The last item, a proposed development at 240 Nassau Street, took another 130 minutes, including over 40 public testimonies at a 2:1 ratio of supportive to opposed. The proposal was for 1,500 apartments in Downtown Brooklyn, with 300 of them having income-restricted rents, plus an African art museum and other amenities.

Alloy Development bought the Boys & Girls Club property for $15 million in 2023, helping fund a bankruptcy settlement over child sexual abuse claims, and contributed another $2 million to restore after-school programming.

In 2025, the NYC Educational Construction Fund selected Alloy to redevelop neighboring P.S. 287. Their plan for housing, community facilities and a replacement school required rezoning both sites through the city’s lengthy land-use review process.

After winning Community Board approval,2 the next hurdle to clear was Borough President review. Supporters and opponents showed up in force, many with the 32BJ SEIU building-service workers’ union or from NYCHA’s Farragut Houses.

Who is We?

The loudest testimony focused on who gets to live in Brooklyn. Christopher Haynes3 described moving from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Fort Greene for “familiar faces and familiar culture, familiar people.” He wanted fewer studios and one-bedrooms:

That is a transient community that comes through, and then they get together, they form their own family, then they move out. So that’s not community building.

Across both sides, speakers judged the development by what it would offer their children. Haynes wanted families to stay amid recognizable faces and culture. Objections to housing types slid freely into objections to their imagined occupants. Haynes demanded the power to make “our standards” of who belongs enforceable:

So I am against this until the corporations that are building this and organizations that are part of it can tell me what power I have as a community member to veto any action that does not meet with our standards.

Carolyn Robinson, a civil servant, declared “we don’t need a 70-something-story building” and questioned why supporters who no longer lived nearby should have a say. Her own history was also one of moving, so the boundary of “we” did not follow neighborhood lines, but it did follow her preferred foodways and folkways.

I’m not from Fort Greene. Born and raised in Bed-Stuy, abandoned buildings, poverty. It was bad there. But now, the same Bedford-Stuyvesant I grew up in, I can’t even afford a room there.

We can’t even afford to live in places that we grew up in because now Brooklyn is the best thing since sliced bread. And now everybody’s rediscovered Brooklyn because they don’t want to commute. They don’t want to take the Long Island Railroad and pay for that. They like the benefits of the bus and the subway. Everything there, taxes are pretty low, homeownership taxes.

But we can’t afford to live well. We can’t afford to shop at Wegmans. The new supermarket that’s there, it’s not for everyone. So we’re not saying that we oppose the change. But when the people come to the area, they make us uncomfortable living there. You know, we have to turn the music down. There’s pickleball coming to a park. We don’t play pickleball. So when they come in and make the changes, it’s not for us.

Haynes’s undesirable neighbor is childless and lives in a studio or one-bedroom. Robinson’s shops at Wegmans, plays pickleball in the park, and prefers quiet and a shorter commute. Living near such people makes Robinson “uncomfortable.”

Shanique Pass, a former P.S. 287 student, opposed relocating its students for the redevelopment. She called the school “our little slice of America”:

As we witnessed the banning of books and the erasure of Afro-descendant history and presence, i.e. gentrification, will we continue to allow others to determine for us, or will we exercise our human right to self-determine?

Supporters also spoke in terms of “us,” but disagreed about who was on their side. Shalik Grant praised childhood friends Tameek Floyd and Taj Gibson, who had grown up in nearby Ingersoll Houses and were now helping develop the neighborhood:

Two decades, a lot of developments came here. I haven’t seen not one Black brother or Black sister from our community be at that table. Here we are right now.

Grant now lives in New Jersey. He was one of the former residents Robinson thought should have less say. For him, moving away did not mean leaving “us”:

I believe in their vision. And I’m not saying this—nobody forced me to come on up here. I didn’t have to come on up here. I live in Jersey. I still love my community. I’m still coming back to my community. And I know they’re still coming back to our community.

Shayla Michelle spoke next. She reframed Grant’s seat-at-the-table uplift story as outsiders using trusted Black men to sell projects that would price Black families out.

