In Praise Of Gentrification; Verbicide Magazine, Summer 2008
I am most definitely a very new and very temporary addition to the Brooklyn mosaic but even in my short time off the 5th L train station, I've seen evidence of the gentrification that defines this column. Larry Livermore's reasoning for the inevitable growth and sprawl of riches in the city--any viable living city--is well supported without being cocky. A great read on the way to work this morning on the subway.
In Praise Of Gentrification
By LARRY LIVERMORE
In the artsy/bohemian/progressive/punk rock circles where I mostly hang out, there are certain things/ideas/movements that it’s assumed all right-thinking people will be opposed to. Among these are racism, fascism, sexism, George Bush and gentrification.
Hatred for the latter of these burns especially bright in the corner of Brooklyn I call home, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, since it illustrates an almost textbook case of gentrification: marginal characters like artists, punk rockers, trust fund junkies, etc., discover cheap rents and colorful conditions in a neighborhood that is, shall we say, down at the heels but situated conveniently close to the more desirable neighborhoods where the aforementioned characters typically conduct their art/punk rocking/junkiedom.
So like colonialists discovering the riches of the New World being squandered by natives oblivious to the worth of the gold idols or empty warehouse spaces scattered all around them, the invading army moves in, takes over, and remakes the land/neighborhood in its own image. And almost immediately begins to get outraged at the next wave of prospective invaders.
“Back around 1990,” a guy was telling me, “I was strung out, broke, homeless, and thinking about leaving New York City altogether. A friend told me, ‘Hey, I just rented this old warehouse over in Williamsburg, you can come stay with me if you want,’ and I told him, ‘Williamsburg? Hey, I may be down on my luck but I’m not that desperate.’”
Times have changed: Williamsburg is now seen as more desirable than some parts of Manhattan (aka the World’s Most Expensive Theme Park), with rents rapidly rising to reflect that new reality. Not unsurprisingly, developers have rushed to cash in, and there’s scarcely a block remaining where you won’t see one or more glass and steel boxes rising to dwarf the colorful (well, some might call them that) little three-story houses that used to characterize the area.
There is a great bit of disquiet about this. Not so much from Williamsburg’s long-established residents, many of whom have already moved on to escape the skyrocketing rents (or, in the case of those fortunate enough to own their own homes, to cash in on a real estate bonanza), but from those who like to think of themselves as old-timers, i.e., those who got here the year before last rather than last year or this.
I’ll have to declare an interest here: I myself am one of the new arrivals, and no doubt am considered part of The Problem by those hardy souls who’ve been homesteading hereabouts since the heady days of 2003 or even, God help us, 1999. As such I don’t benefit from the cheap rents that my predecessors found, and I suppose that I could be accused, by my willingness to pay them, of helping to drive rents up to their current exorbitant levels.
Maybe that’s why I’m not so troubled to see a host of new apartment buildings rising all around me. I mean, that’s how cities have traditionally worked, isn’t it? You have a bunch of people who want to live in a place where there aren’t enough houses, so some enterprising individual or company comes along and builds them. Eventually there are enough, maybe even too many new houses, the prices level off, and nobody finds it worth his while to build any more for a while.
It’s how, for example, all those highly prized and fabulously expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan got built. It wasn’t as though some great-hearted philanthropist thought, “Why don’t I build a bunch of cute red-brick tenements and four-story brownstones that a century from now will make great backdrops for all those movies that they’ll be shooting in New York City.” More like: “Hey, there’s thousands of new immigrants coming in every month and they’re desperate for housing. If I stack as many apartments in as small a space as possible, I could make a killing.”
The East Village and Lower East Side are prime examples: yesterday’s slums are today’s luxury housing. 40 years ago I lived in a variety of Alphabet City hovels that ranged in price from $60 a month to free; today I can barely afford to visit my old neighborhood; the places we once squatted run around three grand a month.
On one level, that’s unfortunate, because I wouldn’t mind living in that area again, but looking at the bigger picture, would I want it to be like 1968 again? Not in a million years. New York City was falling to pieces in those days. My friends and I were like cockroaches crawling over the ruins. Being smart-ass know-nothing kids, we thought it was hilarious to see the greatest city in western civilization being brought to its knees by the coupled forces of anarchy and decay.
