August 8, 2018
A Gazette Editorial
In a scene straight out of a Tom Wolfe novel, a dozen activists were evicted from the City Council balcony today for protesting a rezoning plan that they said will drive them and their neighbors out of their neighborhood. They were shown the door after showering Council Members with a small fortune in Monopoly money. In this hypothetical, posthumously written novel the lead character would have to be Ydanis Rodriguez, District 10’s beleaguered Council Member.
Ydanis Rodriguez speaks with the press after Inwood Rezoning Plan vote, August 8, 2018.
Ydanis worked hard to get where he is today. He immigrated to America, he drove a taxi, put himself through CUNY, and won a Council seat on his third try. He developed a solid reputation for standing up for the working class and for demanding justice for immigrants and tenants. He was at Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street and, more recently, he was collared for an act of civil disobedience against ICE deportations. His Prog Left bona fides were impeccable. And then came the rezoning plan.
Suddenly recast in an unfamiliar role as stooge of real estate developers he struggled to make the character believable, but his method acting skills weren’t up to the task. He came across as an actor playing a part, inauthentic. If he’d always been a lackey for the 1% he probably could have pulled it off. But just like you could never see Reagan the same way in a movie after he was President, it was hard to buy into Ydanis playing the villain. Why did he even take the part? There was a genuine grassroots movement against the economic cleansing that the rezoning plan implied and it was growing right in his own backyard. It should have been practically reflex for him, or any politician for that matter, to simply step in front of it and call himself the leader. But he didn’t do that.
Instead, he grabbed hold of the plan with both hands and jumped on it like somebody might drunkenly mount a mechanical bull in a honky tonk in Texas. It promised to be a wild ride from the get go, and it was that. By the time it reached City Hall today, Ydanis’ name was mud and he had even received a death threat on FB over the controversial bill.
“This is what Democracy looks like” was a rallying cry during Occupy Wall Street, a feel-good ditty that self-validated the People chanting it as they Reclaimed the Power, blocked traffic, and raised consciousness. It was chanted without irony and offered hope for better days ahead, a bright future when everyone would make enough money and you could go to college for free. That we are more or less right back where we started, with Wall Street on an extended sugar high of low taxes and weak regs is disappointing, of course. But even more dispiriting is the hollowing out of Democracy itself. We’re not just talking about he said/she said election results that only the winners accept nowadays. We mean going through the motions so it “looks like” Democracy but it really isn’t.
The Inwood rezoning plan hit the City Council floor for a vote today after a marathon of hearings and interim votes. At every stage of the ULURP process it was evident that the plan was unloved by the people who live and work up here. The Community board, the U.S. Rep, the State Assemblywoman and the State Senator, the Borough President, the SRO crowds of Inwood residents and local small business owners at Town Halls all opposed the plan in whole or in part. But not Ydanis. He won’t be facing these Inwood voters in the next election. He’s ineligible to run for his seat again because of term limits. So there’s that. But still, nobody has convincingly put their finger on his true motivation for this role. Perhaps he’s telling the truth and he really does think it’s a great idea, even if the impacted community doesn’t agree because they don’t know what’s good for them. It’s possible.
One thing’s for certain though. With today’s 43-1-1 vote by the full Council in favor of the plan, it “looked like” Democracy. Only it wasn’t really. 42 of those 43 “Yes” votes came from Council Members representing Districts other than Inwood. Ydanis pointed to late changes in the plan that showed he listened. It was too big, he conceded, so they removed the “Commercial U,” the very heart of Inwood east of Broadway and between Dykeman and 207th Street. It’s an irony that Wolfe himself might have playfully deployed: Ydanis telling the plan’s opponents it’s much better without U.