And what hurts the most is that the strategy that the developers used against us—they come to the neighborhoods and then they use our Black men. They put them in suits. They make them go around and make them become the face of projects that will ultimately price our families out.

We cannot afford to be fooled by the familiar faces.

After the in-person testimony, Jorge Romero spoke via Webex. He asked existing residents to consider the people who could become their neighbors. Not just as threats or tools of evil developers, but as people whose lives and wellbeing mattered.

I just want to, I guess, be a different type of voice. I am living in downtown Brooklyn, as I mentioned before. I live in a market-rate new build with my two-year-old daughter, who is taking a bath next to me right now, and my four-month-old daughter. And our community school is 287.

And I mean, I think I know a lot of people are from NYCHA and are concerned about the type of neighbors that are coming there. But I think they should step into the view that they’re the incumbents right now, and they’re blocking housing.

Back in the day, people would block the NYCHA development, and they would oppose them, and they would not have a place to live.

Also, the point of housing is for people to live there. It’s not about all the benefits.

By this point, much of the debate over 240 Nassau Street concerned the cultural fit and lifestyle choices that would make future Downtown Brooklynites one of “us” or “them.” Romero brought the focus back to people who needed somewhere to live.

I had come to hear about rezoning from R6 to C6-12. I left with a much more concrete understanding of “exclusionary zoning.” The proposed towers gave people an occasion to gather and affirm who they were. Taller buildings threatened to expose the children—the future of the community—to pickleball players from Long Island or New Jersey.

But ordinary commercial greengrocers are not recognized as altruistic workers. Psychologically, the distinction seems to be self-interest. Newman and Cain found the presence of personal gain (like a cashier’s hourly pay) to have a kind of polluting effect on perceived morality of the act, relative to the equivalent, uncompensated work.

In other words, people struggle with the idea that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Intuitively, the baker’s interest is at odds with our getting fed.

Amy Wrzesniewski’s work on job crafting among hospital cleaners found people with the same formal duties drawing radically different boundaries around the work: some minimized interaction and stuck to prescribed cleaning tasks, while others integrated themselves into patient care and understood cleaning as one part of helping the sick.

These differing frames have become a matter of concern for organizational psychology because they can increase persistent behavior that is thought to have impact. Adam Grant’s experiment found that fundraisers who met a scholarship beneficiary subsequently spent more time on calls and raised more money.

The beneficiary of the cashier’s prosocial work is already standing three feet away, but our vocabulary hides his grace by calling him a customer, so his salvation becomes “customer service.” Had the hungry man approached the right kind of official’s desk, helping strangers navigate something they need might now become public service.

The public is served at both desks. Private sector workers feed, transport, insure, repair, teach, and assist members of the public all day. If calling attention to the beneficiary helps workers recognize the impact of their work, there is little reason to reserve that recognition for people with the right employer. A more expansive and inclusive definition of public service might help produce more service to the public.

Because political actors benefit from the rules as written and organize to defend them. In that article about specific “building rules that can add over $100,000 in development costs to a single unit of housing,” beneficiaries appear as moral patients:

NYC political interests want to protect skilled labor workers. I’ve got empathy for this position. […]

This artificially cheap car storage induces more people to drive, which leads to more traffic and perceived parking shortages

But the record doesn’t show mainly misguided top-down paternalism driving NYC’s “death by a thousand codes,” like mandatory copper pipes and parking minimums. Organized interests advanced their own policy preferences through democratic voice.

A recent example from 2024: a proposal governing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) would have allowed plastic piping in those units under the state residential code. The Plumbing Foundation urged the Council to strike that provision. The Council’s revised bill removed it, and the final law preserved New York City’s restriction.

Likewise, representatives for disabled residents asked to keep parking minimums:

• Queens Community Board 8 chair Martha Taylor said during a City of Yes review that “all this business with no parking and ½ mile to a subway station tells me the people with disabilities are screwed.”

