Gentrification Killed NYC's Vibrant '70s Music Scene
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
Shout out to Danceteria and CBGBs! Memories of the Tom Tom Club's hit, "Genius of Love". Mariah Carey used it in her "Fantasy" song in 1995.
Gentrification seems to be a negative way of saying these areas are returning to the norm? The parts of these cities associated with being poor and blighted haven’t always been that way. Why would anyone expect or want that to continue indefinitely?
Appeals to keeping a music/food culture fall somewhat flat to my ears when you just look at pictures of these areas or crime statistics of those periods.
Gentrification refers specifically to this displacement, and it shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is considered negative. No-one likes to have to move.
It’s also an effect of how the housing market works almost anywhere, so it’s not so easy to imagine an alternative within these market economies—a challenge the article doesn’t really touch upon.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/01/22/affordable-housing-lotter...
? Some people think it is not a good thing to give people a preference to stay in the neighborhood they are in because this entrenches racial segregation.
[0] https://www.vox.com/22629826/gentrification-definition-housi...
Saying two concepts are being conflated without explaining the differences sounds a bit... pedant ? And it is because from what I can read, gentrification is when richer people arrive in a place. No wonder why people conflate it with rising prices and displacement of the poor, this is just the "natural" consequence in a market economy where housing is a commodity. Sure, you can (should!) have a policy to mitigate that problem but if you don't, as is usual, it just happens.
Is it possible got some of the existing residents to be partly responsible for undesirable conditions? If so, then displacing them seems like a necessary component.
Note that I specified “some” residents, and “partly” responsible. A mechanism to cleanly identify and displace only them seems difficult to implement.
The problem with this analysis is that it prioritizes physical locations and comfortable people over, well, pain?
I get that its weird, but it appears as if "society/culture" whatnot has a lot of trouble paying attention to pain unless expressed through fun art.
So what people are perhaps subconsciously lamenting is the possibility of really changing things for a lot of people because our focus is at an interesting place being bulldozed by "the rich." Again.
If you want art in a capitalist society, the options are to make it cheaper or to give it money. The cheapest places to live and work in a city are also the least desirable.
I'd just add that gentrification of cities has been pretty selective overall. There are a ton of cities that haven't really gentrified or that have gentrified very narrowly (e.g. Detroit) in the US. One of the things that has led to housing affordability problems in that the mostly young professional influx to cities has mostly been to a fairly small selection of cities and has happened over the course of just a couple of decades.
White flight, however, is entirely just about white people just wanting to get away from black people.
Redlining was one of FDR's racist policies. The resulting non-white areas were cheaper and became cheaper still than white ones for many reasons. Under LBJ, redlining was finally made illegal. Then the threat of declining property values due to "darkening" of neighborhoods could be used to clear out white neighborhoods and buy up real estate at bargain prices! That's white flight.
It's a little more complicated than "I don't want to be near that person on the bus."
White people were living in cities close to Black people for a long time - they suddenly decided they didn't like it?
If the answer is that they suddenly started allowing Black people to buy next to White people then how would moving to the suburbs help? I mean, we can no longer redline in the city but when can still redline in the suburb county?
I don't want to overstate it - some part of it clearly had to do with not wanting to live next to Black people. Some part was clearly not caring for the riots happening contemporaneously. I just think there was more going on.
I've talked to my Dad about house buying in that period in the past and he mentioned places in the city that they almost bought (generally he talks about one place in the city ruefully as it's price doubled after every sale) and the places in the suburbs that they ultimately did purchase. If they settled on a detached house with a yard in the suburbs because there were only white people in the neighborhood (which was largely though not entirely true when I grew up ) he (obviously I suppose) never mentioned that. The main impression I did get was that he valued detached and yard so highly that the places they did buy seemed very cheap.
I'm living in a row home in the city and I can sort of see how he must have felt. I don't really want those things that badly but the places in the city that are detached with a yard are out of my price range. A reasonable price for that - especially if the things you get from living close to city center didn't catch my fancy - would be very compelling.
As I understand it white flight criticizes that white people (at a population level, not each white person obviously) displaying behavior that suggests that they don't want to live in a multi-cultural society. Alternatively, white flight might be a criticism of defacto segregation either due to redlining or due to minorities being priced out of white neighborhoods.
