The billionaire's building.

The opening shots of Park Avenue: Money, Power and The American Dream show the famed avenue in all its moneyed glory: idling Mercedes, impeccably coiffed society women and stern limestone facades with white-gloved doormen stationed outside like sentries. It is a vision so lofty that it is almost otherworldly—can the vast majority of Americans even conjure this up as the apex of the American dream, let alone attain it?

It’s a question that director Alex Gibney revisits repeatedly in his documentary about the growing gulf between the rich and poor and how that gulf has been widened by the political manipulations of the country's wealthiest citizens.

The press release about the film, bashed by The Observer in a previous post, was indeed misleading, but only in what it represented the film to be about: the two Park Avenues. This is not a story about the low or lowly classes. Nor is it really a story about 740 Park, the Upper East Side, the South Bronx or even New York. Those things just happen to be convenient physical touchstones.

This is a story about the richest of the rich, as it were, the residents of 740 Park—a building that is home to more billionaires than any other building in New York—and how they have managed to claim a larger and larger share of the nation's wealth, or as Mr. Gibney puts it in his opening voice-over, how they have enjoyed "unprecedented prosperity from a system they increasingly control."

As Michael Gross, the author of 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, which Mr. Gibney bought the rights to, wrote us earlier this fall: "we're both more interested in the perps than the vics." (Mr. Gross also acted as an adviser on the film and is interviewed extensively alongside New Yorker scribe Jane Mayer, Yale professor Jacob Hacker and Bruce Bartlett, a historian and adviser to presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush, among others.)

Indeed, the documentary unfurls like a crime story, with a raft of damning evidence revealing the shameful acts committed by the masters of the universe in service of accumulating even vaster fortunes than they already have.

At least, it's a crime story as told by talking heads. This is not a human interest film—partially as a matter of necessity. None of the men at the film's center—the Koch brothers, Stephen Schwarzman, John Thain, Sen. Chuck Schumer or Paul Ryan consented to an interview. Their onscreen presence is limited to archived videos from dinners and conventions and voice-over explanations from experts. Nor did Mr. Gibney manage to get inside the famed building.

We do get a glimpse into the hallowed halls (or at least the lobby) of 740 Park thanks to a former doorman, who talks about witnessing an eerie shift in the children of the super-rich: as little kids they joke and share special high-fives with the staff, but between the ages of 12 and 15, they shut off completely, emulating their parents' cool reserve. Also, David Koch is incredibly cheap, giving the doormen who regularly loaded his Hamptons-bound cars with heavy bags a $50 check at the end of the year.

Alas, Mr. Gibney uses such anecdotes to buttress one of his flimsier arguments, backed by a study by UC Berkeley professor Paul Piff: that wealth destroys empathy. The question of why the super-rich behave the way they do, and why they feel the need to claim even greater quantities of wealth, is a complicated (and fascinating) question that demands more in-depth exploration. As such, it's one which the film should have either mentioned in passing or left alone. Certainly, wealth can and does breed entitlement, but as Mr. Gross says at one point, "some people are just dicks."

The film includes trips to food pantries in the South Bronx and Wisconsin, an interview with a young social worker speaking about how early opportunity or the lack thereof begins to shape a life and plenty of shots of embattled-looking impoverished Bronx residents, but this all feels like window dressing for the takedown at the heart of the film.

Mr. Gibney is clearly most interested in illustrating how the nation's wealthiest have rigged the game, not only claiming a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth via devices like the carried interest tax rate, but using that wealth to fund groups and candidates who have by and large succeeded in turning the dwindling middle class against the the less fortunate, unions and each other. The latter accomplishment is arguably the largest battle won by the one-percenters in the wake of the financial crisis. After all, the great recession began with anger at greedy financial titans and foolhardy hedge funders, but somehow shifted to rage at greedy teachers and foolhardy middle-class home buyers.