Being the self-obsessed brats that we were, it never occurred to us to worry about all the people for whom a failing city wasn’t so much “fun.” The grannies, for example, who were essentially prisoners in their own homes because the streets had become so unsafe, the children who attended schools no longer capable of providing even the rudiments of an education, the approximately one million New Yorkers who ultimately just had to leave because life in the big city no longer appeared sustainable.
Today New York still offers many problems and challenges to those who want or need to live here, but it also offers commensurate rewards. Yes, the rents are obscenely high, the available space obscenely small, it’s often noisy, dirty, and nonstop in your face. But it’s also one of the most dynamic, exciting, pleasant and, yes, civilized places on planet earth.
And that, my friends, like it or not, is a byproduct of this much-hated “gentrification” you inveigh against. Don’t like all the new people moving to Williamsburg (well, newer than you, that is)? Maybe you’d like it better if it were still a crime-ridden borderline slum? Gentrification is what made this place safe enough for you to live in, and spare me your macho posturings about “I can take care of myself on the streets.” Unless you’re almost as old as me, you just don’t know what it used to be like. In fact, I doubt you can even imagine it.
Maybe it’s time to retire the concept of “gentrification” altogether. Cities, healthy ones, anyway, are living, breathing organisms, and as such they share a common denominator with all living things: constant change. Over time some areas will always get “better” while others get worse. Yes, there will always be excesses and injustices, losers and winners, but when you try to freeze a place in time, stop it from growing or changing, you wind up with a quaint but stultified, pretty but pointless little village like, say, Boston or San Francisco.
I say this even knowing that continuing development may ultimately force me out of the neighborhood I have come to love, because if it does, that means other adjacent neighborhoods - where I wouldn’t live now if you paid me - are likely to become similarly attractive. This notion of preserving whole sections of the city as permanent slums in the name of providing “affordable housing” for the poor has never made much sense to me.
So keep on building and growing, New York City. Even if it’s impossible ever to build enough apartments for everyone who wants to live here, you’ll become an even more amazing place in the process of trying. And for those of you who think it’s becoming “too big” or “too crowded” or “not like it used to be,” hey, there’s always Philadelphia just a few miles down the road.
In Praise Of Gentrification
By LARRY LIVERMORE
In the artsy/bohemian/progressive/punk rock circles where I mostly hang out, there are certain things/ideas/movements that it’s assumed all right-thinking people will be opposed to. Among these are racism, fascism, sexism, George Bush and gentrification.
Hatred for the latter of these burns especially bright in the corner of Brooklyn I call home, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, since it illustrates an almost textbook case of gentrification: marginal characters like artists, punk rockers, trust fund junkies, etc., discover cheap rents and colorful conditions in a neighborhood that is, shall we say, down at the heels but situated conveniently close to the more desirable neighborhoods where the aforementioned characters typically conduct their art/punk rocking/junkiedom.
So like colonialists discovering the riches of the New World being squandered by natives oblivious to the worth of the gold idols or empty warehouse spaces scattered all around them, the invading army moves in, takes over, and remakes the land/neighborhood in its own image. And almost immediately begins to get outraged at the next wave of prospective invaders.
“Back around 1990,” a guy was telling me, “I was strung out, broke, homeless, and thinking about leaving New York City altogether. A friend told me, ‘Hey, I just rented this old warehouse over in Williamsburg, you can come stay with me if you want,’ and I told him, ‘Williamsburg? Hey, I may be down on my luck but I’m not that desperate.’”
Times have changed: Williamsburg is now seen as more desirable than some parts of Manhattan (aka the World’s Most Expensive Theme Park), with rents rapidly rising to reflect that new reality. Not unsurprisingly, developers have rushed to cash in, and there’s scarcely a block remaining where you won’t see one or more glass and steel boxes rising to dwarf the colorful (well, some might call them that) little three-story houses that used to characterize the area.
There is a great bit of disquiet about this. Not so much from Williamsburg’s long-established residents, many of whom have already moved on to escape the skyrocketing rents (or, in the case of those fortunate enough to own their own homes, to cash in on a real estate bonanza), but from those who like to think of themselves as old-timers, i.e., those who got here the year before last rather than last year or this.