Gentrification refers to the residents of areas that are low cost and low income being priced out by an influx of more wealthy residents. It's also used to refer to development designed to cause that influx. Race is only a factor to the degree that wealth tends to correlate with race in the US.
Not gentrification which is at best a description of one of the many effects of high housing costs.
source: professional urban planners at the time
But if you solve that you may find that you have an additional five million families far from the area, out of state, even out of country that would also like to live there. At some point you can't satisfy everyone, or the Bay Area wouldn't be the Bay Area anymore and it would more resemble New York West.
nonsense like "oh maybe another five million would want to come here" is not only distracting, but bordering on cruel denial.
But, we have such a supply problem (in popular US metro areas) that prices continue to go up, even when we add capacity.
In my immediate area, there is very little SFH stock being added - it's almost exclusively large THs and rental apartments (but not condos).
The apartments rent for "luxury" prices ($2500-$3500+/month) but are just generic 1-2 bedroom flats without any true luxury features.
The THs are "near-luxury" - better than "builder grade" finishes, but nothing special either. And sell for $800-$1.2 million (for a typical 3-bed, 1-2 garage, 2500sqft floorplan).
This doesn't apply to housing at all, because the landlord would simply price in all positive externalities, such as the free road infrastructure mentioned above. The "free shit" would go straight into the pocket of the landlord, which would stimulate supply and discourage demand. The problem is that these places are constrained by geographics, local politics and the willingness of previous land owners to move out so you can't just build more.
This isn't really true in housing. Housing is not a market commodity, it's not priced primarily via supply or demand. Housing is priced based on comparables, quite literally, what is the most expensive thing that sold recently, and how close do we compare to that.
In this way, building a fancy new condo building will literally raise prices, even if the number of people remain constant, and even if it "increases the number of the units in the area", because now pricing comparables will get to take the new condo's higher pricing into effect, and things like comparables and federal interest rates have a much higher effect on sales price than traditional supply or demand.
To be clear, this is NOT an anti-build argument, we need more housing, the only way to get more is to build it. We just need to be mindful of the real-world consequences of it, new luxury condo construction creates a form of financial "pollution" into that area, and all nearby housing stock will absorb that pollution in higher prices.
This is something anyone who cares about affordable housing needs to understand, and plan for.
Because otherwise prices could never decline (because comparable could never decline) - but we know that price drops do occur.
The biggest issue is that when prices are increasing year over year, it can be hard to tease out that "prices would have been X% higher instead of only Y% if Z, G, and B hadn't happened".
Or another way to put it - if you overbuild; prices will drop, because nobody will buy/rent a crappier house/unit right next to a nicer one when both are on the market for the same price - the crappier one has to drop price until competitive, or sit empty. And sure, some people will allow it to sit empty for some time, but eventually carrying costs eat it alive.
If you're going to make a claim this strong, you really should provide a better supporting argument.
> new luxury condo construction creates a form of financial "pollution"
One thing about "luxury" is it's another word for "exclusive." That is relevant because if you flooded an area with "luxury" housing, then the features that define "luxury" would have to change.
One can easily see this has happened as buildings that were "luxury" in the 1960s are (unless they have undergone wholesale renovation) no longer considered "luxury." (Two of my favorite luxury amenities are indoor plumbing and A/C.)
One can also observe this across American cities. Some "luxury" apartments in NYC are not very expensive in other cities, because the supply & demand are not as out of balance.
Not sure if your comment applies here.
Places like CBGB's held on until the 2000s. Working class people could still affordably live in most places in the city until then as well.
I lived in NYC for a summer in the mid-80s. I never set foot anywhere below about 90th in Manhattan.
Compared to global cities, American cities are woefully under-built and underutilized. 70s white-flight, interstates and inner cities made cities the place for poor people. As things normalize and as young people return to cities, this anomaly is beginning to resolve itself.
This is a great thing for the poor who lived there. They can sell their suddenly expensive land make a big buck. Except, they never owned the land they lived on. They never purchased even so much as an apartment when the prices were rock bottom. Now they don't have any assets to liquidate.
This highlights the key enemies of poor people. Not yuppies or gentrification, but instead.