And while the outcome of the most recent election at least proves that money is a deciding factor, not the deciding factor in a presidential election, dulling Mr. Gibney's argument slightly, he makes a compelling case that inequality imperils democracy and that the victims of the inequality include not only those who find themselves in the rapidly expanding underclass, but the American dream itself.

kvelsey@observer.com

What a difference a few years make. (Tom Stoelker/ArchPaper)

Michael Kimmelman was not the only one writing about Via Verde yesterday. The Architect's Newspaper also has a report on the revolutionary South Bronx public housing complex done by architects Grimshaw and Dattner Architects and developers Jonathan Rose and Phipps Houses.

The Times's architecture critic was heavy on the social metaphors, but A|N gives us all the nitty, (un)gritty details, like how the  building combats obesity or keeps costs down to ensure the project's affordability. But what was most striking was this picture, by the paper's Tom Stoelker, which captures just how radical the new building is when compared to some of its predecessors. ''

You can see more of these stunning shots—which were shockingly absent from The Times' story—on A|N's site, but here's one more:

Step up to the future. (ArchPaper)

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Once filled with doorman apartment buildings with opulent lobbies, the strip lost quite a bit of its cache and luster in the urban exodus of the 1960s and 1970s, and the above video tracks the boulevard's history quite well.

The competition, "Intersections: Grand Concourse Beyond 100," comes as the city has launched a rezoning of the area surrounding the southern portions of the boulevard: the Lower Concourse rezoning.

Per the competition’s Web site, the organizers are looking for:

Submissions are due May 1.

The area currently has a large amount of parking lots, auto repair shops and buildings devoted to industrial uses. Assuming developers eventually build out the area, the administration’s plan would create a dramatic change to the area, as it is one of the more substantial rezonings undertaken by the city under Mayor Bloomberg. In addition to the 3,400 estimated new apartments, the plan would allow for up to 841,000 square feet of new commercial space (for retail, grocery stores and hotels) and 95,500 square feet of industrial space.

The Planning Department, led by Amanda Burden, is also launching a new tool that would encourage developers to set aside a fifth of their apartments to sell to low-income families at below-market rates. The tool, known as inclusionary zoning, had previously only been open to renters.

Here’s a statement by Mayor Bloomberg:

Much more on the rezoning here, at DCP’s Web site.

Here’s four areas (and one borough) where buyers would be fools to rush in now.

1. MANHATTAN
In Manhattan, prices are falling. But several gauges indicate that, in the months ahead, they'll fall even further.

For one, new development – which accounted for 30 percent of sales in the borough last quarter – continues to skew prices, according to the third-quarter market report from Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman. For another, sales are slowing.

As of the end of September, it would take close to eight months to sell all of Manhattan's current listings at the current pace of sales, according to Jonathan Miller, the report's author. In a normal market, this would happen in five or six months. Finally, consider how much inventory is on the market: 7,003 units last quarter, up over a third from record lows during the same period last year.

A less tangible reason might be the "very wide" price gap between what buyers offer these days and what sellers will take. "Buyers tend to rely on national housing stats because they're more gloomy," Mr. Miller said. "And sellers tend to rely on the past because it's more positive. So there's a disconnect on the parts of both parties. And that's a market in transition."

In Mr. Miller's opinion, the flow of new building projects won't dry up until mid-2009, and "it'll still take another 18 months after that to absorb that product completely," he said. He declined to forecast, but he noted that if the economy continues to weaken and the dollar strengthens, Manhattan prices will fall over the next year or two.

2. WILLIAMSBURG-GREENPOINT
"In places where the developers have been aware there's been a change in the marketplace, and they've given incentives, or they've given slight adjustments on the pricing, we've seen business pick up," said Frank Percesepe, the Corcoran Group's Brooklyn regional vice president. "And I think that's what we're going to see through the entire market."

Mr. Percesepe is an optimist on the North Brooklyn market from its sales side, and he has reason to be.

Unlike in the rest of the borough, median sales prices are up compared to the same period last year, according to Miller Samuel's report. The increase, however, is tied to the number of condo projects that have flooded Williamsburg-Greenpoint, and sales are down by roughly 20 percent since last year.

Isn't it only a matter of time before prices fall?

"I think that there will be some price reduction," Mr. Percesepe said. "Whether there's going to be a major number, I don't know. I'm not projecting that."

