The Death of a Once Great City
harpers.org
harpers.org
You grow up; you stop going out to bars; you stop bouncing between different groups of friends who introduce you to interesting new experiences and start hanging around with parents; you spend your life in nicer restaurants and nicer neighborhoods and you wonder 'how did the city get so boring?'
The only way you can reach a conclusion like "Boston ... which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors ... is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper" is if the last time you visited Boston you visited a college friend who lived in Allston, but now whenever you visit the city it's to stop in at a client's office in the seaport.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers...
"From what I understand, the shine is rubbing off. The cost of housing is ludicrous, and companies are fleeing to places like Arizona."
If you hid the dates and reformatted it as a reddit thread, everyone would believe it was written today.
"The place has a much different, more ossified feel to it than it did seven years ago."
Maybe cut out the bits about Sun, PARC, NeXT, etc.
Yeah, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but it's practically a New York tradition to publish essays like this[0] every so often - about why New York isn't what it once was (the "Why I'm Leaving New York" essay). Typically, it's an exploration of the ways in which contemporary New York doesn't match up to the New York of nostalgic memory. Usually, the essay ends on an ambiguous note, with the sense of discovery and adventure, but ultimately results in the author either returning to or remaining in New York. It's so common that it's almost a literary genre trope, with predefined criteria and stages, similar to the Hero Journey[1] concept first formulated (but not invented) by Joseph Campbell. And, like the Hero's Journey, the journey usually (though not always) ends where it started, but with the participants ("hero") changed somehow in the act of exploration.
The first[2] was Joan Didion's, which she wrote back in 1968. While she took a short break while raising her daughter in the suburbs, she's lived in New York City for 35 of the last 60 years and still lives here today.
[0] usually better-written than this one, but on the same topic and format
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
[2] Not necessarily chronologically, but seminal[3] to the genre
[3] It's influential enough that a recent essay on the genre even opens with a nod to Didion's work: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-...
Ok, lets suppose rats aren't dragging pizza home in the city anymore [1]
While the people that ran and frequented the "back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors" might be busy raising kids and saving for retirement, there's a new generation of people doing the same carefree shit we all did when we used to be cool.
What was Harvard Sqr became Davis which is now Malden.
I really hate this attack angle but its important to see because this is what serious local political candidates actually believe. If we would only build housing this would not be the case.
I don't think there is anything you can do about it. I don't think it is bad. But it makes SF a boring scene relative to other places in the same way Manhattan became culturally boring relative to Brooklyn. Or maybe London is becoming boring relative to Berlin. The wealth will stick with these established cities, but new culture will happen somewhere else.
Swarm?
According to this SF Examiner article in 2017, there are 9,800 commuters every day from the shuttle program. That's barely over 1% of the city's population.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/tech-workers-voice-support-commute...
Remember NYC has the advantage of being a unified city - the fractured Bay Area cities have way more infighting when trying to build anything.
These are the consequences of the confluence of money and the intervention of power. Idiosyncrasy, complexity, and opportunity arise from "The Bazaar." The combination of concentrated money and authoritarian government strive for "The Cathedral." This is factor #1.
Factor #2: You can only have "The Power of the Marginal" when you have a substrate which lets marginalized groups carve out their own communities. Social media and the democratized organizational power of networks paradoxically work against this by enabling the most virulent and toxic elements of society to engage in campaigns of "soft terror" through moralistic name-calling and infiltration of subcultures.
"The Power of the Marginal" has been replaced with "The Power to Marginalize."
http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
(EDIT: If you want a society where you have "The Power of the Marginal," you want a "Live and Let Live" society. That is how you foster diversity. Back in my grad school days in a southern backwater in the mid 90's, the Hard Rock crew, Heavy Metal folks, Punks, Rude Boys/Rude Girls, Trad music folks, World music people, people into eastern religions, Orthodox Christians, "College Alternative," people with pimped-out Harley bikes, bible thumping "local-missionaries," atheists, art school types -- we hung out with each other, sometimes went to the same cafes and clubs, and even had healthy arguments. If you want diversity, you need a "live and let live" attitude. It was easy then and there, because we were all marginalized together, united against the mainstream, and if we didn't coexist, there would be no place at all for us to hang out.
