MovieChat Forums > Broken City (2013) Discussion > Major plot hole

Major plot hole

posted 10 years ago by Captain_Woodrow_Call
3 replies | jump to latest

A basic idea that drives the plot in this movie--that an agreement with contractors will automatically pave the way for the destruction of public housing and the construction of high rises in NYC (or anywhere else in America for that matter)--is utterly ridiculous. A private contract like that creates no public agency approvals for a project. These days even far, far more modest projects go though literally years of studies, public hearings and pile after pile of revised drawings and plans--all mandated by myriad local, state and federal agencies. (It is BTW an extremely time consuming, risky, costly process, which all of us pay for when we buy and rent our homes or procure goods and services.)

In this movie Mayor Hostetler committed a number terrible crimes, but the result of his being an officer of a corporation that signed a contract for a project is simply that he had a conflict of interest. Moreover, having a conflict of interest is not by itself a crime so long as the public official recuses him or herself from taking any official action concerning a proposed project.

Apparently, the writers, producers and director of this movie have never tried to shepherd a proposed project through today's labyrinth of procedures mandated by public agencies.

[–] bek-12 10 years ago

Good point. But Hollywood always takes these types of short cuts... I see it in movies that depict teachers in classrooms doing stuff that teachers clearly are not allowed to do, movies about hackers getting into very secure systems in a matters of seconds or minutes (when in truth it takes days or weeks).

[–] Digital_Data 8 years ago

Hm, I would say, if you sell something from the city to yourself, it will not really help to get reelected.

Digital_Data
http://www.youtube.com/LiebensteinMovies

[–] Tandalai (69) 2 years ago

Private firms and corporations purchase public housing all the time, the private sector has been buying public housing projects since 1998, when the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) was signed into law.

In 2012, NYCHA began leasing and selling public housing to private developers. The leases included outsourcing the management of these housing projects to private companies.

QHWRA allows the Public Housing Authority (PHA) of each state to demolish public housing without building a new public housing unit, and the Faircloth Amendment (part of QHWRA) prohibits Public Housing Authorities from using federal funds to construct new public housing if the new public housing would result in the PHA having more public housing units than it did when QHWRA was enforceable (signed 1998, enforceable 1999 onward). The Faircloth Amendment gave the federal government the right to abandon public housing. The Faircloth Amendment is the Magna Carta of federal disinvestment. It allows the PHA to handle public housing however it wants, and Public Housing Authorities have been selling public housing communities and individual housing since 1999.

Private equity firms frequently buy up slum housing projects and squeeze everybody dry and force them out then either "gentrify" or build luxoury offices etc. The ex-President's son-in-law currently does that, Trump's own father did that, that is how the world works.

What the mayor did was not merely "conflict of interest", he knowingly and actively planned to strip low-income residents of New York of their very lives so he could pocket a few billion dollars. If he cared about his own people (he was their mayor), he should have used a hundred million dollars of the "surplus" $3 billion he kept taking credit for to invest in renovating the project. Instead, he strangled the city's funding, which undercut public housing, bragged about the surplus, and stripped his own people of housing for personal profit.