• Manhattan Community Board 8 chair Valerie Mason later told the City Council that “[t]he rich will always have parking” and “[w]e need to think about the disabled and middle class having affordable parking.”

This is public choice theory: concentrated beneficiaries organize to defend rules whose costs are dispersed across everyone else. Plumbers know exactly what’s good for their trade. Drivers know exactly what losing required parking means for them.

The people paying for those preferences are harder to organize because each person bears only a fraction of the cost. A renter may pay a little more because of copper, a little more because of parking, and a little more because of dozens of other rules that altogether register as “New York is expensive,” without knowing who made it so.

I’m talking umbrellas to water bottle—all sorts of things that won’t fit into men’s pants pockets. Women’s handbags are fit to purpose for carrying general necessities. Menswear traditionally branches out into backpacks, briefcases, and gym bags, each accommodating well any particular plan for the day but not general urban serendipity.

Enter the tote bag.

The metropolitan male may discover several more objets d’art on his way from an errand. Going home to fetch a bag rather defeats the purpose of living somewhere with so much to do. The tote will hold what he didn’t know he wanted!

Conveniently, the metropolis doesn’t just reward keeping your options open. It also supplies the bags to do it. Bookstores, galleries, and other institutions distribute tote bags as mementos that broadcast pieces of our cultural affiliations. I myself have been known to rock a B.M.T. subway pride tote from the New York Transit Museum.

In addition, the tote-bearer establishes himself as environmentally responsible, and either ahead-of-the-curve or just law-abiding. New York State's plastic-bag ban took effect in March 2020, and NYC imposes a five-cent fee on most paper carryout bags.

Specialized bags are full of predictions about their contents. Padded laptop compartments, dedicated bottle holders, little slots where tyrannical designers decree: a pencil here, a lip-balm there. The tote would rather not put a label on its relationship to your day. Its empty space offers the freedom to discover and play.

In 1841, John H.W. Hawkins stood before the Maryland legislature to tell the room he had been a drunkard “taken almost out of the gutter.” The Senate chamber listened to the reformer, according to a contemporary source, “with tearful attention.”

Legislatures have long had a weakness for the man who has escaped evil and come back to tell the rest of us what it’s really like. This is a curious preference if the object is knowledge. The people still doing the thing usually have more current information.

What Jacob Coxon, Daniel Kokotajlo, and the handmaidens of Prohibition have in common, then, is a role in a conversion story already written. The reformed prostitute, the ex-gay, the recovering addict, and the AI whistleblower all emerge with “clarity”: they can now see what participation supposedly prevented them from seeing.

Leaving does not merely change their incentives; in the conversion story, it improves their eyesight. The participant had experience, but the former participant has perspective. The current participant’s position becomes evidence of bias; the defector’s equally selective position becomes evidence of “insight.”

The dramaturgy of the public hearing is that the legislature has already cast the roles before anyone answers a question. The reformer explains the harm; the institution is called forward to answer binary questions. Shelly Palmer named the template during the 2024 Senate hearing on child safety. “Do you support this bill, yes or no?”

The CEOs could endorse child safety, but not honestly endorse every bill offered in its name without qualification. That nuance, which their job requires, then confirms the role already assigned to them in the hearing: as the interested party resisting reform.

Before the subpoenas are ever issued, the defector has already been granted a powerful role in driving legislation forward. Menin’s package even proposed paying future AI whistleblowers a share of penalties recovered from “bad actors.” Brave men are thus encouraged to keep blowing the whistle, loudly, repeatedly, and in public.

On the moral poverty of the belief that “accidents of birth are a just way of allocating rights,” we agree. But her conflation of national partiality with racial exclusion forecloses a more tractable challenge to real American institutions that combine co-national preference with antiracism.

In 2026, HUD says it is trying to “put the American people first” in federally assisted housing, and has ordered housing authorities to verify citizenship or immigration status. The same agency enforces the Fair Housing Act against racial discrimination.

Although it is possible to nutpick, Republican-led institutions can and do put Black Americans inside the moral circle of concern while excluding Ukrainians and other white Europeans from welfare benefits that give preference to citizens.