Today, things have changed so that certain factions of the formerly marginalized now have access to tremendous power. As always, power corrupts. As everyone's reach has been extended, the reach of the most toxic has also been extended. We no longer live in a "Live and Let Live" society. Some of this has been positive. I'm not so sure about the overall cost/benefit, however. Short term security isn't worth the price of long term freedom.)
I think this kind of crap is on the same level as Fox News hate mongering. Embarrassing.
I get the supply and demand laws but there comes a point where we have to decide of continuous and infinite growth at the cost of literally every other metric of importance to a city is worth burning it down for.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco
People keep saying this, and my response is: what is your solution? Rents aren't going up (solely) because of sinister plutocratic plots; it's because people want to move to New York. Big cities are where the jobs are, and Millenials hate suburbs, so that's where white-collar workers are going. Is your plan to forbid people from moving to New York so you can freeze time in the 70's?
People complaining about gentrification hem and haw when you ask them this forthright, and then try to dodge the question and pretend there's a simple solution involving rent control or millionaire taxes. But at some point you have to face facts and understand that, as long as the dynamics of the modern economy keeps favoring big cities, you can't stop gentrification without forbidding people from moving in.
* Progressive taxes on corporations. Use it to fund important social safety nets like healthcare. One reason people move to big cities is because the only modicum of security you have in the US today is to be in a place where there are multiple jobs in your profession. If you get fired, sorry "downsized", oops I mean "rightsized", oops, "restructured", you need to be able to find a new job fast or you'll end up on the street or dead if you get sick. One of the reasons people concentrate in large cities despite the insane rent is out of fear.
* Progressive taxes on individuals. A society that allows someone to be as rich as Jeff Bezos while his own employees are barely scraping by has failed. You should, of course, be rich-er if you work harder or provide more value to society. The graph should not be flat, but the slope should not be as insanely high at one end like it is now. A billionaire could sacrifice most of their wealth without losing any measurable quality of life. Use these taxes to lower taxes on the working and middle classes and to:
* Invest in significant infrastructure improvements in the urban core of mid-size cities. Thanks to automation, the balancing force that pulled people to spread across the country into small rural towns is gone. Without that, cities are the natural locus, but most don't have the infrastructure or amenities to be appealing or handle growth, so you get concentration mostly in the handful of megalopolises. Pour money into mid-size cities like Bakersfield, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Plano, and Des Moines. Fund the arts and other cultural properties that turn a city into the kind of unique place that makes people want to actually live there. Learn from Austin, Portland, and Athens. Learn from the slew of mid-sized European cities that each have their own character and feel.
Acknowledge that the US is never going to function like it did in the 50s and start building the social, financial, and geographical structure needed for it to be a thriving country in the Information Age.
I would rather see the current welfare system made more efficient before we start giving more money to it. Our healthcare system already spends 1.5-2x more than other developed countries for similar outcomes. Addressing that would be a good place to start.
I also find myself in the habit of asking questions like this, but I think it's the wrong way to frame it. Like many things in life, the question isn't "if", it's "which".
The money is going somewhere, so the question isn't whether the government is doing good with it, it's whether the government would do better with it compared to where else it's going.
I totally agree the government is a pretty inefficent system for improving human welfare. But I still think it's a better one than, say, Apple's offshore coffers or Bezos' plan to go to space.
The US government doesn't have to do that good of a job to do better than the average large US corporation.
> Our healthcare system already spends 1.5-2x more than other developed countries for similar outcomes.
Agreed. Health insurance companies are also giant corporations that would fall under my "tax them more" goals.
(And, if we want to go farther down the "fix all the things rabbithole", obviously eliminating corporate personhood and removing corporate money from elections should come into play.)
