
The Death of a Once Great City - jxub
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/
======
jameshart
This reads like an example of the classic genre of writing "nostalgia for how
a place used to be which is really nostalgia for the life the author used to
have"

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.

~~~
raldi
On a similar note, this amazing thread from 1993 about how "Silicon Valley is
dead" \-- written not by a bunch of schmucks, but, e.g., the co-creator of
Altavista:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/bvE0Ka5nCnM/NAIOQnrEyCAJ)

"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."

~~~
tnecniv
> If you hid the dates and reformatted it as a reddit thread, everyone would
> believe it was written today.

Maybe cut out the bits about Sun, PARC, NeXT, etc.

------
justinzollars
> "San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its
> remarkable diversity"

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.

~~~
georgeecollins
I am not going to attack tech or the prosperity that it has brought.. but as
someone born in San Francisco a long time ago I have to stress that the city
has changed and lost a lot of the creativity that used to make it interesting.
SF used to be a place where starving artists and musicians could live. Now
they live somewhere else: Oakland, Austin, etc. The same thing happened to
Manhattan.

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.

------
acchow
> San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its
> remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially
> chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley

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...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/tech-workers-voice-support-commuter-
shuttles-ahead-programs-approval-sf/)

~~~
subpixel
That's still a lot of people, even statistically, and a weird, weird,
phenomenon.

~~~
klipt
What weird, weird phenomenon - employers providing buses because existing
public transit sucks?

~~~
haskellandchill
Yeah, that's weird, in my opinion, as a New Yorker.

~~~
valenciarose
I lived/worked in New York when financial service companies handed out car
service vouchers to those who had to work late (and to everyone at any
official event involving alcohol). That was equally weird and more wasteful.

------
stcredzero
_a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the
opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great_

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](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.)

------
forkandwait
Even if they have a point, this type of strident editorializing makes Harper's
impossible for me to read. "mausoleums for trump supporters"? WTF? (Ignoring
the dominance of progressive politics in Seattle as well...)

I think this kind of crap is on the same level as Fox News hate mongering.
Embarrassing.

------
huac
It's impossible to read this piece without the context of _Harpers doesn 't
pay their interns._

------
FussyZeus
I mean the shortest and simplest explanation is that the lower-earning people
who made these cities interesting in the first place are getting priced out of
their homes. The only people who can afford to live in New York, San
Francisco, etc. are white collar workers, who's other big feature is also
white.

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.

~~~
Analemma_
> 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.

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.

~~~
sp332
_Is your plan to forbid people from moving to New York so you can freeze time
in the 70 's?_

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.

~~~
Analemma_
> SF for example prevents buildings over 4 stories in the downtown area.

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.

~~~
sp332
Well not in so many words. But since prices are going up, you could provide
some kind of subsidy for people who are contributing to the kind of city you
want. It could even be as crude as a seniority system. It's not that different
from an income-based housing benefit system.

~~~
lovich
If you don't constrain the prices or increase as well then the prices will go
up forever and your subsidies will get higher and higher. Student loans work
like this currently.

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

~~~
sp332
Well, instead of companies paying employees money which goes to rent, the city
could tax those companies to subsidize the housing instead. That would make
similar amounts of money available but the city would have more control over
who gets the rent money. Unforeseen consequences abound, I'm just pointing out
that rent doesn't have to go up forever.

~~~
lovich
I don't see how that will prevent rent from going up forever unless you put a
cap on prices. Salaries in SF keep going up because rent is going up. The
subsidy would have to continue to grow forever. If you are looking to just
have certain groups of people to live there without concern for rising rents,
just mandate rent control instead of the layers of indirection

~~~
sp332
Yeah just speaking mathematically, that rent has to come out of a new
employee's paycheck. And if the companies are being taxed to pay the subsidy
to a different employee, that puts a cap on how high rent can be. Assuming
people are coming to the city to work and not buying a 10th home as a "pied-a-
terre" using money earned elsewhere.

~~~
lovich
Theoretically there is a cap on rent through the forces you are describing,
but we have no idea where that cap is and have yet to see it in reality. If
its arbitrarily high it may as well be infinite for how it affects budgeting.
Rent control will achieve the same pros and cons as your system but with a
known value that people can plan around instead of seeing just how much money
is going to be passed around in tax

------
peterwwillis
_" But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as
visionaries and billionaires; a place of schoolteachers and garbagemen and
janitors, or people who wear buttons reading is it fascism yet? [..] A city of
people who sell books on the street [..] street photographers [..] immigrant
vendors [..] bus drivers [..] driven businessmen [..] hedge fund operators.
All helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they do
to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable."_

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.

------
CPLX
I have mixed feelings about this piece, it is a little heavy handed and does
come across as the rant of an old person who is disoriented by change. So I
sympathize with those who are leveling that criticism.

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.

~~~
naravara
>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.

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.

------
sunshinelackof
Nostalgia is dangerous and the past isn't better simply because we remember
the good parts from it. We pretend memory is crystal, but we tend to stitch
together the best memories and even fill-in the gaps of what we forgot with
lies. It isn't comfortable to think about the past and remember all of the
things that sucked when you've got plenty to complain about today. When you
yield to nostalgia you forfeit your agency to make today and tomorrow better.
Suppose the past was better, what are you going to do so you can look back at
today with the same fondness?

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.

------
jshaqaw
Meh. I live in the core area the author describes. The retail situation is
frustrating but at least as much a function of Amazon as rapacious landlords.
And eventually the vacancies will force a reset of retail rent expectations
and things will normalize. NYC is a lovely exciting place. I’m in my 21st year
here. Sure I’m nostalgic for the NYC of my recent college grad days but really
that’s mostly being nostalgic of being 21 again.

------
api
As strongly as I advocate measures to combat real estate hyperinflation, I've
come to think that building more real estate is only a small part of the
solution.

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.

~~~
babesh
Its the self reinforcing ecosystem/market. For companies, you can find people
if all the people are concentrated in a single place. For people, you can
choose between companies if the companies are concentrated in one place. You
get faster exchange of informal information from people jumping between
companies. You have people striking out on their own.

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.

~~~
babesh
As to why the Internet didn't "solve" this. Not all things are virtual. Your
physical self isn't virtual. Nor are other people. Physical goods are not
virtual. You need to invent and continue to nurture equivalent virtual places
for formal and informal, accidental and deliberate interactions. Its hard to
take a heart to heart walk with someone who isn't there with you.

~~~
babesh
Is there any industry that wasn't and isn't like this?

------
tootie
This is a rambling bunch of "Get Off My Lawnism". NYC is still the most
immigrant-heavy city in the country. We still have all the museums, zoos,
parks. In fact, more than ever. We're still overflowing with artists and
musicians. We've lost some things, we've gained others. Yes, cost of living is
rising rapidly and it's displacing some communities. The median level of
coffee quality has vastly increased and homicide rate has plummeted. We also
have LCD screens telling you when the train is coming. And it's more prevalent
than ever for families to really want to raise their kids here and we're as
choked with tourists as ever.

This place is never the same from one generation to the next and that will
never change.

~~~
weeksie
Totally agree.

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.

------
weeksie
This idiot decries the building boom in Seattle while blaming high rents for
the problems in New York. Get on one side of the "build more housing" argument
or the other.

------
castlecrasher2
> In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years,
> smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for
> the Trump crowd to revel in.

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.

~~~
jcadam
Nothing. I stopped reading when I got to that statement. It's sad that that
the author felt compelled to insert his personal feelings about an
administration that hasn't yet reached its second anniversary into an article
about long-term economic trends.