People differ quite widely in how much moral weight they assign to national membership. “I feel stronger obligations to my countrymen” describes a preference of some—called parochial altruism—that is commonly used to organize a political faction.

Before we can ask whether there are good moral arguments for drawing the circle of special obligation around the nation, analysts have to separate national preference from allegations of racial motive that are often unsupported and facially false.

Otherwise the question more relevant to today’s actually existing multiracial societies never gets asked. Is national membership itself a morally legitimate basis for treating one person’s claim as stronger than another’s?

The Heritage Foundation and related institutions have prescribed a “success sequence” for young people:

1. Achieve a high school education

2. Work full time

3. Marry before having children

in order to avoid poverty in adulthood. But this is an impoverished account of success for life in one of the richest societies ever to exist.

The World Bank’s poverty line for upper-middle-income countries is $8.30 per person per day; only about two percent of Americans fall below it. Abraham Maslow observed of Americans in 1943 that material needs had receded enough for other wants to become important—including the desire to fully exercise one’s capabilities.

Finish school, secure full-time work, marry, have children, buy the house. The prefabricated American life has the virtues of anything prefab: familiar components, a known order of assembly, and an obvious definition of finished. Components can be sourced from sea to shining sea, without the risk of specialized or experimental parts.

Antipoverty campaigners may reasonably demand to be shown a better blueprint. Everyone knows somebody whose experiments ended in debt, loneliness, addiction, or just years they wish they could get back. Failure yields many cautionary tales.

Sometimes there is no better blueprint because the point is not to know the destination in advance. Renting can preserve the ability to move when a good opportunity appears. That flexibility has a kind of option value that looks like nothing.

Because the opportunity may never come, and never be exercised. But if it does, the renter’s ability to capitalize on it quickly and decisively was not mere luck. The supposedly unfinished life had been carrying unused capacity the whole time.

If Prohibition is compressed to “America tried banning booze, and it didn’t work” for practical reasons of bootlegging, then everyone in 2026 gets to agree with the lesson. But today, people still want things that are “bad for them,” and it’s not just alcohol.

It’s every controversy when a company releases some new gizmo. “Who asked for this?” Well, nobody needs a strawberry vape, FanDuel parlay, Twitter at 1:30 a.m., fluorescent Dorito, or an AI boyfriend, but maybe I want to indulge in all of these.

Suppose I spent some time with an “addictive” activity that was “designed” by predators to exploit me, like watching an Instagram reel. If I feel satisfied, the prohibitionist would call it false consciousness. If I regret it, now that’s a revelation.

There are people who will lose the rent money at a casino and people who will put twenty dollars on a basketball game and then go to bed. A ban is easier to defend if we call gambling addictive instead of asking why only some gamblers become addicts.

A central achievement of liberal modernity was to recognize differences of appetite and lifestyle without turning them into ballot questions. Prohibition turns my strawberry vape back into a matter for lawmakers, regulators, and eventually police.

Down past the gummy candy couches where 20somethings splayed. Down past the food counters with diners draped in cashmere and rare textiles. A folding table held a two-page agenda delicately crimped together without staples. “PUBLIC MEETING.”

I took a seat among 11 physical audience members, facing 30 people behind tables. The woman at the podium was boosting a state bill to protect school library books with LGBTQ themes. “When parents complain, access is disrupted.” Next item!

Council Member Carl Wilson beamed as he recounted a recent oversight hearing’s trophies: clips of tech representatives being scolded. A Zoom attendee interrupted. The sound had cut out for the last ten seconds; what happened at the hearing? New York City, Wilson explained, had a duty to lead on AI, with or without Washington.

He moved on to another bill he was proud to sponsor: the PET Act, requiring veterinarians to disclose their prices for routine procedures.

The room’s most animated technical discussion concerned housing. For a Seventh Avenue co-op, the board wanted to cap owners’ resale profits for at least 80 years instead of 30. Subsidized co-ops allow sufficiently organized residents of modest incomes (but substantial assets) to live in an expensive neighborhood like Chelsea.