I also find it interesting that we have an abysmally low participation rate in local elections, considering how much people bitch about local governments not being able to get anything done well.
And finally despite having so many allegedly incompetent people manning so many critical local offices, the country by and large seems to function alright, which is perhaps the strangest part of all.
As for the low participation rate, well it is quite hard to vote in America. I always try, but it is very tricky.
The incompetence can be explained by the low salaries for the offices, and we save some of our lowest salaries for teachers. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it, get off your ass, and then become Elon Musk.
I don't know why you think its difficult to vote. You register when you get your drivers license and then show up to a voting place and click a button
I don't see why people outside NYC wanting to move in means people already in NYC must accommodate them. SF for example prevents buildings over 4 stories in the downtown area. I live in a much smaller city that mandated brick fronts on all buildings on the main street. And from one perspective it's petty and limiting but my point is, yes NYC residents get to choose what about their city is important to them and protect it. That includes preventing people from moving in if it comes to that.
The thing to understand in my comment is that I meant it very literally: the only way to halt these trends if you won't build tons of new housing is to literally forbid people from moving in; i.e. passing a law that blocks outsiders from becoming residents. What San Francisco is doing by preventing high-rise apartments is a lousy proxy for that which is making the situation worse: they think they're keeping people from moving to SF, but the people just move in anyway and price out the existing residents.
Anyway, my question was mostly rhetorical. Even the most strident anti-gentrification advocates usually stop short of claiming that people shouldn't be allowed to move in - hence why I asked it, to try and force people to confront the real issue. And if you did pass such a law, I'm almost positive it would be thrown out in court. This is not China; you shouldn't need the government's permission to move to a new house.
There is not enough housing for everyone who wants to live in SF to live in SF. Some people are going to lose. If it's left to market forces then the losers are going to be the people with the least money. If you do it randomly it's going to be arbitrary. If you let the government pick and choose who gets in your going to get discrimination as people's biases sneak in.
Every approach has advantages and disadvantages so SF is going to have to pick which trade-off it wants unless it builds more housing
When I then pointed out the skyscrapers in the city center I was met with shrugs...
You can get really damn dense while still maintaining a human scale. In fact, your city will evolve in a way that makes it more livable and gives it more charming character if you let it go that way. Trying to flip from one layout to another instantly is just going to get you something like Dubai.
They'll accommodate them one way or the other; the current residents might as well decide how that accommodation takes place. The alternative is: "hi, just moved here with my graduate degree and a job offer to do programming for a financial company. I make lots of money, can anyone rent me a place to stay?"
"Of course, my good sir/madam, please give me a moment while we kick poor people out of this 'rustic' condo, make a few adjustments to the rent price..."
Sure, there's rent control in NYC to avoid some of this. But that's because the residents never had a choice in accommodating/not accommodating in the first place: the developers did.
I'm rather tired of accommodating snowbirds from NYC down here in Florida during the winter months. But citizens tend to demand freedom of movement within their own country, so...
I'm not sure people contest that NYC can't do that, I think it's just considered a pretty bad idea that also runs against a lot of American ideals. For example, we usually try to avoid the whole birthright thing. And, what a mess we'd have on our hands if (for example) when Detroit's economy tanked, every other city had closed their doors and Detroit residents effectively weren't allowed to go anywhere else.
It's true that many well-to-do young adults move to big cities, but plenty are moving to 1950s-1980s era suburbs too [1], where they're living in cheaper, older housing stock and neighborhoods that are less affected by developmental pressures [2][3]. International working-class immigrants, subject to many of the same pressures, are following suit.
This system is really difficult for an average person (or family) to game. Most people are caught in economic pressure to go either where the jobs are or shift within the same metro to find their acceptable balance between amenities and cost. And anyone willing to take a chance on cross-country relocation to some second or third-tier metro is probably being taken for a fool; by the time they read about a place being a 'great place to raise a family' it's probably already experiencing rising costs of living [4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744401#16746390 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079269#17080117 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898200#16898850 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898200#16899874
I know the US has a ton of regulation in housing and health care but none of them seem to help with affordability.