His advice for buyers is to keep looking and shop around. "When sellers become aware of what's needed in this market," he said, "I think we're going to see a lot of deals beginning to happen."

3. THE SOUTH BRONX
There hasn't been a better time to buy in the South Bronx in the last five years, according to Allison Jaffe, the owner of Key Real Estate Services.

Unless there's a better time a year from now.

Apartment sales in the Bronx are dropping at an even greater pace than earlier this year, according to reports compiled by the Real Estate Board of New York. Third-quarter condo sales are down by half since the same period in 2007, a steeper decline than in any other borough.

"It's fair to say that there's too much inventory to keep prices at their peak," Ms. Jaffe said. "There certainly isn't too much inventory from a buyer's perspective. They've got lots to choose from!"

No wonder buyers are trying to negotiate better deals. But many sellers are "in denial" and holding firm, Ms. Jaffe said. Investors? They don't need her listings: "An investor can sit on the county court house steps and scoop up foreclosures that will give them a much better return on their money," she said.

Although Ms. Jaffe believes sales will speed up after the winter, it's not going to be a seller's market come spring. She's working with a developer to find a new building, one that would open for sales in two years, when the market has recovered. "Anybody who can put together the financing will be in a good position 18 to 24 months from now, when those units are ready," she said.

4. LONG ISLAND CITY
In recent years, shiny condominium towers sprouted across Long Island City, and until lately, buyers snapped them up. But now negotiation dominates most of Tom Le's deals.

"Let's just say, a year or so ago, you don't see any negotiation," said Mr. Le, a broker at Corcoran who specializes in Brooklyn waterfront and Long Island City properties. "You take the price, or you don't. But now you see the sponsors starting to negotiate," offering incentives to potential purchasers.

If the financial slump persists, the incentives will grow, as supply outpaces demand. ("It's Economics 101!" Mr. Le said.) Sales in new developments in Long Island City and Astoria are down 37.3 percent from the same time last year – twice the drop of re-sales – according to Miller Samuel's third-quarter report. Mr. Le wagered that if developers only sell 10 or 15 percent of the units in a building, they might "make life easier for themselves" and offer buyers a discount. (Although he stressed that developers would rent the units before they "lose their shirts.")

Should buyers wait it out and rent?

"I would advise any buyers to look at actually what their needs are," he said. "If they need to move, if they need to purchase a home, buy now. … If they want to stay in a place more than four years, buy. But if they want to test the neighborhood for the next little while, rent for a while."

5. BOHO BROOKLYN
In neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Fort Greene and the rest of northwest Brooklyn, sales are down 39.9 percent since the same period in 2007, slightly more than in the rest of the borough, according to Miller Samuel's third-quarter report. Sales of brownstones have declined further than condo, co-op and luxury properties, by a whopping 59.8 percent since the same period last year. Lower prices will likely follow.

"Typically what happens in a weakening market," Mr. Miller said, "is prices continue to rise as the number of sales falls, as people that are either priced out of the market or are not willing to make a decision fall out, and people who are willing to continue to pay the prices stay in."

But the types of people willing to pay the prices in past years – young professionals who fueled BoHo Brooklyn's growth – are losing their jobs. The city predicts 165,000 jobs will vanish from the private sector in the next two years. No doubt, this will affect the real estate market. We haven't seen the end of the slowdown.

In his article “The Power of Green,” Friedman argues that green is not about cutting back. “It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance … It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet.”

That’s the goal of the Green-For-All campaign, which pushed Congress to provide $125 million to train 30,000 people a year in green trades. While I have reservations about the new federal Energy Independence Act of 2007—it did manage to authorize $125 million for the creation of a Green Jobs program, a worker-training program that helps poor people qualify for jobs in energy-efficient construction or the renewable power/biofuels industry.

The Act also includes an annual $2 billion Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant administered by the Department of Energy and the US Conference of Mayors.

This program is supposed to help local governments develop and implement energy efficiency and conservation strategies.