The threat of rezoning loomed over the meeting: a proposal to replace a TV studio at 515 West 57th Street with 400 apartments, not enough affordable. What did FAR 18 residential really mean, a member prompted? “Billionaires’ row!” came the reply.

They started taking roll call. It was already after 9 p.m. How much longer would this go on? I envied the attendees dialing in from their divans. I crossed the street into Chelsea Market and scanned for something more interesting than a bodega sandwich. Within minutes, I walked out with a ready-made box of mango sticky rice for $12.

Riding the bus in New York requires pretty much the same practical skills as riding the train. On the bus, you might have to press a button to request your stop, if someone hasn’t already; this habit takes little time to acquire.

Payment problems, however, are more public on the bus, where you pay as you board. There is the possibility of holding up more people than yourself, whereas a problem at the subway turnstile is usually just your problem. MTA policy also instructs drivers not to intervene when passengers refuse to pay—for the driver’s own safety.

In 2025, the MTA estimated fare evasion at 44% on buses versus 10% on the subway. Turnstile jumpers are not exactly like other riders except for the fact of their nonpayment. In 2023, BART police union vice president Brad Wilson reported that roughly 80% of people arrested on its trains or at its stations lacked proof of payment.

BART completed the installation of harder-to-evade fare gates across all 50 stations in 2025. By September 2026, it reported that crimes against riders per million trips had fallen 67% since the end of 2024, while police- and safety-related delays had fallen 47%. A fare gate may collect more than revenue: it may change who gets aboard.

The MTA is installing similar “modern fare gates”—I was happy to see one at my local transfer station where I experienced the train stopping for 20 minutes because a conductor was punched by a laughing student. Until the upgrades are complete, the subway, too, offers opportunities for the urbane to demonstrate their tolerance.

Years later, they still disagreed about what that arrangement had meant.

Eli: You always leave out that Mom worked nights.
Mara: And you leave out that somebody always meant me.
Eli: You were the one who could drive.
Mara: You were the one with practice. Funny how necessities had calendars.
Eli: Practice was three nights a week.
Mara: Grandma was seven.

Eli: We were trying to get through the week, not decide whose life mattered more.
Mara: That’s when those decisions get made without anybody calling them decisions.
Eli: Somebody still had to stay with Grandma.
Mara: You always liked “somebody has to.”

Eli: You made itineraries for Six Flags.

Mara: You liked rules before you understood them.
Eli: You pierced your eyebrow because they told you not to.
Mara: I was going to anyway.
Eli: Sure.

Mara: See? If I push back, that’s just more proof I needed pushing.
Eli: And if I didn’t push back, that’s proof they got to me.
Mara: Sometimes.
Eli: Sometimes.
Mara: So?

Eli: Same parents.
Mara: Same two people. Different parents.
Eli: Same mortgage.
Mara: Different house.

Although the siblings experienced the same level of material insecurity, their dispositions shaped which costs felt salient and, in turn, their worldviews.

Survival needs can narrow your options, but you decide what those options mean.

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Tom Wolfe follows these mechanisms from organizing strategy to disbursement in his 1970 essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” a satire of San Francisco’s antipoverty bureaucracy and its relations with organizations like Mission Rebels.

Wolfe distinguishes between a confrontation, which intimidates individual civil servants, and a demonstration, like the 1963 March on Washington, which challenges “power” in the abstract but gives administrators little guidance on who to deal with.

In a mau-mau confrontation, the organizer’s ability to harangue and humiliate an official qualifies him to receive a grant. The relationship is both antagonistic and symbiotic, since the organizer needs the administrator’s funds, and the administrator needs someone to recognize as the community’s representative.

Officials already have procedures for petitions and contingency plans for armed assaults. The confrontation must make ordinary business impossible while making forcible removal look like Bull Connor turning fire hoses and police dogs on children.