Another thing to consider is to somehow discourage concentration of industry in one place. It's not healthy that there is a place that sucks up so many people because the pay is much, much higher than anywhere else.
Or building more homes and lowering housing standards.
I wasn't born until 1989 so I don't have an attachment to the 70's. I'm not saying it's even a problem, I'm just stating the fact that the prices going up on housing prices out the elements of a city that people complain are leaving.
> People complaining about gentrification hem and haw when you ask them this forthright, and then try to dodge the question and pretend there's a simple solution involving rent control or millionaire taxes. But at some point you have to face facts and understand that, as long as the dynamics of the modern economy keeps favoring big cities, you can't stop gentrification without forbidding people from moving in.
Actually I think taxing the corporations would be far more effective, but millionaires should be taxed too, especially the kind who keep non-primary residences in highrise buildings.
The simple fact is that the wealthy people and the rich corporations just take up more space in a city, period. How many low-cost apartments could be built where the 1%'s high rise suites are now, that are only occupied 20 days out of the year? How many buildings have floors upon floors of empty space because a company doesn't need the room but doesn't want to give up their exclusive plot of land in an in-demand area?
I'm not arguing for anything in particular, but the problem is all the current incentives are favoring developers to build expensive properties and living spaces in very in-demand areas, and it's causing a dearth of affordable housing that everyone claims to want but no one is ready to pay for or live near. You can't have it both ways; if you want the colorful and interesting aspects of a city, then yes, you must be ready to leave some of the money you could be making on the table and sell/rent to people who can't afford $2,500 per month in housing, or raise wages so you don't need a white collar job to afford them.
Again, I don't care either way, it's not my problem to solve. I'm just stating fact.
Edit: I guess the main thrust of what I'm saying is that cities know all of this, know both sides of the equation, but keep throwing up their hands at the plummeting levels of culture and "weird" that they all seem to want, whilist their lower-class residents are being evicted at insane rates to build more condos for tech workers like it's "just happening" and nobody knows why. They know exactly why, and if they really are against it, they should be pressuring their leadership to actually work on the problem instead of just blowing each other in the press for being so concerned about it while continuing to reap the rewards.
You've got a nice city. Tech starts moving in. Prices start rising. You have a few options:
1. Make the city an undesirable place for tech (via taxes, regulation, or whatever). This has the downside that it may cost the jobs of people who currently live there (and are some of the highest-paid people in the city).
2. Build a bunch more housing, so that lower-income people don't get priced out. This keeps the diversity of the city, but changes the physical characteristics. Some consider the physical characteristics to be part of the charm of the city.
3. Do neither of those things (note that both of them have their downside). This leads to new, high-paid jobs, no new housing, and lower incomes being priced out.
As far as I can see, those are the only options. There is no option where everything just stays the way people like it.
Especially people fighting to keep the value of their home equity up.
It occurs to me that this is pale nostalgic romanticism, and we don't really need cities at all except for commerce & trade. Most of our country's population was rural about a century ago. No reason we couldn't go back to that and still benefit from modern convenience.
I think mega-cities should probably evolve into massive business parks with no residential housing, and that collective mega-business-park can then pay for the services their employees need to access it (transportation, sanitation, etc).
It sure seems like a modern transportation system might make living in rural or suburban land more feasible for lower-income people.
But with that said, as someone who's been in NYC for 20 years or so, I have to agree that there's definitely something to his underlying point. It's just a fact that New York feels like it's rapidly becoming a place that literally just has no place for anyone that doesn't have significant economic resources.
It hasn't actually happened yet, the city is still incredibly diverse in nearly every dimension. And so some extent some of the change is just the poor/hip neighborhoods moving around, as they always have, as the artists go from Tribeca, to Williamsburg, to Bushwick, to Ridgewood, or wherever is next.
