This article reads like a paean to a place in the author's nostalgic imagination. The NYC of the past that he describes was dirty, filthy, and downright dangerous. I grew up there at the tail-end of that era, and it wasn't a place to glorify. What paid for this crime cleanup and quality-of-life improvements is in part the same wealth he pans. Not to mention that billionaire absentee ownership has almost no impact on housing availability for the average person.
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 NYC of the past that he describes was dirty, filthy, and downright dangerous
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 [...]"
...and yet, culture-wise, Manhattan is still basically selling and living on "the dream" created by the cultural output of the 70s and 80s. There is no real artistic or cultural activity in Lower Manhattan anymore - it's simply too expensive for normal people to live there.
Edit: Added (Lower) Manhattan (which was the epicenter of most NYC culture 60s-80s).
> There is no real artistic or cultural activity in Lower Manhattan anymore
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.
> 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!
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.
OP said there is a dearth of cultural and artistic activity in Manhattan. I was countering that with examples of numerous quality venues within walking distance of my lowish-key neighbourhood.
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.
Actually, my experience with these venues is that they don't care about local, available talent that's almost certainly better. The reasons behind this are up for debate.
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.
It’s all relative. But to say the flatiron neighborhood is a thriving cultural scene is a stretch. Is a ballet school for rich kids part of a creative scene? Is Eataly, a food court for tourists?
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.
> Is a ballet school for rich kids part of a creative scene?
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.)
Anyone who finds the cultural variety within walking distance of any point in Manhattan is comparable to a mid-sized city probably shouldn’t be in New York. (You’re overpaying if the experiences are comparable.)
Mind being more specific about where in Lower Manhattan you are referring? Lower Manhattan is quite a large space in regards to differing cultures, that further clarification would be helpful.
I'm not sure what exactly your question is, sorry. Can you clarify? My only point was that lower Manhattan 30-40 years ago was a vastly more affordable and artistically-inclined place. Just read the Greenwich Village Wikipedia page for an example:
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.
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:
Just moved after 11 years there. You aren't ever going to convince a New Yorker that it's uncool, so expect them to come out of the woodwork to defend it. That said it's one basic AF place. Beckys everywhere...
> sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing.
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.
When as a NYC renter it is impossible to live in near half of the rental housing stock at any price due to de facto permanent tenancy, this only pushes up the price of the housing that is possible to rent (the exempt buildings). Instead you get people in their 20s, 30s and 40s living in market rate apartments carved into multiple illegal bedrooms, places without a certificate of occupancy, illegal conversions and other shady situations.
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.
That's not even close to showing it as a non-issue.
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.
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.