New York City (NYC) and Los Angeles (LA) are both well-known cities, yet different in culture and lifestyle. In the article “Los Angeles and Its Booming Creative Class Lures New Yorkers,” Alex Williams discusses migration from NYC to LA. New Yorkers who can no longer afford rent or who seek different opportunities than those offered in NYC move to Los Angeles, where they can solve both or either of those problems. Los Angeles has a scene much more suited for the creative class. There are more bloggers, artists, and content creators on the west coast. People tend to meet up based on creative interests, and people are friendlier. New York, on the other hand, is full of people who have 9 to 5 jobs and don’t care much about their neighbors. While both these cities are successful and growing, people of a certain mindset leave NYC and head west for different opportunities.
Jane Jacobs: Warnings against the Trump Era
Jane Jacobs in her fight against Robert Moses and his power hungry plans to establish multiple projects in the New York City area had shown the need of the public to fight back against dictatorship like power that can arise in political leadership. However Jacobs also saw the rising power of cities and the power that comes with leaders manipulating nationalism and xenophobia in order to fulfill their political and economic agendas. Donald Trump is one such person who used xenophobia and an increased sense in nationalism to go from one of New York City’s most wealthiest real estate investors to the head of arguable the most powerful and influential government in the world. The article states that this is what Jane Jacobs precisely wanted to avoid as she states in her books that this is the coming of the New Dark Age where the views of the people can be distorted in this form of “mass amnesia” and manipulated to fulfill the agendas of people like Trump who can use the increased sense of nationalism and fears such as xenophobia to climb the political ladder and establish policies not entirely beneficially for the majority.
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At Whose Expense?
With the publication of her novel, Jane Jacobs became the hero that fought against Robert Moses and his “destructive” urban renewal policies, emphasizing the importance of street life culture, close-knit communities, and decreased intervention of the state to allow for neighborhoods to be cared for solely by its residents. However, her ideas inadvertently inspired a different kind of extreme than Moses’s plan of eradicating the “slums”: neoliberalism (Tochterman 65). With its emphasis on free-market capitalism, neoliberalism was not built to help the people that were exploited by Robert Moses, but instead continued to cater to the upper and middle classes that could afford the means to becoming successful and producing wealth through opportunities that are unavailable to the lower and working classes. Overall, inequality is continuously reproduced at the expense of these classes in the ideal societies of both Robert Moses and neoliberal activists. Continue reading “At Whose Expense?”
New York’s Neoliberal and Real Estate Past
Richard Florida was a neoliberal who believed that the economic driving force in cities was the creative-class who craved technology, talent, and social tolerance (Tochterman 75). This theory had many encouraging ideas such as that the creative working class was an important part of the economy and that whites, gays, minorities, and all other peoples should be integrated, not segregated. However, his theory lacked a way to enhance the economic standing and workplace freedom of the people serving creative elites. This was a major issue since the wealth gap was increasing during this time period and since the creative-class was obsessed with consumerism (Tochterman 78). This obsession eventually translated into overpriced housing and rents in neighborhoods that eventually no one could afford. Many of these neighborhoods began with urban renewal schemes that were created such that private companies took profits while the state took the risk. These renewal programs increased the prices in the areas such that poor residents were displaced and lost both jobs and homes. In the 1970s, the neoliberal real estate sector and state allowed for this abasement to occur to an extreme. During the 1970s, the industrialization of Asia and Latin America drew money from the globalized New York City (Angotti 75). This hurt the local economy, and people stopped paying their rents. These rents were already very high because of New York’s grossly overdeveloped land, which already deprived people’s quality of life. It was even worse since, unlike during the New Deal, the government did not want to help. In fact, President Gerald Ford famously told the city to “drop dead”, implying that New York should go through a contraction phase regardless that its people were suffering. Continue reading “New York’s Neoliberal and Real Estate Past”
NYC’s Creative Class Present Day- The Lowline
The Ted Talk above was delivered by Dan Barasch, the cofounder and executive director of a new project called the Lowline. This project, as explained in the video, aims to use innovative solar technology to create New York City’s first underground park from a historical trolley terminal on the lower east side. This park would serve as a creative and green cultural space ironically situated in a gentrifying and overdeveloped area of our city. When reading about this project, I immediately drew parallels to our readings, specifically to Brian Tochterman’s discussion of Florida’s view of the creative class in the city and the necessity of the creative class in terms of stimulating the economy. Furthermore, a parallel can also be drawn to Tom Angotti’s discussion of the Growth Machine and the perpetuation of the myth that growth primed by real estate brings money into neighborhoods.
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Blockbusting and Structural Racism
This video is a Part II of a compilation of videos interviewing author Antero Pietila on his novel, “Not in My Neighborhood.” He speaks on the process of blockbusting that surrounded and devastated the area of Baltimore, Maryland. He spoke on how speculators would propagate the racism that surrounded the area during the period of the 1940 and 1950’s.
Housing Discrimination by Race
New York City is one of the most racially segregated cities in the world. This didn’t occur naturally; this was the result of years of laws and real estate practices that allowed this to happen. Housing discrimination is still practiced in New York City and it continues to create divides in the city’s diversity. Specific real estate practices that contribute to this are assigning codes to neighborhoods based on desirability, redlining, and blockbusting. All of these practices essentially go the same way. The real estate broker will determine a person’s race. They use this information to decide which property to rent or not rent based on what will make the broker the most money.
Examining the “Creative Class”
In our class’s discussion of visions of our city, we have discussed so far Moses’ perspective of an automobile-centric city and Jacobs’ four important points of a bustling city: a multifunctional district, short blocks, mixed-age and conditioned buildings, and a dense population. However, though we often credit Jacobs for halting Moses’ vision of an overdeveloped city, she did not herself offer a tenable answer on how to approach the potential problems of a growing urban center.
How 19th Century Immigration Made New York City Rethink Its Parks
Some of the leaders in the development and redevelopment of New York City have been urban planners who did not see the city as a whole, but rather prioritized social classes based on how much their wealth can contribute to the success of NYC as the financial capital of world. Brian Tochterman’s article points out that Florida’s theory on urban development favored the “creative” class, and ignored the rest of NYC’s population—which made it impractical for its application on the city. Tom Angotti’s chapter discusses how larger and more powerful players have pushed smaller and local property owners and business out of the real estate market throughout the course of NYC’s history. Many other leading theorists in the FIRE fields have shaped NYC to become more of a city for the wealthy and powerful, rather than for the entire population. This priority was subtly expressed in various projects throughout Manhattan—a key project being the creation of Central Park. Central Park was supposed to be a public project designed to boost the social, moral, and biological quality of the city and all of its citizens, but it was manipulated in many aspects to benefit the rich and ignore the poor.
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Can Bill de Blasio turn the public tide against homelessness?
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s initiative Turning the Tide Against Homelessness calls for 90 homeless shelters designed to decrease the city’s reliance on renting hotel rooms for homeless people. Part of the initiative’s emphasis is keeping families’ social networks in place and therefore building shelters in all boroughs. Framed as an “overhaul of how and where the City shelters homeless New Yorkers” the plan emphasizes finding locations so shelter residents are closer to the social networks with the goal of giving “families and individuals continue to live near the neighborhoods they called home, in a clean and safe environment, while receiving the assistance they need to get back on their feet” (“Turning the Tide Against Homelessness,” 78). Moreover, the plan also focuses on gaining the cooperation and input from residents and businesses in the neighborhoods proposed to receive a shelter.
And yet residents don’t seem so pleased at least in this video provided by NY1 of residents at on such community board meeting – click through to see the video and a very provocative comparison!
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