1. Slumlords - you couldn't have owned cuz they won't sell. You can't built because of horrible housing policy.
2. Bad education and cultural aversion to investing - you could have owned, but you never bought.
3. Bad Public transport - makes the inevitable displacement be a zero sum game.
Don't hate the yuppies who are being forced move to cities to work for companies there. Blame the city for limiting their local populations ability to make money of an a great opportunity.
What about neighborhood character though? Well, what about it. Every neighborhood's character has changed through the generation. The 'my suburb will be the same in 50 years' mentality is a uniquely recent take from American suburbia, and is already being proven wrong as the youth abandons them and maintenence costs are picking up.
2 - Poor people can't invest because they have no wealth... But you are correct in that people are intentionally not taught to think this way. 'The poor' (people) generally aren't dumb enough that they wouldn't buy a house if they could. In other places where renting is more popular it's because renting is a safer bet.
3 - Good transport would be nice, but without solving underlying inequalities it may make the problem worse (yuppies can commute easier and outprice people)
1. Neighborhood is old, run-down, inexpensive (for numerous reasons)
2. Young professionals (usually white) start moving in to save money
3. Investors/developers notice the trend and start rebuilding/redeveloping at a faster rate
4. The end result is what's frequently perceived as a bland upper-middle-class neighborhood.
Somewhere between 2 and 3, the previous residents are driven out by price increases. They take their culture with them. Between that loss of diversity and zoning restrictions (typical 5-over-2 building pattern), the result usually is pretty bland (IMO).
Also, the Hip Hop scene is alive and well in NYC, maybe just not so much in Manhattan anymore.
EDM, DJs etc are doing just fine despite these factors as well
I’ve been to a lot of cities in various time periods and almost nobody in any of them seems cognitively acute enough to recognize this
This seems to benefit the landed gentry as the squabbling they cause from their gambles on the highest rent and ownership prices possible completely exempts them from criticism
(In this model it draws the line at renters who offer an even higher rent to close faster, since there tends to always be units available at the offered price.)
Non-productive costs are a leech on society.
For starters, some of the more ambitious punk bands became New Wave: Wire went from raw punk to brilliant new wave, and even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols went on to form Public Image Limited.
> the New Wave scene was created mostly by middle- to upper-class white musicians ... after graduating from private art colleges
Guess the author has some weird beef with the Talking Heads, who went to RISD?
Also one of the first punk bands, the Ramones, were essentially a bunch of white kids from Ridgewood, Queens, which is pretty suburban itself, let's be honest.
There's some I agree with, but all in all, kind of a meh musical take from a non-cultural socialist mag.
That backs what the article is saying. As punk became more settled and palatable to more people (musicians learned to play their instruments?) first wave punk turned into new wave music.
> Guess the author has some weird beef with the Talking Heads, who went to RISD?
Note that's a college. In the 70s, before college became the new high school. That's fairly upper-middle class. Devo and R.E.M. also met in college.
> the Ramones, were essentially a bunch of white kids from Ridgewood, Queens, which is pretty suburban itself
The Ramones started as a high school garage band in Forrest Hills, Queens (also the home of Spider Man!). Every kid goes to high school, unlike college in the 70s. And I'd call it urban even though it has some greenery.
That said, some things cannot be tamed. Even when Bruce Springsteen covers them, Suicide is still raw post-punk from before there was post-punk. And I think that's where the author's analogy really breaks down - all of the many examples that don't at all parallel gentrification.
I wasn't talking about college as a marker of class. I was referring to the quote "graduating from private art colleges that had prepared them to work in the culture industry". Private art colleges are way fewer in number than college in general, and off the top of my head, I only know of Talking Heads as a new wave band coming from a private art college (Rhode Island School of Design). It's so specific, I wonder why the author didn't name the Talking Heads specifically. (I checked, and Devo and REM didn't go to art colleges.)
> The Ramones started as a high school garage band in Forrest Hills, Queens
Ahh, I misremembered the particular nabe. But from the NYC perspective, that's still the suburbs. I lived all over NYC for almost twenty years. Good place to raise a family, and a bit boring. Not many subway lines, thanks to Robert Moses, so it's car-heavy, which is part of why it's suburban. Just because it's in NYC city limits doesn't make it urban. And it was probably similar when the Ramones were there.