Funding a community program run by the organizer offers officials a way out—and strengthens their counterparty’s standing in the next negotiation. Administrators recognize him because he can bring followers to City Hall, while the jobs they fund keep those followers attached to his organization and available for the next visit.

If not, I had better start reminding you that you know these things. Repeated exposure to low-resolution facts is important. Some of the mistake was mine: I wrote “spotted lanternfly,” not “bugs.” I’m getting better at this.

If I “brought my whole self” to this blog, it would be exhausting and pedantic. Certain interests and private preoccupations have to be bracketed so that association can become enjoyable in itself. The most comforting songs to repeat have simple choruses.

We’re building some lore here. I’ll say the first half and you can fill in the rest. “You guys know what my mother is like.” (TODO: write her as a recurring character.) “You guys already know where I’m going.” (TODO: establish a morning routine.)

A deep, traumatic story is not a shortcut to intimacy. This pain that transformed my value system tells you almost nothing about what spending an afternoon with me would be like. Here is something more useful: I always buy Diet Coke at the airport.

Eventually I want you to see me walk into Hudson News and know what I am about to do. Knowing somebody partly means being able to predict them. The creator gives thousands of people cheap opportunities to be right.

Pitching the product involves another kind of symbolic manipulation. In the budget office, the product manager presents PipeBurst as fiscal responsibility: fewer expensive emergencies, more money for something else.

At an environmental organization, it is conservation. Treated water should reach people rather than disappear into the ground.

At a foundation, it is an opportunity to address unequal infrastructure reliability. Whose service keeps failing? Whose repairs keep getting postponed?

At the mayor’s office, you had better align with “government that delivers.”

In the vendor’s presentation to a turnaround SEAL team, PipeBurst speaks the language of digital transformation. The pipes are old, but the intelligence is predictive.

The product manager is solving a problem too: which benefits of PipeBurst matter to this audience, and how should they be expressed? That requires a model of the audience, a vocabulary, and judgment about what will work. The “why” is being translated through another “how.”

DoorDash said the new pay requirement would mean higher customer fees, and moved tipping out of checkout to soften the impact on customers. Uber also moved its tipping prompt. Tipping afterward was still possible. According to the city’s report, average tips on those platforms immediately fell from $3.66 to $0.93 per delivery.

The report calls those changes “design tricks.” We usually hear that phrase when an app steers customers into spending more. Here, the complaint was that customers spent less. The city wanted higher required pay without a responsive decline in tips.

So the Council required the apps to bring tipping back into checkout. Since January 2026, food and grocery delivery apps must offer a conspicuous opportunity to tip before or when customers place an order, including a suggested option of at least 10%.

New York established a pay floor independent of tips, then gave the tip prompt legal protection too. In its own 2022 study, the city had identified interface changes that “discourage or eliminate tipping” as a way to limit the cost to consumers. What it once contemplated as an adjustment to higher pay, it later legislated against.

The conventional moral education follows: “thankfully,” as Curbed puts it, the demolition helped galvanize support for New York’s landmarks law. An enlightened public gave government authority over alterations, demolition, and construction on designated properties.

No longer would greedy developers sacrifice beautiful buildings to profitable uses.

Preservationists may want to look at a building badly enough to stop its demolition, but not badly enough to buy it. Landmark restrictions let them make selected owners pay for a public benefit. The owner pays the bills while “the public” gets a veto.

In “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek distinguishes valuing an end from being entitled to force others to serve it. He also observes that conservatives’ admiration for spontaneous growth tends to stop at the past. We are now living in tomorrow’s past! A neighborhood accumulates through ambition, imitation, commerce, and replacement.

Buildings house families, carry passengers, and give people somewhere to work. Historical significance and beauty give us reasons to value a building. But landmark laws reduce occupants and operators to supporting characters in a public exhibition.

This post is not sponsored, but I need no incentive to sing the praises of the soulless corporate chain. In the big box store, you need no introduction, local history, or promise to return. The role of customer is enough for us to transact peaceably.

