control of his newsboy’s club. He appears to have used the club to teach boxing (how crude) and on at least one occasion used club assets to post bail for women accused of “loitering,” a jail-able offense in corrupt, Tammany-era New York. The club closed 2 years later. And then Jack gets married (November 27, 1910), and it appears that Jack’s real name was not Sullivan at all, but Reich. He marries Sarah Siegel at the Ohav Tzedek synagogue as “Jacob Reich”. The name Jacob Reich appears on his marriage license, on his death certificate, and on various court records, though he still appears as Jack Sullivan in other activities. Jack/ Jacob appears to have chosen the Irish-sounding name “Sullivan” as an homage to the leader of the Tammany (Democratic) machine, “Big Tim” Sullivan, shown in the photo below.

Turn of the century Tammany boss, "Big Tim" Sullivan, shown at right.

Turn of the century Tammany boss, “Big Tim” Sullivan, shown at right.

By March, 1912, Jack appears again in the news, this time suing two film companies for use of his story and likeness without payment to him. It’s a film called “the Gangsters.” It would be interesting to see if a copy still exists.

A month later, April 15, 1912, The unsinkable Titanic goes down, and six days after that, April 21, 1912, Jack is selling papers at a charity baseball game to benefit the survivors. The game takes place on a Sunday, normally prohibited by New York blue laws, between The New York Giants and The New York Yankees (the Yankees are still called the Highlanders in those days, but are already wearing pinstripes). In the picture below, Jack is under the red arrow with lots of “papes” under his arm, just behind famous song-writer, playwright, George M. Cohan. Both are dressed as newsies. George M. Cohan, known for the WWI song “Over there”, had four plays on Broadway at the time. He is one of the very few successful New Yorkers to have avoided major attachment to the crooked, New York political machine.

Jack Sullivan with George M Cohan, April 1912 selling a special newspaper to help survivors of the Titanic.

Jack Sullivan (arrow) with George M Cohan, April 1912 selling a special newspaper to help survivors of the Titanic.

New York Refuge

The New York house of refuge

And now Jack Kelly / Sullivan/ Reich enters history as a tragic bystander. When he got married, Jack borrowed $1000, from a Jewish gambler and gambling hall owner, Herman (Beansy) Rosenthal. Rosenthal was a good friend of his, and of “Big Tim” Sullivan, but he (and Sullivan) had enemies. Among them, the crooked police Lieutenant, Charles Becker, who headed the city vice squad and delighted in shaking down the gamblers, pimps, etc for protection money. Becker wanted Rosenthal dead, in part to keep him from going to the newspapers with stories of police corruption.

By 1912, “Big Tim” lost control of the Tammany organization and was put in seclusion under Tammany guard. Within a year he’d be dead. Someone (Becker?) then hired four hit men to kill Rosenthal (1:30 AM, July 16, 1912 in front of The Metropole Hotel). It’s an event recounted in “The Great Gatsby.” Several beat-policemen were there to see the shooting, but every one looked away. Not one shot back or took the license of the car. In fact, the police did nothing to catch the murderers except to lock up the only honest witness to keep him from testifying. Before the shooting, Becker took Jack Sullivan out for an evening at Madison Square Garden; he then dropped Jack at the Metropole just before the 1:30 shooting. Becker and the police then blamed Jack and four others for the murder based on testimony that they had concocted. In the end, Jack was acquitted, but not the other four, or Becker. All five went to the electric chair; all five protested their innocence.

Becker was the first US police lieutenant to be put to death for murder. It seems unlikely that he was innocent, but was he a murderer, or just an accomplice. As for the other four, perhaps they were guilty, perhaps not; it’s hard to tell from Tammany-era records. The judge was crooked; Police chief Devery was at least as crooked as Becker in terms of shaking down hoodlums. And Devery had as much motive as Becker to want Rosenthal dead. The witnesses were lying from a script they’d been given — that’s what justice was like in those days. Within a year of the murder, Big Tim was dead and Charles Francis Murphy had gained firm control of Tammany Hall. The police spent the next decade in criminal activities while trying to pin something on Jack, now a cigar store owner. He was busted for gambling and related offenses, but nothing much came of it. Jack cleared his name from the charge of murder only in 1936, two years before his death — three years after Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor. Republican/ Fusion candidate, La Guardia ran against Tammany and did much to end their police corruption.

As for The Refuge, The New York House of Refuge is a real place. It sat on Randal’s Island between Manhattan, The Bronx, and Queens. The Island is now famous as the center of The Triborough Bridge. There is now a park where The Refuge was. Was The Refuge run honestly? If it was, it would have been virtually the only public institutions to run that way. Tammany was corrupt to the core.

Robert E. Buxbaum, October 25, 2015. Much of the information here comes from a tumbler exchange called, “newsies historical research.” I organized it and added some background about Baseball, Tammany, etc. If you like Newsies, or the era, I can recommend the novel (and movie), The Great Gatsby, or Fiorello!, a musical version of La Guardia’s unlikely rise to power. Hearst is treated somewhat positively in Newsies, but less-so as “Citizen Kane.” If someone’s seen, or has a link to “The Gangsters” please tell me.