Being a resident of Brooklyn, I’m quite familiar with sinking-gut reaction that comes with spotting the plywood barriers and angular iron beams rising up from the open pit of the latest luxury condo tower site (in case you aren’t up to speed, check out the website for Downtown Brooklyn Partnership to see what Flatbush Avenue will look like by 2012).

I’ve always thought I reacted that way because at heart I’m a proletarian, and also I probably distrust just how luxury all these complexes can be given the speed of their proliferation and construction, and, maybe, I’m also a bit nostalgic about the parts of New York that look old timey. I also don’t want my rent to quadruple just because one luxury complex decides to park its giant ass in my back yard.

But The Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff offers an interesting argument in favor of a tower plan designed by Norman Foster that got nixed by the Upper East Side’s community board and is set to be replaced by a new Foster design that seems aimed to appease the opposition. Ourourssoff seems to believe in the optimism of the new, or, at least favors it to the political wrangling that can impede progress; he accuses some of the opposition of using landmark protectivity really just to protect their own luxury views. By the end he seems to say that the tall glass tower would be more beneficial to those of us down on the street than the short, inconspicuous bronze box.

I’m not so sure I agree. Towers cast shadows. Even my reaction to seeing these renderings side by side was one of relief as I got to the new rendering. The tower frenzy that’s taking place in Brooklyn is visually exhausting. You can actually notice when a new shadow appears ten or so blocks away from where the tower sits. In less towerous areas, the new towers seem to loom rather than rise. They catch your vision at odd angles and by surprise from around the cornice of a more modest building relatively far away from the spire. Maybe I see them more as threatening because they promote exclusion and–at least in Brooklyn–tend to have leveled some affordable housing to make room for themselves.

I don’t want to oversimplify the situation. Perhaps there are merits to the proliferation of luxury towers I don’t fully see. I know they are a great alternative to urban sprawl, but lack of affordability and the promise of an impermeably luxurious lifestyle sully the social optimism they intend to purport.

The tower also just looks out of place.