I chose three books from my List, all on the same topic: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, by P. E. Moskowitz, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman, and Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss.
Gentrification doesn't begin to describe
The phenomenon described in these books is usually called gentrification, but that process -- how it is commonly conceived -- does not convey the sinister, soul-crushing shift that has erased the lifeblood of major cities all over North America, and apparently, the world.
The two cities most emblematic of this change are New York and San Francisco. This makes sense, as historically both have been the chosen homes of creative and nonconformist people from all over the US, and both possess some of the most valuable real estate in the country. But no North American city has been immune to this, from Toronto to Austin, from Detroit to Atlanta, from Portland, Oregon to Burlington, Vermont.
Gentrification is too mild a word. Call it hyper-gentrification, homogenization, suburbanization. Disneyfication. The authors of these three books use those words -- and those were the words we, too, were using in 1990s New York.
I felt the trend of deadly homogenization keenly through the 1990s and in the early 2000s. The progress of that shift was part of what propelled me to leave New York in 2005 -- and if we had a viable plan, we might have left several years earlier. In a sense, this is the same sensitivity that had us feeling the rightward shift in the US, and the encroaching end of reproductive rights, before the mainstream seemed to catch on.
In 2004, as I was just beginning this blog, I wrote:
I've been ready to leave New York for a while. The incessant homogenization is really getting me down: all the chain stores, theme restaurants, the Upper West Side looking like Chelsea looking like Park Slope. It's something I've been complaining about since the late 80s, and it's only gotten worse and worse. NYC has lost so much uniqueness, so much character; it feels too much like anyplace USA. I find it very sad. A friend called it soul-destroying, and that's precisely right.
Although we were highly sensitized to this shift, I now realize we ourselves were among the earliest wave of gentrification -- the creative "pioneer" phase -- in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of upper Manhattan. I now hear those words in a different light: P. E. Moskowitz notes how the language of gentrification mimics the language of colonization, and how fitting that is, as both displace people and cultures.
Not to be confused with nostalgia
Thousands -- tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands -- of working-class people can no longer afford to live in the cities. They are forced into the suburbs or exurbs, where they are have longer and more expensive commutes, where they are isolated, where they lose their communities, lose services.
The ethnic communities that have formed organically in response to waves of immigration are replaced by people who can afford the out-sized rents, and whose expectations and demands align with privilege and luxury.
Creatives can no longer afford to live in cities. Music, art, theatre, acting, and all manner of creative thinking -- typically supported by having free time outside of one's "day job" or "survival job," because of relatively inexpensive living situations -- becomes impossible for all but the highly privileged. The very reason that so many millions have flocked to cities -- to create, to be themselves, to create themselves -- becomes impossible.
Exorbitant rents plus the shuttering of locally-owned neighbourhood businesses, replaced with national chains (the only companies that can afford the spaces) kills communities, and with it, the character of the city.
The city loses the very thing that made it itself.
This is not the natural order of things
New York City, to be sure, was always a playground for the rich. Ultra-expensive restaurants, luxury ticket prices, fundraising galas for the elite who support expensive arts and culture -- this has always been an integral part of the city. But parallel to that world were countless others -- cheap eats, theatre of every price and for every taste, poetry slams, underground art scenes, cheap clothing stores, used bookstores, dive bars. Lots and lots of free or cheap stuff. Gone, gone, gone. Distinct neighbourhoods with distinct personalities. Gone. gone. gone.
Finding pockets of affordable housing (often by living with a large number of roommates), inexpensive food, spaces where creative people can congregate -- be they tiny off-off-Broadway theatres, open-mic comedy nights, neighbourhood restaurants, food trucks, free museum nights, and a menu of options for supporting oneself -- waiting tables, tending bar, office "temping" -- this is why creatives flock to cities. This is why people without huge amounts of discretionary income can thrive in them, giving cities character, making them more interesting -- which in turn bolster the city's economy.
Without anything resembling affordable housing, none of this can happen.
Three books in brief
Of these three books, Sarah Schulman offers the most original concept and the most challenging read. Schulman offers a unique and fascinating thesis about the AIDS epidemic being an agent of gentrification, permanently altering New York's queer community, and decimating activism among low-income people.
From the introduction to The Gentrification of the Mind.
On the way home, these images were reeling in my mind. The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize oneself as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change.What is this process? What is this thing that homogenizes complexity, difference, dynamic dialogic action for change and replaces it with sameness? With a kind of institutionalization of culture? With a lack of demand on the powers that be? With containment?My answer to that question, always came back to the same concept: gentrification.. . . To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomena: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of culture and relationship, and this destruction has profound consequences of the future lives of cities.But in the case of my particular question, while literal gentrification was very important to what I was observing, there was also a spiritual gentrification that was affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their condition. There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.
