By 1984, for example, the city had acquired 60 percent of property on the Lower East Side by way of tax defaults and abandonment by incompetent or insolvent landlords. “Contiguous lots” of derelict or neglected housing were “put together to form what is known in the real estate business as ‘assemblages’ . . . sold for large sums of money at municipal auctions to developers who thus amass entire blocks for the construction of large-scale upper-income housing.”13 Careful management, that is to say perpetuation, of abandoned spaces and empty buildings was key to these municipal strategies of
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