Prophecy fulfilled ...

Prior to the recession, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg was "fantasyland for luxury-condo developers."
In 2005, 130 new projects started and since then, over a thousand proposals have been filed with the local community board.
But that same year, a very special lady, so called "urban activist" Jane Jacobs wrote to New York Mayor Bloomberg suggesting he shelve gentrification plans for the Williamsburg waterfront. A year later she died.

“Even the presumed beneficiaries of this misuse of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of luxury towers, may not benefit, misused environments are not good long-term economic bets,” Jacobs wrote in her letter to Bloomberg.

Yet four years on, her prophecy is now realized and given the state of things, it’s unlikely that any significant development will happen in Williamsburg anytime soon. New York magazine takes an indepth look at the Williamsburg development catastrophe:

Part of what makes the present situation so dire is that it is still in the early stages of unfolding. There are already about 400 new apartments on the market in Williamsburg, and additional condos are completing construction every month. According to a study released last month, 2,818 new apartments will have hit the market by the end of this year, with another 2,766 projected by the end of 2010. On top of this, Fannie Mae, the country’s most dominant home-mortgage lender, recently implemented a policy requiring that buildings be 70 percent in contract before guaranteeing mortgages, thus delaying the moment when a developer can stop covering the taxes and common charges on a finished project…
The thing is a year ago, those inventory numbers would have been great news. Buildings around here have been selling out so fast that there didn’t seem to be an end in sight. Now, with the new restrictions, the bottom line is that most of the new buildings will have to be turned into rentals. The problem is that, for a lot of these guys, that’s just not an option.

However, one man's crisis could be another man's opportunity. Even though 2005 Jacobs' prophecy is very very powerful, Biblical prophecies are also quite telling and the Holy Book does speak of people who "rebuild the ruined cities and live in them" I wish I can be one of those people.