P. E. Moskowitz looks at four cities -- Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York -- and illustrates how hyper-gentrification has altered each city -- and how it happened. He digs down to reveal root causes, making visible a process that is thought to be inevitable, but is actually intentionally created by humans, for their own power and profit.
From How to Kill a City.
The Michael Bloomberg administration rezoned large swaths of the city, mostly from industrial and commercial to high density residential. Developers were given free rein in these newly zoned areas. Most buildings were not required to provide any affordable housing, and in those that were, their percentages were low enough, and the definition of "affordable" loose enough, that they made virtually no impact.And so multimillion dollar condos fronted by twisted blue and green frosted glass have sprouted in Chelsea, in Midtown, and along every other corridor where the city has allowed height limits to be raised and zoning to be changed. Given the height of these buildings you'd think street life in West Chelsea would be busy, but the neighborhood is still largely a dead zone. And that's because these buildings, like many in New York nowadays, are not so much places to live as places for capital to grow.
Entire neighborhoods are becoming stash pads for the global elite who see real estate as a safer investment than the stock market. Often very few people are really living in these buildings, except for maybe a month or two out of the year. Chelsea is not even the worst: a New York Times investigation found that on a single three-block stretch in Midtown, 57 percent of apartments are vacant for at least 10 months each year. Absentee home ownership has grown by 70 percent in Manhattan since 2000. Even if you believe that attracting billionaires to New York is a good idea, it's hard to understand why these apartments are assessed at rates of one one-hundredth of what they are worth. Because of New York's tax code, a $100 million apartment in one of these new, super-tall glass buildings is usually only taxed as if it were worth $3 million or $4 million. Even mayor Bloomberg's more progressive successor, Bill de Blasio, has done little to change this status quo. . . .
I walk along tree-lined 11th Street (one of the prettiest streets in New York, if you ask me me), past Magnolia Bakery, where dozens of tourists perpetually stand outside to partake in their own personal recreations of a Sex and the City episode that aired nearly 20 years ago. I hit 7th Avenue and in front of me is Saint Vincent's, or what used to be Saint Vincent's -- the neighborhood hospital that everyone in my family made use of at least once. It closed down to make room for a condo development that now takes up the entire block and where apartments go for $20 million. Down the block was a good vegetarian Chinese restaurant that recently closed when its rent was raised from $5,000 to $25,000 a month.Continuing on 11th Street, I hit Sixth Avenue and then Union Square. One of the only open, European-style plazas in the entire city, Union Square was well on its way to being gentrified when I was growing up, but now it is essentially a shopping mall. If you've never been there, imagine a big town square like a piazza in Italy, but instead of government buildings and stately architecture flanking each side, there are stores: DSW and Walgreen's and Nordstrom Rack and Best Buy, to name a few. It's a hyper-capitalist's version of a stately plaza. This area did not naturally evolve to become an outdoor shopping mall. It took concerted effort.
During the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Union Square was a site for protest and a gathering spot for New York's art scene. Andy Warhol's Factory was nearby, as were famous nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City. But after New York City went bankrupt in the 1970s, a consortium of business leaders, including the Chairman of the Board of Con Edison (New York's main electric company), proposed redeveloping Union Square as an essentially private enterprise. A Business Improvement District, or BID, took over Union Square, replacing city control.
BIDs aren't unique to New York but they wield a lot of power here. Business Improvement Districts in New York often do the work that a robust city government would do on its own, planning streetscapes, cleaning up trash, and policing the area. But a BID's employees are nonunion workers and get paid low wages, and BID have no special laws governing them, meaning they cannot be held accountable to voters/citizens in the same way that a government agency theoretically could be. The BIDs are accountable to no one except the neighborhood businesses that provide 100% of their funding. Member voting rights in a BID are assigned to each business based on that businesses land value.
Today, Union Square is often blocked off by BID sponsored barricades, it's grassy areas protected with BID-approved netting, its security and clean-up paid for by the BID. Sure, thanks to the BID, Union Square is less dirty than it once was, but it's also no longer a public square in any true sense. "We're constantly trying to attract a specific demographic: young, moneyed consumers who know New York City from New York magazine... and who watch 'Friends'," a spokesperson for Union Square BID once said. "We can train these young consumers to think of urban living on Union Square."
Harlem's 125th Street "revitalization" has a similar story: a cabal of development-friendly nonprofits has worked to bring in chain stores and luxury housing. Meanwhile, the media report on the "new" Harlem as if its progression to luxury and whiteness is somehow natural.
The best and most painful of the these books is Vanishing New York, by Jeremiah Moss, a pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury. As Moss, Hansbury wrote the long-running blog "Jeremiah's Vanishing New York", which became a hub for the rage and sadness that so many New Yorkers feel at the destruction of our city. Of course that includes former New Yorkers -- because once you are, you are.
