Gentrification and the Urban Future

Growing up in the 1980s, when cities were SCARY and FILLED WITH VIOLENT BLACK PEOPLE JUST WATCH TV IF YOU QUESTION THIS WATCH OUT HUNTER DON’T GO DOWN THAT DARK ALLEY!!!!, the idea that cities would become so expensive that they not only were not livable for people of color but for middle-class whites would have been impossible to contemplate. Even as the beginnings of the modern urban boom began in the 1990s and neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn started becoming kind of rich, it was just a few places. But today in Brooklyn, people of color are simply being pushed out and going to homeless shelters, farther out to urban edges, to the South, or even back to their home nations. And of course Brooklyn is just perhaps the most famous example of something happening nationwide. In New York, the century-old jazz scene is starting to collapse because the artists simply cannot live there anymore. It’s not all that much better for the white working class. Even the middle class can’t live in much of Brooklyn, while Manhattan has of course become a refuge to the world’s billionaires. Thanks Bloomberg. It’s entirely possible that the endless suburban sprawl of the South might pick up a bunch of this, since in places like Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, the developers rule, land is cheap and preserving green space largely not valued. But in New York, the people who work there have to be able to access it from somewhere. Increasingly, the question is where. Already, cities up the Hudson Valley like Newburgh are gentrifying as people realize the Metro-North from that far away puts you no farther from Manhattan in real time as much of Brooklyn.

Surely there must be a point where we either decide than a largely unregulated housing market is a real problem and we step in, that this is in fact a big ol’ housing bubble and the rapidly accelerating prices in the cities suffer a sharp decline, or I guess Schenectady and Scranton become the next hipster outposts by 2025. But right now, the current urban landscape seems utterly unsustainable to me.