7 ms·

The Death of a Once Great City

53 points by jxub 8y ago

castlecrasher2 8y ago
> 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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  DC in particular is left-leaning. And, "in recent years" means that it started before Trump. So what's the point of the quoted line? "We hate Trump, and we hate what's happening to DC, so let's link the two"?
- jcadam 8y ago
  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.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  It's like they have to mention Trump to get the article approved for publication. It's like in a communist country, you could be writing about interior design but you better stick " glory to the people's party!" in there to make sure censors approve it quickly.
- pnathan 8y ago
  DC overwhelmingly voted for HRC. I think it was something crazy like 98%.
FussyZeus 8y ago
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.
- haskellandchill 8y ago
  Do we get to decide?
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Yes, but not as easily or as obviously as people would like. You've got a nice city. Tech starts moving in. Prices start rising. You have a few options: 1. Make the city an undesirable place for tech (via taxes, regulation, or whatever). This has the downside that it may cost the jobs of people who currently live there (and are some of the highest-paid people in the city). 2. Build a bunch more housing, so that lower-income people don't get priced out. This keeps the diversity of the city, but changes the physical characteristics. Some consider the physical characteristics to be part of the charm of the city. 3. Do neither of those things (note that both of them have their downside). This leads to new, high-paid jobs, no new housing, and lower incomes being priced out. As far as I can see, those are the only options. There is no option where everything just stays the way people like it.
    - crdoconnor 8y ago
      >Some consider the physical characteristics to be part of the charm of the city. Especially people fighting to keep the value of their home equity up.
      - FussyZeus 8y ago
        Point of order: the value of their property was already very high and going up when the changes (tech industry, finance, whatever) began happening, what they're fighting to keep going is the growth in that value.
justinzollars 8y ago
> "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 8y ago
  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.
jameshart 8y ago
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.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > 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" Yeah, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but it's practically a New York tradition to publish essays like this[0] every so often - about why New York isn't what it once was (the "Why I'm Leaving New York" essay). Typically, it's an exploration of the ways in which contemporary New York doesn't match up to the New York of nostalgic memory. Usually, the essay ends on an ambiguous note, with the sense of discovery and adventure, but ultimately results in the author either returning to or remaining in New York. It's so common that it's almost a literary genre trope, with predefined criteria and stages, similar to the Hero Journey[1] concept first formulated (but not invented) by Joseph Campbell. And, like the Hero's Journey, the journey usually (though not always) ends where it started, but with the participants ("hero") changed somehow in the act of exploration. The first[2] was Joan Didion's, which she wrote back in 1968. While she took a short break while raising her daughter in the suburbs, she's lived in New York City for 35 of the last 60 years and still lives here today. [0] usually better-written than this one, but on the same topic and format [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey [2] Not necessarily chronologically, but seminal[3] to the genre [3] It's influential enough that a recent essay on the genre even opens with a nod to Didion's work: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-to-Andrew-Sullivan-some-writers-leave-behind-letters-when-they-leave-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-...
stcredzero 8y ago
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 8y ago
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.
acchow 8y ago
> 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-commuter-shuttles-ahead-programs-approval-sf/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/tech-workers-voice-support-commute...
- ciscoriordan 8y ago
  That's the line that made me give up on the article. The author twists the truth to fit his narrative.
- subpixel 8y ago
  That's still a lot of people, even statistically, and a weird, weird, phenomenon.
  - klipt 8y ago
    What weird, weird phenomenon - employers providing buses because existing public transit sucks?
    - haskellandchill 8y ago
      Yeah, that's weird, in my opinion, as a New Yorker.
      - klipt 8y ago
        I wish the public transit in the Bay Area were better, but given that it does suck, I'm glad the buses exist. Remember NYC has the advantage of being a unified city - the fractured Bay Area cities have way more infighting when trying to build anything.
      - valenciarose 8y ago
        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.
tootie 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- throwaway427 8y ago
  > This place is never the same from one generation to the next and that will never change. This is not incongruous with the writers belief that NYC has lost its edge. > We've lost some things, we've gained others. What do you think you've gained, aside from safety and cleaner parks and better schools for the unaffordable, gentrified enclaves of Brooklyn?
huac 8y ago
It's impossible to read this piece without the context of Harpers doesn't pay their interns.
api 8y ago
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.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >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? The people who are in a position to shape the long term direction of a no-name city are still of sufficient means that they are capable of packing up and moving to some city that grew out of a suburb of SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston, etc. They don't do that because that's not the kind of place they want to live. Why won't those people point to the fate of Denver, Austin, etc and say "we're not going to compromise our culture and character in the long term to attract a bunch of rich people in the short term" and implement policies that boil down to "screw off, we're full"?
weeksie 8y ago
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.
joeldg 8y ago
the byline should be "an author ages and realizes the world has changed around him"
CPLX 8y ago
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 8y ago
  >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.
peterwwillis 8y ago
"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.
sunshinelackof 8y ago
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 8y ago
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.