I’ll have to declare an interest here: I myself am one of the new arrivals, and no doubt am considered part of The Problem by those hardy souls who’ve been homesteading hereabouts since the heady days of 2003 or even, God help us, 1999. As such I don’t benefit from the cheap rents that my predecessors found, and I suppose that I could be accused, by my willingness to pay them, of helping to drive rents up to their current exorbitant levels.
Maybe that’s why I’m not so troubled to see a host of new apartment buildings rising all around me. I mean, that’s how cities have traditionally worked, isn’t it? You have a bunch of people who want to live in a place where there aren’t enough houses, so some enterprising individual or company comes along and builds them. Eventually there are enough, maybe even too many new houses, the prices level off, and nobody finds it worth his while to build any more for a while.
It’s how, for example, all those highly prized and fabulously expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan got built. It wasn’t as though some great-hearted philanthropist thought, “Why don’t I build a bunch of cute red-brick tenements and four-story brownstones that a century from now will make great backdrops for all those movies that they’ll be shooting in New York City.” More like: “Hey, there’s thousands of new immigrants coming in every month and they’re desperate for housing. If I stack as many apartments in as small a space as possible, I could make a killing.”
The East Village and Lower East Side are prime examples: yesterday’s slums are today’s luxury housing. 40 years ago I lived in a variety of Alphabet City hovels that ranged in price from $60 a month to free; today I can barely afford to visit my old neighborhood; the places we once squatted run around three grand a month.
On one level, that’s unfortunate, because I wouldn’t mind living in that area again, but looking at the bigger picture, would I want it to be like 1968 again? Not in a million years. New York City was falling to pieces in those days. My friends and I were like cockroaches crawling over the ruins. Being smart-ass know-nothing kids, we thought it was hilarious to see the greatest city in western civilization being brought to its knees by the coupled forces of anarchy and decay.
Being the self-obsessed brats that we were, it never occurred to us to worry about all the people for whom a failing city wasn’t so much “fun.” The grannies, for example, who were essentially prisoners in their own homes because the streets had become so unsafe, the children who attended schools no longer capable of providing even the rudiments of an education, the approximately one million New Yorkers who ultimately just had to leave because life in the big city no longer appeared sustainable.
Today New York still offers many problems and challenges to those who want or need to live here, but it also offers commensurate rewards. Yes, the rents are obscenely high, the available space obscenely small, it’s often noisy, dirty, and nonstop in your face. But it’s also one of the most dynamic, exciting, pleasant and, yes, civilized places on planet earth.
And that, my friends, like it or not, is a byproduct of this much-hated “gentrification” you inveigh against. Don’t like all the new people moving to Williamsburg (well, newer than you, that is)? Maybe you’d like it better if it were still a crime-ridden borderline slum? Gentrification is what made this place safe enough for you to live in, and spare me your macho posturings about “I can take care of myself on the streets.” Unless you’re almost as old as me, you just don’t know what it used to be like. In fact, I doubt you can even imagine it.
Maybe it’s time to retire the concept of “gentrification” altogether. Cities, healthy ones, anyway, are living, breathing organisms, and as such they share a common denominator with all living things: constant change. Over time some areas will always get “better” while others get worse. Yes, there will always be excesses and injustices, losers and winners, but when you try to freeze a place in time, stop it from growing or changing, you wind up with a quaint but stultified, pretty but pointless little village like, say, Boston or San Francisco.
I say this even knowing that continuing development may ultimately force me out of the neighborhood I have come to love, because if it does, that means other adjacent neighborhoods - where I wouldn’t live now if you paid me - are likely to become similarly attractive. This notion of preserving whole sections of the city as permanent slums in the name of providing “affordable housing” for the poor has never made much sense to me.
So keep on building and growing, New York City. Even if it’s impossible ever to build enough apartments for everyone who wants to live here, you’ll become an even more amazing place in the process of trying. And for those of you who think it’s becoming “too big” or “too crowded” or “not like it used to be,” hey, there’s always Philadelphia just a few miles down the road.