But like I said this era really does feel different. The author's central premise here is that NYC soon will have no place for anyone that's not economically elite. I'm not sure he's wrong about that.
Of course the era feels different, it's a different era. We have new architectural styles now, arguable better building and safety standards, and different relationships in terms of how we get around, socialize, and use and navigate public spaces.
What bugs me about these pieces is they have a gauzy, nostalgic view of the past and a pessimistic view of the future, but spend no time actually grappling with what the actual problems are that we need to solve. We don't need a return to rat infested slums and burnt out husks of cars lining the streets for people to smoke rocks in. What we need is for rents to be about $500/mo cheaper across the board. Manage that and the rest will take care of itself, but instead we get a lot of complaining about how we're not in Reagan's America anymore and we've lost the crucial gritty aesthetic that the authors grew up in.
This theme was explored quite a lot by David Lynch in "Twin Peaks: The Return;" where he annihilated fans' desire to feel nostalgic over the original show.
Why does everyone have to be in New York? San Francisco? LA? Boston? Seattle? Why does everything upwardly mobile, creative, interesting, or otherwise productive need to super-concentrate in a small list of super-dense cities?
The US has dozens of medium sized cities with affordable rents, affordable housing, and interesting history, and hundreds to thousands of smaller cities and towns depending on where you stop looking. Why can't interesting stuff happen in these places?
Indeed it did once. The Altair, widely regarded as the first quasi-PC, came from Albaquerque, New Mexico. The IBM PC was designed in Boca Raton, Florida. Commodore, one of the best selling PC lines in the 80s, came from Philadelphia by way of Toronto. Texas Instruments in Dallas was once a leader in the semiconductor industry (they still lead in some ares like DSPs but have fallen quite a bit.) Apple came from the Bay Area, so that's one out of quite a few. The rest of the early PC industry came from elsewhere.
Today that list of cities would be San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, and maybe Seattle.
What happened? It's very paradoxical. The Internet was supposed to make it easier to compete from geographically diverse locales by making access to information easier and breaking gatekeepers, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Either that or the decentralizing effect of the net has been swamped by some other much more powerful centralizing effect that has simultaneously been in operation.
>The US has dozens of medium sized cities with affordable rents, affordable housing, and interesting history, and hundreds to thousands of smaller cities and towns depending on where you stop looking. Why can't interesting stuff happen in these places?
The people who are in a position to shape the long term direction of a no-name city are still of sufficient means that they are capable of packing up and moving to some city that grew out of a suburb of SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston, etc. They don't do that because that's not the kind of place they want to live. Why won't those people point to the fate of Denver, Austin, etc and say "we're not going to compromise our culture and character in the long term to attract a bunch of rich people in the short term" and implement policies that boil down to "screw off, we're full"?
There are the same sorts of hubs in other parts of the world for other sectors: finance, manufacturing, auto, aerospace, entertainment. London, Shenzen, Detroit, Munich, LA.
I would turn that around and ask, why does everyone have to be kept out of New York?
If you live in New York, you should understand exactly why people want to live there -- how is it fair to deprive them of what you have?
If you don't live in New York, what business is it of yours if other people want to live there?
This place is never the same from one generation to the next and that will never change.
As an aside, I too have noticed our coffee improve over the last ten years.
I'd bet money that has to do with the Aussie work visa program that went into effect sometime around 2009. Quid pro quo for Howard supporting the Iraq War.
Our subways are fucked and something needs to be done about the empty storefronts in high rent neighborhoods.
This is not incongruous with the writers belief that NYC has lost its edge.
> We've lost some things, we've gained others.
What do you think you've gained, aside from safety and cleaner parks and better schools for the unaffordable, gentrified enclaves of Brooklyn?
I'm struggling to understand what Trump supporters would have to do with city construction, considering the vast majority of US cities are very left-leaning.
And, "in recent years" means that it started before Trump. So what's the point of the quoted line? "We hate Trump, and we hate what's happening to DC, so let's link the two"?