53 points by jxub 8y ago

> 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.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
DC in particular is left-leaning. And, "in recent years" means that it started before Trump. So what's the point of the quoted line? "We hate Trump, and we hate what's happening to DC, so let's link the two"?
jcadam 8y ago
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.
rdtsc 8y ago
It's like they have to mention Trump to get the article approved for publication. It's like in a communist country, you could be writing about interior design but you better stick " glory to the people's party!" in there to make sure censors approve it quickly.
pnathan 8y ago
DC overwhelmingly voted for HRC. I think it was something crazy like 98%.

FussyZeus 8y ago

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.

haskellandchill 8y ago
Do we get to decide?
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Yes, but not as easily or as obviously as people would like. You've got a nice city. Tech starts moving in. Prices start rising. You have a few options: 1. Make the city an undesirable place for tech (via taxes, regulation, or whatever). This has the downside that it may cost the jobs of people who currently live there (and are some of the highest-paid people in the city). 2. Build a bunch more housing, so that lower-income people don't get priced out. This keeps the diversity of the city, but changes the physical characteristics. Some consider the physical characteristics to be part of the charm of the city. 3. Do neither of those things (note that both of them have their downside). This leads to new, high-paid jobs, no new housing, and lower incomes being priced out. As far as I can see, those are the only options. There is no option where everything just stays the way people like it.
  - crdoconnor 8y ago
    >Some consider the physical characteristics to be part of the charm of the city. Especially people fighting to keep the value of their home equity up.
    - FussyZeus 8y ago
      Point of order: the value of their property was already very high and going up when the changes (tech industry, finance, whatever) began happening, what they're fighting to keep going is the growth in that value.

justinzollars 8y ago

> "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 8y ago
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.

jameshart 8y ago

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.

chimeracoder 8y ago
> 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" Yeah, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but it's practically a New York tradition to publish essays like this[0] every so often - about why New York isn't what it once was (the "Why I'm Leaving New York" essay). Typically, it's an exploration of the ways in which contemporary New York doesn't match up to the New York of nostalgic memory. Usually, the essay ends on an ambiguous note, with the sense of discovery and adventure, but ultimately results in the author either returning to or remaining in New York. It's so common that it's almost a literary genre trope, with predefined criteria and stages, similar to the Hero Journey[1] concept first formulated (but not invented) by Joseph Campbell. And, like the Hero's Journey, the journey usually (though not always) ends where it started, but with the participants ("hero") changed somehow in the act of exploration. The first[2] was Joan Didion's, which she wrote back in 1968. While she took a short break while raising her daughter in the suburbs, she's lived in New York City for 35 of the last 60 years and still lives here today. [0] usually better-written than this one, but on the same topic and format [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey [2] Not necessarily chronologically, but seminal[3] to the genre [3] It's influential enough that a recent essay on the genre even opens with a nod to Didion's work: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-to-Andrew-Sullivan-some-writers-leave-behind-letters-when-they-leave-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-...

stcredzero 8y ago

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 8y ago

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.

acchow 8y ago

> 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-commuter-shuttles-ahead-programs-approval-sf/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/tech-workers-voice-support-commute...

ciscoriordan 8y ago
That's the line that made me give up on the article. The author twists the truth to fit his narrative.
subpixel 8y ago
That's still a lot of people, even statistically, and a weird, weird, phenomenon.
- klipt 8y ago
  What weird, weird phenomenon - employers providing buses because existing public transit sucks?
  - haskellandchill 8y ago
    Yeah, that's weird, in my opinion, as a New Yorker.
    - klipt 8y ago
      I wish the public transit in the Bay Area were better, but given that it does suck, I'm glad the buses exist. Remember NYC has the advantage of being a unified city - the fractured Bay Area cities have way more infighting when trying to build anything.
    - valenciarose 8y ago
      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.

tootie 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
throwaway427 8y ago
> This place is never the same from one generation to the next and that will never change. This is not incongruous with the writers belief that NYC has lost its edge. > We've lost some things, we've gained others. What do you think you've gained, aside from safety and cleaner parks and better schools for the unaffordable, gentrified enclaves of Brooklyn?

huac 8y ago

It's impossible to read this piece without the context of Harpers doesn't pay their interns.

api 8y ago

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.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>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? The people who are in a position to shape the long term direction of a no-name city are still of sufficient means that they are capable of packing up and moving to some city that grew out of a suburb of SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston, etc. They don't do that because that's not the kind of place they want to live. Why won't those people point to the fate of Denver, Austin, etc and say "we're not going to compromise our culture and character in the long term to attract a bunch of rich people in the short term" and implement policies that boil down to "screw off, we're full"?

weeksie 8y ago

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.

joeldg 8y ago

the byline should be "an author ages and realizes the world has changed around him"

CPLX 8y ago

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 8y ago
>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.

peterwwillis 8y ago

"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.

sunshinelackof 8y ago

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 8y ago

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.