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

[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*