I like my local corner store guy too. He has seen me through a few bad hair days, I know which Korean dramas he watches, and he has given me cockroach advice. But not every deodorant purchase needs to deepen your relationship with local culture.

A predictable errand leaves more time and attention for what you actually came to the neighborhood to do. The store can repeat itself while you do something new. I look forward to the day when fully unstaffed convenience stores are entirely unremarkable.

There are places you visit because someone will be glad to see you. There should also be places you can use without becoming someone to be glad to see. A database can remember what I buy without my having to catch it up on how I’ve been.

In his retrospective, Flores turned the missing precedent into part of the indictment: the legal establishment had ignored the issue; “NYCHA was abandoned.”

The dispute was about ULURP, New York City’s public review process for specified land use actions. Created in 1975, it applies to things like rezonings, special permits, certain housing plans and City-property dispositions. The Charter lists the triggers.

Flores’s “Fight for NYCHA” website describes ULURP as required when projects reach a certain “scale or impact” or simply “when projects involve public housing.”

The Charter says no such thing. Albany legislators have repeatedly introduced legislation specifically requiring NYCHA land dispositions to undergo ULURP. The current sponsor memo explains why: “NYCHA is exempt from this rule.”

ULURP does not mean “the public should get a say.” It means the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. Words mean things. One can argue on a street corner that redevelopment deserves public review, but a lawsuit needs to address the law.

Grok could generate more case names. It could not change the City Charter.

I worry about the childless accountants who do their jobs adequately and spend their evenings pleasing themselves. When their turn comes, will these institutions say anything in their defense?

“She cared for us; how can we treat her this way?” offers an easy route to sympathy. It also makes protection sound like repayment. The wrong should be identifiable before we check whether we owe her a favor.

Criminologist Nils Christie called someone an “ideal victim” when an audience readily grants them victim status. Being harmed is not always enough; being vulnerable, blameless, and doing something respectable helps.

His classic example was an elderly woman attacked while returning from caring for her sick sister. The visit doesn’t explain why robbery is wrong, but it does give the audience another reason to take her side. Someone returning from an afternoon of drinking has the same claim against being robbed, with less material for applause.

A reader unmoved by the treatment of immigrants might care about the treatment of nurses. Kuyateh’s biography can win her a defender without changing his mind about anyone else. The people with less impressive biographies still need protection after the exemplary case has been made.

Kuyateh’s patients and relatives may suffer from losing her. Those losses matter, but having no dependents does not mean your removal harms nobody. The accountant herself is there. She can lose her home, her safety, and the life she wanted to continue. If deportation circumvents protection against return to danger, nothing in that objection requires a grateful patient or a grieving child. She is enough.

At the end of the Gilded Age, Progressive reformers used police statistics and flash photography to scandalize elites with accounts of New York’s tenement squalor. They presented the slum not merely as an unhealthy building but as a machine for producing backwardness, broken families, and future criminals.

Jacob Riis’s 1890 photojournalistic exposé How the Other Half Lives became the canonical statement of this case. It helped build support for the campaign that produced the Tenement House Act of 1901. Fifteen years later, the ambition to regulate urban form widened from the room to the city: New York adopted the country’s first comprehensive citywide zoning resolution.

Riis’s descriptions of ethnic groups have become embarrassing. Unfortunately, his method has not: show respectable readers housing they find intolerably crowded, then treat a ban on building or leasing this cheap housing as compassion or social progress.

New York’s housing code still contains a section titled “Conversions to rooming units prohibited.” Single-room occupancies once provided inexpensive housing for people unable to afford conventional apartments. The city grandfathered the old rooms and banned their successors.

The demand moved outside the permitted housing stock. New Yorkers subdivide apartments, rent basements and fit more people into houses than the certificate of occupancy allows. The city calls these arrangements illegal conversions.

New York has always attracted people before they could afford a conventional apartment. Cheap rooms let them enter before they could afford much space. Prohibiting those rooms does not make newcomers richer. It is leveling down at the city gate: when poor people or immigrants cannot afford the housing reformers consider acceptable, the law takes away the housing they can afford.