Today I was at the bodega across the street and this lady came in and asked the guy at the counter:
Lady: Are you Alex?
Alex: Yeah
Lady: My mom lives down the street and she said to come get her a turkey sandwich. She said you'd know how to make it.
Alex: OK. (calls over to the guy at the deli counter for a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes on it in some foreign language).
These are the kind of things people worry about losing when they think about communities getting destroyed by developers. Manhattan is a small island, and this neighborhood is one of the few patches left to exploit. Uptown, most of the affordable housing is being bought up by private equity firms who have a vested interest in getting rid of long-term residents and jacking up the rent. Downtown, the city is rezoning 125th Street, the main drag of harlem, for high-rise condos and such. (Not to mention the battle of morningside heights over the expansion of Columbia a little further downtown.)
While it may be an isolating and sometimes scary place to live for a transplanted 20-something midwestern white girl, this is the kind of neighborhood where families have had roots for many, many years, where everyone on the street seemingly knows each other, where people sit in chairs outside their places of residence (or employment) and chat with people as they go by. Progress and safer streets and better stores are all good, but I really hope I don't come back to visit this place in 10 years to find that it's turned into the upper-upper west side and all the longtime residents have been pushed up to the south bronx.
Showing posts with label gentrification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gentrification. Show all posts
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Rent Control
So I'm trying to sell off some of my furniture that won't fit in my new apartment (that's the downside to having an actual closet, it takes up wall space so you can't cram in as much.) A woman who lives downstairs came to look at it, and she was telling me how her apartment's been in the family for 65 years and it's rent controlled. Know how much she pays for it? $300 a month. (My apartment is more than 4 times that).
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
in which a lily-white harlem resident waxes philosophical on diversity and gentrification
At UW-Eau Claire, there is a lot of verbal wankery on the subject of diversity — why there isn't any, how they can get more of it, how they can change around their educational requirements to get students to think about it. But even so, the student body is still 93 percent white.
Well, now I live in central Harlem, in a neighborhood that 85 percent black, 14 percent Latino and 1 percent white. I *am* the diversity. It's a wee bit of culture shock.
When I came here, one of the movers asked me why I had decided to move to *this* part of town. (Well, because it's probably the only place in the city I can afford a nice 1-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained building and still make it to work in about 30 minutes door-to-door).
"Well ... usually certain groups of people live in certain areas of the city," the mover said.
Not being part of said "certain group" of people is definitely a new experience for me. Say you are a white person, living in a typical midsize, mostly white Midwestern town. You probably deny this to yourself, but when you walk down the street and you pass someone from a minority group, your eyes glance that way for a fraction of a second and a voice in the back of your head says, 'look, a black/Latino/Native American/whatever person.' Now imagine living on a major city street, going to the store, walking to the train, whatever, and getting that not-really-looking look from practically everybody that you pass. It's an adjustment if you've never been a minority. Actually, it's a lot like being in Spain was — minus the catcalls every five seconds.
It's not so much a question of safety, other than the obvious reservations I have about walking at late hours of the night through the neighborhood where "American Gangster" was filmed. I've been assured that all things considered it's a safe enough neighborhood. According to police precinct reports, it's more on par with the bulk of downtown Manhattan than with the Bronx, which is just across the Harlem River. And the super says in the eight years he's been in my building there's never been a break-in.
But there is a certain amount of racial tension involved, and that is compounded by the fact that people who are priced out of richer neighborhoods tend to equate "ungentrified" with "undiscovered," see the neighborhood as dangerous and rundown and in need of being fixed, and slowly push out the locals as if they were just in the way. (See the Village Voice piece The Second Battle for Bushwick if you really want to understand how this plays out.) Adding to that, in Harlem at least, Columbia University is buying up a bunch of real estate. From what I've gathered in my short time here thus far, the gentrification battlefront has effectively been pushed up from 96th street to 125th street.
Truly it's a double-edged sword — popularity of a neighborhood equals investment equals better facilities and often lower crime rates and the like. I'm not in the best situation to opine on gentrification because a. I haven't lived here before it took off and b. as a tenant of a management company that's buying up huge chunks of Harlem and upper Manhattan I'm part of the problem. But isn't there a way to improve a neighborhood and accommodate new residents without pushing the old ones out?
It's capitalism run amok, really. I don't think you can fight basic supply and demand without a. more people owning instead of renting, therefore not having to pay someone else skyrocketing amounts of money just to stay in their apartment and b. a serious crackdown on the kinds of unethical property management practices in the aforementioned Village Voice story, and/or c. regulations on landlords and businesses that many people would consider profoundly un-American. In that way I can see Manhattan as a microcosm of how the American free-market system will eventually cannibalize itself if left unchecked.