The goal of improving energy efficiency in building is a major theme of PlaNYC 2030, Mike Bloomberg’s sustainability plan that identified existing buildings as a significant source of greenhouse gases and concluded that incentives were necessary to encourage building owners and tenants to reduce their carbon footprint.

Now some Environmental Science and Policy Masters students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs are working with Sustainable South Bronx (SSB) to develop a “green jobs” model for New York and other cities.

The project is led by faculty advisor Gail Suchman, a Lecturer at Columbia’s SIPA and Law School, and an attorney in the environmental practice at the law firm of Stroock Stroock and Lavan.

The students are working to identify opportunities and obstacles to green-job training and recommend a business plan for the development of a green-building retrofit program.

“This is an opportunity for people to take ownership of revitalizing their neighborhoods and cities,” says Suchman. “It’s about creating jobs for a community, because we can’t wait for the government to do it any longer.”

The project takes a three-prong approach to creation of green-collar jobs:

1. Analyzing incentives for economic development in areas like the South Bronx
2. Requiring the equipment and technology necessary for sustainable development to be developed locally; and
3. Training workers in fields such as green construction and retrofitting. The Columbia class includes 11 students with a wide variety of training and experiences.

“The diversity of folks attracted to the project is extraordinary,” says Suchman, who describes the class as a mixture of science, business and public policy interests. “It’s good to see this merger of economics and environmental protection,” Suchman adds. “I think it will really result in a new wave of environmental protection.”

Sustainable South Bronx’s executive director, Majora Carter, has paid a visit to Suchman’s class and has kept up on their progress through e-mails and phone conversations.

“She inspired the students, and she wrote in an e-mail that she was inspired by them,” Suchman says.

Sustainable South Bronx runs the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program, which trains people in riverine and estuarine restoration.

The 10-week program shares the Green-For-All mission: giving ownership to workers who have an economic stake in the future of their local environment. According to Suchman, the green-jobs initiative is a broader view of what can be done.

It involves retrofits, environmental auditing and will expand on programs such as the green-roofs project, which involves replacing traditional roof tops with plantings that absorb rain water and provide building insulation. A green economy requires the help of government and nonprofits to push it along, but in the end depends on the private marketplace.

“To a degree, the market is already at work on this project — because some venture capitalists and companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry,” Friedman writes.

This emphasis on green jobs has the potential of transforming the environmental justice movement from a defense operation designed to reduce the impact of pollution on poor people, to a creative coalition to improve local economies while improving environmental quality.

Suchman observed that the environmental justice movement in New York has operated for more than 15 years. When it began it was mostly about fighting toxics and pollution. Today, it has been so successful that it is shifting its focus from lawsuits and litigation to community revitalization.

“The Green-For-All project is a natural extension of all the environmental justice groups’ mission. This is an opportunity to be proactive in community vitalization and to create jobs that can’t go overseas,” Suchman says.

I am grateful for the reporting and research assistance on this piece provided by Sara Schonhardt, (Columbia Journalism School Class of 2008).

This content was provided for use by The New York Observer, specifically on Observer.com by the scientists and researchers at Columbia University. Any other use of this content without prior authorization from Columbia University and The New York Observer is strictly prohibited.

- Tom Acitelli

But this Bloombergian consensus was shattered by Majora Carter, the one African-American on the panel, the one woman, and the one representative of "the community perspective" (she is executive director of Sustainable South Bronx). Ms. Carter, when innocently asked by the architecture critic for Bloomberg L.P. for her opinion on all the grand-scale planning going on in the city now, took a deep breath, paused for effect, and began:

Ms. Carter went on for 10 minutes, detailing how the destruction of the Bronx, where she grew up, was still felt today--and was still continuing today, arguing:

She concluded by criticizing the Bloomberg adminstration's plan to put a jail in the South Bronx.

It must have been hard to be Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, who was sitting just four seats away.

- Matthew Schuerman

He's the latest of the country's mayors to make the pilgrimage to New York to talk to Bloomberg.

The visit grew out of a a May 19th letter that White sent to Bloomberg, asking the New York mayor for some pointers on public-private partnerships and affordable housing.

- Jason Horowitz