Comment by nihonde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nihonde | Hacker News Reader

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OK, but, why do people avoid leaving the confines of Manhattan and Brooklyn?

I had a car for many years in NYC, and I mostly used it to get as far away as possible. That liminal zone outside the city is beyond depressing to me. I've never been a huge fan of suburbs (even the quiet, tree-lined ones), but huge swathes of the areas around NYC are best described as semi-abandoned, litter-strewn, century-old, razor-wired-wrapped, pigeon-shit coated blight. And the means by which one passes through these areas are broken. The highways are perpetually "under construction", yet covered in potholes. The trains are crowded, dirty, late, filled with crazy people, on fire, etc. Half the cars are being driven by people who probably don't have valid licenses, and have the common courtesy of PCP addicts. Trashcans overflowing with rats scurrying around. Piles and piles of trash bags leaking toxic fluids into the gutters and sewers. And every ten blocks or so is an "am I going to die today if I walk near here?" housing project. (Probably you won't die, but don't use your iPhone!)

I'm sorry, but it's a disgusting mess and we can and should do sooo much better. I'm not someone who wants the world to be a Connecticut country club——in fact, I would almost hate that more. I'm talking about a civilization where people carry around a reasonable amount of shame and humility and build atop the nice things that others have left behind instead of accruing sedimentary layers of ill will and misery on their own doorstep.

(For the record, even Manhattan, and definitely Brooklyn don't meet my standards either. Tokyo. That's a far bigger city in a country with a failing economy, but is clean, pleasant, and orderly in every direction.)

Dangerous idea: Tokyo is that way because it's full of Japanese people. New York will never be that way because it isn't.

>Tokyo. That's a far bigger city in a country with a failing economy, but is clean, pleasant, and orderly in every direction.

The country may have a failing economy but it's also a vastly different culture to a degree that makes it hard to compare. London is probably the fairer comparison.

I'm not really going to defend Manhattan though. I lived there one summer--albeit in the 80s as a student when there was a lot worse things about it than today. But, much as I do like visiting from time to time, I'd never want to live there.

> The country may have a failing economy but it's also a vastly different culture to a degree that makes it hard to compare. London is probably the fairer comparison.

The bits of London outside Manhattan are also pretty rubbish.

Look, as a fellow 20-year New York City veteran, you can see in this city what you want to. You're clearly taking a bleak view on it. I'm sorry you've viewed so much of the city through this lens and been turned off by it. But this really speak more of your lens than intrinsic qualities of the city.

I agree with you that the educational infrastructure here is sadly lacking. And the highways.

I largely disagree with most everything else you've shared. Jersey City and East New York aren't remotely similar to each other - huge swaths of Jersey City are perfectly livable and lightyears ahead of East New York, which is notoriously one of the city's most challenged neighborhoods. Huge swaths of Jersey City are also downtrodden, but... it's an entire city. It varies up and down. East New York is just a single neighborhood.

Trashcan cleanliness is middle of the road - I've certainly seen better but I've certainly seen worse. New York is a far cleaner city than the stereotypes suggest. Some blocks are absurdly filthy. Others are pristinely taken care of and perfectly clean.

I couldn't disagree more strongly on your attitude about housing projects. They are not death zones. You're not placing your life into your hands by walking through them. You can use your iPhone walking straight through the middle of many of them and you will have zero problems of any kind. You're doing a real disservice feeding into peoples' worst paranoid fears about housing projects. Some have more problems than others. Most are filled with decent people and most are far more stable than reputations suggest. Some housing projects I'd feel uncomfortable walking through But most I wouldn't (and don't).

And so on. We could debate these perspectives forever, but I've learned quite clearly that you can take two people who live in this city for the same exact amount of time and find one who views it as a filthy godforsaken land of misery and poverty while the other sees it as an inspiring place full of passion, beauty, and inspiring and deeply giving people. Eye of the beholder is a real thing here. I won't fault your perspective but I seriously challenge the idea that it's some uniquely accurate perspective.