What boggles my mind about European urban development is that in so many places it manages to balance the past and the present — you can go to school in the very same building in which Inquisition prisoners were held 500 years ago, and big wealthy business chains can't swallow up the smaller ones just because they can afford to break the rules that confine their competitors.* Which requires not only some intervention from -- gasp -- democratic socialism, but the squelching of the colonize and conquer, destroy and rebuild, darwinist mindset that has fueled American history since the first white dudes set foot on this continent. Europe has a few centuries on us in the western-civilization business, and we could take a few hints from them on pacing ourselves.
*In Spain, for example, most businesses aren't allowed to be open on Sundays, and I believe there's some kind of regulation on closing for siesta. Though that made life a huge pain in the ass at times while I was in Valladolid, I think it was a small price to pay for keeping the city as close-knit as it was ... with the side effect of legislating a more relaxed way of life.
Well, now I live in central Harlem, in a neighborhood that 85 percent black, 14 percent Latino and 1 percent white. I *am* the diversity. It's a wee bit of culture shock.
When I came here, one of the movers asked me why I had decided to move to *this* part of town. (Well, because it's probably the only place in the city I can afford a nice 1-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained building and still make it to work in about 30 minutes door-to-door).
"Well ... usually certain groups of people live in certain areas of the city," the mover said.
Not being part of said "certain group" of people is definitely a new experience for me. Say you are a white person, living in a typical midsize, mostly white Midwestern town. You probably deny this to yourself, but when you walk down the street and you pass someone from a minority group, your eyes glance that way for a fraction of a second and a voice in the back of your head says, 'look, a black/Latino/Native American/whatever person.' Now imagine living on a major city street, going to the store, walking to the train, whatever, and getting that not-really-looking look from practically everybody that you pass. It's an adjustment if you've never been a minority. Actually, it's a lot like being in Spain was — minus the catcalls every five seconds.
It's not so much a question of safety, other than the obvious reservations I have about walking at late hours of the night through the neighborhood where "American Gangster" was filmed. I've been assured that all things considered it's a safe enough neighborhood. According to police precinct reports, it's more on par with the bulk of downtown Manhattan than with the Bronx, which is just across the Harlem River. And the super says in the eight years he's been in my building there's never been a break-in.
But there is a certain amount of racial tension involved, and that is compounded by the fact that people who are priced out of richer neighborhoods tend to equate "ungentrified" with "undiscovered," see the neighborhood as dangerous and rundown and in need of being fixed, and slowly push out the locals as if they were just in the way. (See the Village Voice piece The Second Battle for Bushwick if you really want to understand how this plays out.) Adding to that, in Harlem at least, Columbia University is buying up a bunch of real estate. From what I've gathered in my short time here thus far, the gentrification battlefront has effectively been pushed up from 96th street to 125th street.
Truly it's a double-edged sword — popularity of a neighborhood equals investment equals better facilities and often lower crime rates and the like. I'm not in the best situation to opine on gentrification because a. I haven't lived here before it took off and b. as a tenant of a management company that's buying up huge chunks of Harlem and upper Manhattan I'm part of the problem. But isn't there a way to improve a neighborhood and accommodate new residents without pushing the old ones out?
It's capitalism run amok, really. I don't think you can fight basic supply and demand without a. more people owning instead of renting, therefore not having to pay someone else skyrocketing amounts of money just to stay in their apartment and b. a serious crackdown on the kinds of unethical property management practices in the aforementioned Village Voice story, and/or c. regulations on landlords and businesses that many people would consider profoundly un-American. In that way I can see Manhattan as a microcosm of how the American free-market system will eventually cannibalize itself if left unchecked.
What boggles my mind about European urban development is that in so many places it manages to balance the past and the present — you can go to school in the very same building in which Inquisition prisoners were held 500 years ago, and big wealthy business chains can't swallow up the smaller ones just because they can afford to break the rules that confine their competitors.* Which requires not only some intervention from -- gasp -- democratic socialism, but the squelching of the colonize and conquer, destroy and rebuild, darwinist mindset that has fueled American history since the first white dudes set foot on this continent. Europe has a few centuries on us in the western-civilization business, and we could take a few hints from them on pacing ourselves.
*In Spain, for example, most businesses aren't allowed to be open on Sundays, and I believe there's some kind of regulation on closing for siesta. Though that made life a huge pain in the ass at times while I was in Valladolid, I think it was a small price to pay for keeping the city as close-knit as it was ... with the side effect of legislating a more relaxed way of life.
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