Panic in Sambôdia: From Crack City Nights To The New Light

CRACK CITY, SAMBODIA: The photoreal present and the virtual reality future. A notable feature of the future is that the landscape is haunted only by vague human figures, if at all ... a feature characteristic of A. Hitler's landscape paintings as well, as art historians have often noted. Source: G1.com.br. Click to zoom.

Local merchant Maria do Socorro Ferreira, 41 … laments what happened to business owners who had their buildings expropriated and lost their businesses. That is what happened to the owner of a parking lot that Maria used, on Rua do Triunfo. “The guy spent R$400,000 renovating it”, she said.

Prefeitura quer que iniciativa privada toque projeto da Nova Luz: City government wants private enterprise to execute New Light urban renewal project, report G1/Globo.

See also

• São Paulo: Cracolândia Makeover Fails a Fact-Check?
• Cracolândia Candid Camera
• São Paulo Diary: “The Villa Madá Will Be the Place Pigalle of Sambôdia!”
• The Sidewalks of São Paulo: The Paulista Gets a Botox Injection

The city plans to expropriate 106 acres in the downtown area.

Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, New York, for comparison’s sake, involved some 21 acres, and years and years of intense negotiation with the local community.

The local community in this case is simply being demonized in the media — Globo is a major culprit — as an homogenous army of crack-smoking zombies and evicted at gunpoint by the fabled Tropa de Choque.

Typical of Globo journalism, some 95% of the report consists factoids plagiarized from press releases by the city government, and dedicates only a token amount of space to opposition to the project by local residents whose properties are being sold off for pennies, in offers they cannot refuse, so that Microsoft can have a nice place to work out of for very, very cheap.

It cannot even manage to interview a single person so affected. It interviews one person who knows of, and sympathizes with, a person so affected.

Symptomatic: G1 follows the city government — the incumbent mayor is polling at about 9% in his bid for reelection, trailing even Paulo Maluf — in referring to the neighborhood as “Crackland.”

The area actually has a historically consecrated name of its own — it is part of the Santa Ifigênia neighborhood, I think. But G1 does not bother to refer to it. It is if the New York Times made a regular practice of referring to the GOP presidential candidate as John “The Insane” McCain.

Longtime residents and property owners are now seeing themselves socioeconomically cleansed from the area along with the crackheads.

Not a day goes by without a “news” program like Bandeirante’s Alerta Brasil showing little kids smoking crack on the sidewalks in the neighborhood while waxing apocalyptic about the moral degradation of the city in comparison with a mythical utopian past.

Pure fascistoid moral panic campaign. Compare

• São Paulo Annals of Crime: “Crackdown on Hookerdom”

Notice the complete absence of crime statistics from this report, as an indicator of the dimension of the problem and a measure of progress or the lack thereof.

São Paulo crime statistics being what they are, in any event. See

• São Paulo: “Criminal Statistics Off By 13,000 in ABC”
• “Deconstructing Alckmin”: Books Cooked on São Paulo Bank Robberies
• “Resistance Followed By Death”: Truths, Partial Truths and Statistics

I translate, draft-quality as always.

The municipal government of São Paulo wants private enterprise to assume responsibility for expropriations of property in the former Cracolândia neighborhood, which the city administration has renamed Nova Luz (“new light”), in downtown São Paulo. The government is set to send the municipal legislature a bill by the end of August that creates an urban planning concession for the area.

“The former Crack City”: As if the city government had wished the problem away in the act of renaming the area.

As you read later on, the crackhead zombie armies still apparently rule the dark of night in New Light.