So they hauled Sheldon Silver away in handcuffs last month. The longtime Democratic Speaker of the New York State Assembly, quietly one of the most powerful men in one of the country’s most powerful states, has been charged with crimes that were stunning even in the standing sewer of corruption that is the legislature he presided over.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara froze some $4 million in assets belonging to Silver—but that still left Shelly, who Aaron Naparstek, the liberal political advocate (and recently unmasked author of the Fake Sheldon Silver Twitter parody feed) called “a walking human filibuster,” with another $3.4 million in leftover campaign money with which to defend himself. The indictments exposed a dizzying network of connections and schemes through which Silver and his confederates had enriched themselves. He stands accused of looting charities, suborning a Columbia University medical researcher into referring asbestos victims to Silver’s law firm in exchange for state grants, and secretly selling out New Yorkers to developers on issues that included rent laws, mass transit, and more. Suffice it to say that, thanks to Speaker Silver, New Yorkers today pay higher subway fares.

Yet none of it—not the plundered charities or the subway fare hike, or even the hoodwinked asbestos patients—is as bad as a handful of vacant lots in Silver’s district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and what they represent.

Silver, in his subtle, phlegmatic way, has always made much of what he is and where he comes from. It’s an appealing image. An observant, Orthodox Jew, he has never strayed far from the neighborhood. He was raised in a tenement on Henry Street, where his father owned a hardware store, and went to Rabbi Jacob Joseph High School, just down the street, where he was captain of the basketball team. (For years, he continued to play pick-up ball on neighborhood courts, where locals remember him as a notorious chucker.) He went to college at Manhattan’s Yeshiva University and then Brooklyn Law School, before winning his first race for the state assembly in 1976. He and his wife moved into a cooperative apartment on Grand Street just a few blocks from his childhood home, where they raised a family, and where he lives to this day. The coops were some of the twelve apartment towers known collectively as Cooperative Village, which were built over 60 years ago by the garment workers’ unions. Along with several other city projects in the area, they make up some of the finest public housing ever constructed in this country, splendidly well-built and maintained.

Others were not so fortunate. In 1967, New York City tore down 20 acres of dilapidated apartment buildings along the south side of Delancey Street, part of one of the ill-conceived, “slum clearance” projects that did so much to gut inner cities in the postwar years. Displaced were some 1,800, mostly poor, mostly Puerto Rican families, who were promised a chance to move in to the new public housing that would be built on the site.