I, for one, couldn't imagine wanting to live in Tokyo over New York, no matter how pleasant it is (but I wouldn't mind better train service).

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, you had me laughing out loud.

However, there's something you're missing: just how dynamic this city is. And I'm afraid part of that is the Manhattan bubble that makes it hard to see what goes on outside of there.

Namely, you mentioned a list of neighborhoods earlier that matched the litter-strewn image you alliterated to here. It's true that many are shitholes from an aesthetic perspective. Some of the local neighborhoods also have your common element of suspicious, aggressive people who seem to pay no mind to tossing litter, etc. And Brooklyn drivers seem to have this 'Neglectful Psychopath' sort of persona. And teenagers ride around on dirtbikes, shuffling zombies yell and moan in line in front of the methadone clinics, etc. We can continue forever painting these sorts of images.

But these places were neglected for so long, with a poverty rate so high. Meanwhile there's a breakneck pace of change. You didn't mention Cobble Hill, which was a shithole, or Fort Greene, which was a bang-bang shithole recently, nor Prospect Heights before Barclays Center, unrecognizable and cheap a decade ago, nor (let's keep going backwards), Williamsburg with its empty Bedford Ave (as little as the early 00's there was little of what there is today, as I recall going there for music lessons). Let's keep going backwards: the East Village was a litter-strewn shithole where you had to walk in the middle of the street to avoid getting mugged (Alphabet City, I'm talking about), now you have multi-million dollar condos going up between aves B and C! Let's keep going backwards: Soho, and even Greenwhich Village?

This city changes, and that's one of the themes of the article we're referencing. Some of the areas in Brooklyn making a comeback were once where the wealthy specifically lived (some of most beautiful, custom-stoneworked brownstones are around Putnam and Hancock in southeast Bed Stuy where investment bankers are now moving). Now that the city's attracting so many residents, there's outward pressure to expand and finite supply of housing in which to do so.

Bushwick will never be a Connecticut Country Club (unfortunately, because then I wouldn't have to avoid walking on dog poop all the time). But it's becoming more and more an area like the affluent parts of Brooklyn (slowly but surely), which themselves have met or exceeded your comfortable little corners of lower Manhattan (where I also lived 10 years). Even places with 40% poverty rates have condos going up and NYU grads moving there.

In fact, the pace of change is so breakneck that DeBlasio got elected on a platform to protect those most affected by the change. And that's a constant theme of the City Council too. Demand is so high, the demand is pushing these 'shitty' areas to improve. Gentrification is a topic on people's minds and a source of arguments all day, every day here.

I'm going long on your detested outer boroughs: I've bought a place. And yes, in the meanwhile I have to clean up the garbage of my neighbors as it floats into my yard.

You've probably seen it but WNYC has a whole podcast series on gentrification and East New York in particular.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/neighborhood/

Well, it sounds like you are part of the solution, and that's the only way it will ever get fixed. When we say that a place has been neglected, the people who live there are ultimately to blame. A civil society is a bottom-up effort, not top-down.

Gentrification is a topic on people's minds and a source of arguments all day, every day here.

I grew up in the East Village in the 1960s. One of my favorite memories of Tompkins Square Park, when I returned for a visit in about 1980, was graffiti that read "stop the gentrification of the Lower East Side". So gentrification is a process that has been ongoing in NYC for many many years.

I'm going long on your detested outer boroughs: I've bought a place.

I'm with you in terms of where to live. I'm raising a couple of kids in a suburb of Portland Oregon, and it's infinitely nicer than the East Village of the 1960s. And, for kids, it's probably much nicer than the East Village of today (but I don't know for sure since I only return about once a decade).

There are so many attractions of living in Manhattan. But there are so many downsides. E.g. your neighboring apartments' cockroaches become your cockroaches. Their mice become your mice. The single 15A electrical circuit that powers your entire apartment is inadequate. The Hare Krishnas waking you up when they walk down the middle of the street, chanting at 4 AM. The week-long non-stop fireworks around the 4th of July. Etc.

C'est la vie.

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