I loved Moss' introduction to Vanishing New York. I tried to get his permission to reprint it, but never heard back, so I'm restraining myself in sharing only a portion.
Reports of New York's death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city's undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you'll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep into denial, point to any trace of the Old Town and say, "There is New York." Yes, there it is. But it's only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing. Maybe it's that dive bar with the Ramones on the jukebox, or that bookshop with a cat lounging atop stacks, or the rare sighting of a transgender outlaw walking some West Village street in platform heels. It's like finding a polar bear, sweating on her melting chunk of iceberg, and then denying that the world is cooked because, hey, there's a polar bear.
Others quote from the long history of doomsayers, the many writers who declared the city dead. "The complaint that the real soul of Manhattan has already expired is a long-standing one -- perhaps as old as 19th century Knickerbockers pining for a mythological Dutch past," writes Bryan Waterman in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. That's true. But has the complaint ever been made by so many, so relentlessly, and with such passionate certainty as it is today -- and with so much evidence to back it up?
Novelist Caleb Carr called the massive change to the 21st Century city a "regrettable, soul-sucking transformation." Patti Smith told us to "find a new city" because "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling." David Byrne wrote an essay on the cultural death of New York saying, "Most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich." Essayist David Rakoff observed how "the town's vibrancy and authenticity" have been "replaced by a culture-free, high-end retail clusterfuck of luxury condo buildings."
Responding to all this, the counter argument goes: but it's safer! The streets are clean! And we have great restaurants! In the New Yorker Adam Gopnik summed it up: "New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a facelift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. . . . For the first time in Manhattan's history, it has no bohemian frontier."
I could go on with pages of similar quotes, all from the past decade or so, a chorus of voices from literature, art, new media, journalism, all making the same argument: at the beginning of the 21st Century, the city changed in what felt like an instant, and the change wasn't good. In short, New York has lost its soul. The place is dead. OK, "dead" might be hyperbolic. Is "dying" a better word? How about "comatose," awaiting a miraculous revival? Maybe this shift is just another phase in the city's long and ever-changing evolution. But who ever thought New York would have a soulless period?If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: hyper-gentrification and its free market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just urban change. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the weather, I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed.
How did such a catastrophe befall the greatest city on earth? It didn't happen all at once. After decades of scheming on the part of urban elites -- the real estate magnates, financiers, planners, and politicians -- who worked tirelessly to take the city from those they considered "undesirables," mayor Ed Koch really got the ball rolling in the 1980s. Rudy Giuliani brought the muscle in the 1990s. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 played a pivotal role. And then after the turn of the millennium, Mike Bloomberg dealt the death blow, a stunning coup de grace. Gentrification morphed into hyper-gentrification. Mainstream young people flooded in from the suburbs where their white-flighty grandparents had fled years ago. They came in droves, many of them (not all) armed with a sense of manifest destiny, helping to turn New York into a sanitized vertical suburbia. They carry a share of blame, the new arrivals who say they love New York, yet celebrate the city's makeover into an image of their Maple Valleys and Prairievilles, their Springfields and Massapequas, complete with hundreds upon hundreds of chains: Starbucks and 7-Elevens, Applebee's and Olive Gardens, Home Depots, Targets, IHOPs, Dunkin' Donuts and -- God help us -- Denny's. While it's true you can still find a pulse, here and there, along the thickly settled stretch of Manhattan, and that the city's soul still haunts pockets of the outer pockets of the outer boroughs, this book is not a Baedeker to those pockets. . . .
This is not unique to New York. Hyper-gentrification, the term I use for the force that drives the city's undoing -- gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism -- is a global pandemic, a seemingly unstoppable virus attacking much of the world. San Francisco is dying, maybe even faster than New York. You see it in Portland and Seattle. Austin and Boston. Paris, London, Barcelona, and Berlin have all been infected. The virus has spread as far as Tel Aviv, Beirut, Seoul, and Shanghai. And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture. While I speak to the global issues in this book, New York is my case study. It may be chauvinistic to say New York is the world's capital city, but New Yorkers are chauvinistic.
This is also from the introduction, out of order, but a very fitting conclusion.
We all have our own lost city. If we stick around long enough, we lose the city of our youth, our dreams and foiled ambitions. Joseph Mitchell, great chronicler of Gotham, wrote, "I used to feel very much at home in New York City. I wasn't born here, I wasn't a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here. Several years ago, however, I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn't belong here anymore." I could say the same today, but this book isn't about how we all lose our personal city. It's about how the city has been taken from us. It's not just the story of a death; it's the story of a murder.
