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It’s an interesting conundrum. More middle-class people are moving back to the city these days, after years of “white flight.” And it’s squeezing out the poor:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is closing in on a milestone: building or preserving 165,000 city-financed apartments and houses for low-, moderate- and middle-income families, the goal of a $7.5 billion housing plan he announced in 2002 and expanded in 2005.
It has already financed the creation or preservation of 94,000 units, including 72,000 for low-income households, city officials say.
But those efforts have been overwhelmed by a far larger number — the 200,000 apartments affordable to low-income renters that New York City has lost over all, because of market forces, during the mayor’s tenure.
The shrinking supply of these apartments, highlighted by researchers at New York University, illustrates not only the increasing strain that housing costs have had on this city of renters, but also the limits of the mayor’s success in providing the city’s poor with reasonable places to live. While the mayor’s plan has put thousands of low-income families in new or rehabilitated buildings and helped stabilize neighborhoods, it has been nearly drowned out by the twin waves of gentrification and rent deregulation.
The trends of city life are reversing, due to economic factors, lower crime, successful urban planning, and the like. It’s making cities a more attractive place to live, because you can get the upsides of city life – diversity, cultural excitement, shorter commutes – without the historic negatives. Except, squeezing out all of the diversity and culture through gentrification seems to reverse that.
Mayors like Bloomberg are trying to keep up, but this is clearly a bigger problem than classic development planning schemes can solve.
8 Comments
Jason, this is a plan that has been in the air -and actions taken- for quite some time.
It all goes back to who is considered ‘important’.
Very true, though I wonder if it doesn’t end up destroying what folks moved to the city in the first place for.
I moved to the Village in NYC in 1979.
It was an incredible time. Gays, music joints, bars, art galleries, restaurants all thrown together. High-income people and poor folks. And all in-between.
Today, the Village is bland. You gotta have a high income.
Things don’t always get better.
Yep, my feeling also for New York.
DC was a similar story.
Its called Gentrification…..
Depress the urban areas so bad that you force people out; of that ones that can afford to leave. Then you force others out by buying them off.
Katrina gave “Urban Planners” a GOLDEN opportunity to rid the city of its mostly poor Black population and then remake the Downtown area into an “Urban Oasis” for the well-healed and high income, Whites mainly.
Just like Disney took Swap Land near Disney World and turned it into a model town, where again median incomes are near 6 digits.
Los Angeles hasn’t been as aggressive has other large cities but around the Staple Center nothing but high priced housing as appeared…
Now that many suburbs have “color” in them many people believe that has been to the detriment of suburbia and are returning to the Urban Areas because the cities have long been on a mission to draw them back into the cities.
For developers around the world, they don’t want the struggling and the poor, they want the connected, the moneyed and the highly educated which is such a tiny part of any population, so you can understand the push back against the elites in politics, even if they are “liberal”.
Thanks djfourmoney; I’d forgotten the word. AND this part “Now that many suburbs have “color” in them many people believe that has been to the detriment of suburbia and are returning to the Urban Areas because the cities have long been on a mission to draw them back into the cities.” is so true.
But I think you meant ‘well-heeled’ as contrasted to ‘well-healed’ but that also is probably true *G*.
People today cannot imagine the rich cultural ferment that was NYC in the 1970s and early 1980s.
I was able to move here to San Francisco 20 years ago with $2000 in my pocket (My friends were busy acting in Linklater’s “Slacker” while I was working my ass off to achieve escape velocity from Texas) and establish myself. Today, that would be about $3500 with inflation, although we all know that wages have not gone up 150% over those two decades, rather have stagnated while the cost of living in the desirable cities has skyrocketed. I would have been trapped in that hell hole.
Here in the Mission District, we see ground zero for gentrification. Greenspan’s low interest rate regime led to a tsunami of cheap construction luxury condominiums and illegal live work lofts that were enabled by a corrupt city government under Willie Brown (saw this sleazebag slinking into see Obama yesterday) and Gavin Newsom. Rapacious speculators also favor evicting long term residents, many of color and poor, from rent controlled apartments in order to convert to “tenancies in common” and condos. On our block alone, all rentals have been converted, neighbors scattered and the prices raised. Since credit is scarce, one building has been remarketed as rental, with the sum total of 3 units rent more than the mortgage on the 2 units in our building, ours and our upstairs neighbors’ combined.
There are intentional programs on the part of Democrats to squelch the progressive political movement here by building our cities out from under us with new luxury construction and to enrich their political patrons. Our local Veal Pen of housing nonprofits is so steeped in the leftist rigmarole of victim hood and so dependent upon government handouts that they’ve been all but neutralized. Yet they continue to get paid even as they fail repeatedly at their job, losing 3 out of 3 ballot measures for housing funds, including some very low hanging fruit ($30m/yr) that I thought up for them in a winnable race they all but threw.
The result has been an urban regime more reminiscent of a theme park for trustafarian hipsters and professional minders of other people’s business veal penners, than any sort of holistic, diverse, desirable city. At this rate, with housing so scarce, nobody will be able to afford to live within 50 miles of here so that the cost to import labor to make your hamburger will be so high, it will end up costing you $25.
We bought our condo in the events following a probate sale from an elderly woman who had lived here her whole life, after we were evicted from our warehouse by the City as it spent scarce affordable housing dollars, earmarked for teachers, cops and firefighters, on a drug treatment center for a politically connected nonprofit. Our intent is to get the hell out of gentrified SF and relocate to Portland Oregon, lily white, but at least not under constant threat of entitled urban hipsters.