The Death of a Once Great City: The Fall of NYC and the Crisis of Urban Wealth
harpers.org
harpers.org
Instead of articles like this I'd love to see one about how to improve housing policy to accommodate a wider cross section of the population, or sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing.
The author does address this, and states he doesn't long for this part of the past:
"Those of us who have been in New York for any amount of time are immediately suspected of nostalgia if we dare to compare our shiny city of today unfavorably, in any way, with what came before. So let me make one thing perfectly clear, as that old New Yorker Dick Nixon used to say, and list right now all the things I hated about the New York of the Seventies: crime, dirt, days-old garbage left on the street, cockroaches, the Bronx burning, homelessness, discarded hypodermic needles on my building’s stoop, discarded crack vials [...]"
Edit: Added (Lower) Manhattan (which was the epicenter of most NYC culture 60s-80s).
I live in Flatiron. My neighbourhood has multiple experimental ballet, jazz, classical music and small-style theatre venues. And it isn’t even a hotbed for any of those things!
For the audience it comes with, New York is cheap. Add to that our strong subsidised housing programs, many of which have special vouchers for artists, and our comfort with roommates and lack of a need for a car and I think you’ll find a thriving creative scene, in Manhattan and across New York.
This is weird to me, because my social circle is full of Berklee and conservatory grads in these spaces, they all live here and are successful in their fields... and yet they have a better chance of their work being staged in Texas or Baltimore than they do here.
It does not follow that it is easy to get booked here. Of course it will be more competitive to be staged in New York than in Baltimore. But the pay-offs are higher. So you see quality concentrate with the ranks of the expelled replaced by ambitious newcomers.
I've seen a lot of mediocre performances.
To the author’s point, these are the default tastes of shallow wealth. You will find services of these genres/motifs anywhere you find wealth. Your point does not imply “creativity” but production and performance. It does not imply enlightenment but rather the very essence of decadence.
Are some of these participants creative? Naturally. These forms are plenty important/respected in culture and the arts, but that is not the perspective which underwrites their survival in NYC. This survival is based on their compatibility with wealthy patrons.
Realize that 1940s modern art, which is most associated with NYC becoming the center of the world’s art scene, was entirely a product of the working class.
A better measure of the neighborhood’s creative DNA is the number of cultural events in Madison Square Park, where just yesterday there was an LL Bean promotional event taking place next to a Brooks Brothers promotional event (you can’t make this stuff up).
In this New Yorker’s opinion the last time your neighborhood had a creative pulse was when artists and photographers lived there in order to be within walking distance of the (now long-dead) photo district, where all the labs and darkrooms were. How many musicians and ballet dancers live there now, when a take-out salad in a plastic bowl is easily $20?
The linked article is maddening to me b/c it’s so damn accurate.
Yes? And it isn’t a school, it’s a repertory. With performers—not kids—from a variety of backgrounds.
Next to the promotional events (which aren’t always horrible) you will find publicly-funded music performances in the park (I never go to these), lectures at NYU and the New School, and random local performers at several bars in the neighbourhood. (Though I personally prefer the West Village for jazz.)
I don't know if this is true. Hell, I'm pretty damn unhip and I even know a number of artists/musicians/writers living and working in Harlem.
In the 20th century, Greenwich Village was known as an artists' haven, the Bohemian capital, the cradle of the modern LGBT movement, and the East Coast birthplace of both the Beat and '60s counterculture movements.
Greenwich Village has undergone extensive gentrification and commercialization;[9] the four ZIP codes that constitute the Village – 10011, 10012, 10003, and 10014 – were all ranked among the ten most expensive in the United States by median housing price in 2014, according to Forbes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Village
While there still may be a lot of arts and culture going on in Lower Manhattan, it is unquestionably a pale shadow of its former self. Don't take my word for it:
David Byrne (of Talking Heads): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/new-yo...
Moby: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/03/leave-...
The author also addresses this point, or rather exposes it as a non-issue.
> One common belief, even in many liberal circles, is that the cause of these outrageous rents and prices is the very government intervention that was intended to ameliorate them: rent regulation. This notion might have some validity if, say, rent regulations in New York stifled construction. But they don’t. New buildings in the city are not subject to rent control and never have been.
Rent regulation help defines the price point of the new buildings, and many of the same tenants living in rent regulation are the constituency fighting for downzoning and against new construction. Rent regulation also contributes to mansionization and other reduction of housing stock.
At least we have as-of-right development of some kind unlike SF, albeit to ludicrously low zoning limits in many places. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people spend hours every week commuting under neighborhoods in Manhattan that are full of 4- or 6-story buildings when they should really be 20- or 30-story buildings that the commuters can live in instead (the Villages, I'm looking at you). It's impossible to tear down a building with permanent rent regulated tenants and build a higher one without massive buyouts; the buyouts raise the price for any new housing that gets constructed in its stead. Instead, you only get sufficient new construction in places like Williamsburg, LIC, Jamaica and the far west side is because there isn't as much political pushback from such permanent tenants in place.
I'll share one example, what happens if a landlord of an older / aging building filled with rent-controlled tenants wants to tear it down and replace with newer and denser construction? Can they just evict the tenants? If not, then that parcel of land is effectively unbuildable. Multiply that by how much rent controlled housing NY has (quite a bit) and it's not difficult to see how it impacts creating of new housing.
The remaining 80,000 new units of affordable housing would start to materialize with De Blasio rezoning fifteen neighborhoods for higher-density habitation. The Bloomberg Administration had taken another approach, rezoning more than a third of the city but more often “downzoning” neighborhoods to limit housing capacity and preserve their “character.” Unsurprisingly, the downzoned neighborhoods tended to be whiter and more well-off than those that were upzoned, but ultimately a net of 15,000 buildings and 170,000 housing units were added during Bloomberg’s three terms. This approach, as well, did absolutely nothing to contain rents.
If we want housing to be more affordable, we should just build more of it: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi...
And complaining about empty condos is silly. Housing services are a huge, underappreciated export opportunity: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/19/exporting_hou....
We have the technology to build more housing units on a given plan. We just have to make doing so legal. The very things that make NYC so desirable are (mostly) illegal today: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/19/exporting_hou....
Many cities suffer similarly: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...
I'm not sure I agree here, NYC's parks are great and seem to be constantly improved.
This still exists, in roughly the same form - it's called Baltimore.
Parts of Baltimore are actually extremely nice places to live.
https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...
Subjective speculation. Hardly thought provoking or meaningful analysis.
too bad the argument isn’t supported.
New York used to be a place you would move to Make It. Now it's a place for those who have already Made It (or their parents did) to live.
If you are from a wealthy suburb, if your daddy is helping you pay rent (or maybe your college education), then NYC is the place for you. If you are a dreamer or an artist, or anyone else with ambition without pedigree, then Detroit, Baltimore, literally any other city will be more accepting of you.
There are an estimated 550,000 or so illegal immigrants out of a population of a little over 8.5 million. Wonder how many there were in 1970
Wait so NYC should only be for the rich? This is exactly the problem the author is complaining about...
Seems the author needs a reality check. Real estate prices and population - from illegal immigrants looking to work for cash to wealthy foreigners looking to park theirs - keep increasing.