Sit And Take It

Juan Gonzalez had the details in the Daily News this morning:

The parking garages for the new Yankee Stadium – to be paid for with a $237 million tax-exempt bond offered by the city – won’t return the benefits originally promised to taxpayers.

The newspaper billed it as a “$tadium $ubsidy $hocker.” But no one should be shocked that a project worth millions to a handful of wealthy men will be subsidized by millions of New York’s poorest people.

Everyone in this neighborhood saw it coming in 2006 when they turned Macombs Dam Park – the home of the new Yankee Stadium – into a construction site that has since gobbled up the baseball fields and basketball courts across from the current Yankee Stadium, too.

We see it coming every day on trucks that belch diesel exhaust and we’ll see it summer after summer on streets clogged with BMWs and SUVs that push asthma rates higher and higher around here.

But this is no more shocking than the waste-treatment plant that always ends up in the South Bronx or the bus depot that always ends up in Harlem or the garbage-transfer station that ends up in every poor neighborhood.

This system is manipulated by wealthy bullies and the poor are easy to push around because they don’t have the resources to fight back.

The new Yankee Stadium didn’t have to hurt this neighborhood, but we knew it would. We knew a long time ago that the rich people would win and the rest of us would lose.

We now plan to do the only thing that poor people are allowed to do: sit and take it.

And we always knew that we wouldn’t be sitting in a park.