Is NYC losing its character?

[davidfcooper]

Radio interview with two of the more pessimistic contributors to The Suburbanization of New York. It is interesting to learn that in Greenpoint, a blue collar Brooklyn neighborhood bordered to the north by Queens and to the west by the East River home prices rose 65% in 2006 (yes that's in one year, not five or ten years). The guests on the program predict that eventually the Bronx and Staten Island, which so far have remained more affordable, will also become strictly white collar. A caller points out that immigrants are starting to bypass the city and move straight to the more affordable suburbs citing several NJ towns as examples. In an earlier program guitarist David Bromberg related that when he decided to return to the northeast from Chicago he found NYC unaffordable and moved to Wilmington, DE instead. I imagine quite a few New Yorkers who have to relocate for school or work will find a few years later that returning to NYC is impossible on all but the most affluent budgets.

Comments

[bethr.livejournal.com]

hence the...well, never mind.

[weret-hekau.livejournal.com]

I was just talking to my husband about the fact that real estate prices have skyrocketed just in the last few years. It's ridiculous... and the bubble has to burst sooner or later even though they keep saying it won't. In some ways it doesn't surprise me. One of my coworkers has a daughter who's out of college and working now and she said to me "You should see these kids. They all have these really highpaying jobs....but they don't save a cent, they're not like we were." I think that's a big part of the problem. You have a lot of people with plenty of income willing to pay ridiculous prices. They don't have to be rich for this anymore, they're in debt up to their eyeballs even though they should never need to be in that kind of debt at their income levels. It can't keep up like this permanently because if it does, there aren't going to be any "workers" here.....and that's what I fear. This city has been moving toward a total disintegration of the middle class leaving nothing but rich and poor.

[cowgrrl.livejournal.com]

*tries to imagine the Bronx all upscale and unaffordable* Hard to imagine but I guess it could happen. After all, Somerville used to be where people went for affordable housing just outside Cambridge, MA. Now it's insanely unaffordable.

I think about leaving the Northeast for this very reason. (Well, that and the weather!)

The question is: after all the working class people flee urban areas like New York, who's going to be left to pour the lattes for the well-to-do?

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

The people who serve the affluent urbanites will have horrendous commutes from their working class suburbs.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

What's happening is that as more and more work gets outsourced overseas, economic opportunity is concentrating itself in a short-list of maybe 8 or so¹ "A-list" cities, and everybody everywhere else is just flipping hamburgers for each other and selling each other cheap crap in Wal-Mart. Hence the huge desire to live in one of these places.

What I suspect is going to happen is that those "A-list" cities will start to look like Paris and some other European cities: the well-to-do will live in the city center, then there will be a ring of inner-ring poor suburbs where the service-sector people live, and then the wealthier suburbs will be outside *that*. You're already starting to see two or more families living together in houses in the close-in post-WWII suburbs of DC. And then you have places like Camden and Newark, NJ, which have remained poor while the cities next door to them or around them grew rich.

What sucks is that so much of the innovative work in any society is done by people who are creative but don't necessarily have remunerative jobs. That's not just true in the arts, either--it's true in science and academia as well. But you need a critical mass of these creative people playing off each other for the whole thing to work. A really excellent treatise on this is The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs. it's about 45 years old and shows its age in spots but it's still an excellent read. I worry about what happens when the "creative class" cannot afford to live in cities anymore.

¹If you had to press me for which ones, I'd say NYC, Boston, DC, SF, LA, Seattle, and Chicago.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Excellent analysis!

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Thank you. *bow*

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

BTW, I should point out that I'm *from* Wilmington DE and keep up with events there. Wilmington has become unaffordable because of all the New Yorkers moving in. :-P (So has Philly.)

I think the big problem there is *New Jersey*, which with its taxation levels, ridiculous car insurance mess, and so on, has made itself so utterly unattractive as a place to live that if you're commuting to NYC and looking for housing a couple of hours out, you may as well go beyond NJ to northeastern PA or to northern DE or to Philly, and have a lower cost of living and better quality of life.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Some of my wife's co-workers commute to lower Manhattan from Philly and the Poconos.