JEFF SHARLET ON BLUE LIVES MATTER HARPER’S MAGAZINE/JULY 2018 $6.99 DEATH OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY NewNew YorkYork andand thethe Urban Crisis of Aff uence AS THE SOUTH GOES, SO GOES THE NATION REPORT THE DEATH OF A ONCE GREAT CITY The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affuence By Kevin Baker ew York has been my home tan, its core—is happening in every any way, with what came before. So let for more than forty years, affuent American city. San Francisco me make one thing perfectly clear, as Nfrom the year after the city’s is overrun by tech conjurers who are that old New Yorker Dick Nixon used supposed nadir in 1975, when it near- rapidly annihilating its remarkable di- to say, and list right now all the things ly went bankrupt. I have seen all the versity; they swarm in and out of the I hated about the New York of the periods of boom and bust since, almost metropolis in specially chartered buses Seventies: crime, dirt, days-old gar- all of them related to the “paper econ- to work in Silicon Valley, using the city bage left on the street, cockroaches, omy” of fnance and real estate specu- itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. the Bronx burning, homelessness, dis- lation that took over the city long Boston, which used to be a city of a carded hypodermic needles on my before it did the rest of the nation. But thousand nooks and crannies, back- building’s stoop, discarded crack I have never seen what is going on alley restaurants and shops, dive bars vials—and packs of burned-out now: the systematic, wholesale trans- and ice cream parlors hidden under its matches—on my building’s stoop, formation of New York into a reserve elevated, is now one long, monotonous cockroaches that scattered everywhere of the obscenely wealthy and the wall of modern skyscraper. In Washing- when you turned on the light, entire barely here—a place increasingly de- ton, an army of cranes has transformed Brooklyn neighborhoods looking like void of the idiosyncrasy, the complex- the city in recent years, smoothing out a bombed-out Dresden, subway cars on ity, the opportunity, and the roiling all that was real and organic into a which only one door—or no door— excitement that make a city great. town of mausoleums for the Trump opened when the train came in, sub- As New York enters the third de- crowd to revel in. way cars cooled in summer rush hours cade of the twenty-frst century, it is By trying to improve our cities, we only by a single fan that swung slowly in imminent danger of becoming have only succeeded in making them around and around, deindustrializa- something it has never been before: empty simulacra of what was. To bring tion, those really big cockroaches that unremarkable. It is approaching a state this about we have signed on to political we called water bugs for some reason where it is no longer a signifcant cul- scams and mindless development and that crunched under your feet. tural entity but the world’s largest schemes that are so exclusive they are New York today—in the aggregate— gated community, with a few cupcake more destructive than all they were sup- is probably a wealthier, healthier, clean- shops here and there. For the frst time posed to improve. The urban crisis of er, safer, less corrupt, and better-run city in its history, New York is, well, boring. affuence exemplifes our wider crisis: we than it has ever been. The same can be This is not some new phenomenon now live in an America where we be- said for most of those other cities seen but a cancer that’s been metastasizing lieve that we no longer have any ability as recent urban success stories, from on the city for decades now. And what’s to control the systems we live under. Los Angeles to Philadelphia, Atlanta happening to New York now—what’s to Portland, Oregon. But we don’t live already happened to most of Manhat- hose of us who have been in in the aggregate. For all of New York’s New York for any amount of shiny new skin and shiny new numbers, Kevin Baker is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His most recent essay Ttime are immediately suspect- what’s most amazing is how little of its for the magazine, “21st Century Limited,” ed of nostalgia if we dare to compare social dysfunction the city has man- appeared in the July 2014 issue. our shiny city of today unfavorably, in aged to eliminate over the past four Aerial photograph of the Empire State Building lit up in red for the US Travel Association’s National Travel and Tourism Week, New York City, May 8, 2018 (detail), by Fred R. Conrad REPORT 25 decades. Homelessness is at or near increased to 15 percent, a fgure lower it, according to the real estate database record levels. The Bronx, poster child than it has ever been since then. StreetEasy, with rents rising fastest on for the bleakness of the city in the The immediate cause of the increase the lowest wage earners in the city. Seventies, remains the poorest urban in poverty doesn’t require much inves- The result has been predictable county in the country, with almost tigation. The landlords are killing the enough. Homelessness in the city has 40 percent of the South Bronx, or more town. Long ago, the idea that “rent is reached a level not seen here in de- than a quarter-million people, still liv- too damn high” in New York was so cades, if ever. Today, an average of ing below the poverty line. Bus-stop ads thoroughly inculcated into the city’s 60,000 people are provided shelter ev- all over New York urge everyone to consciousness that it became a one- ery night, in 547 buildings, by the city’s carry the emergency medication nalox- man political party and a Saturday Department of Homeless Services. one so that they can reverse some of Night Live sketch. But the rent is too Most of the newly homeless are not the overdoses that kill nearly four New damn high, and getting higher all the derelicts or the mentally ill. Of these Yorkers every day. time. Whereas the old rule of thumb people 70 percent are families with The average New Yorker now works was that your rent should be one pay- children, and at least one third of the harder than ever, for less and less. Pov- check a month, or about 25 percent of families include a working adult. They erty in the city has lessened somewhat your income, the typical New York were simply priced out of a market that in the past few years, but in 2016 the household now spends at least one seems to have no ceiling, victims of the off cial poverty rate was still 19.5 per- third of its income on rent, and three “ownership society” that is modern cent, or nearly one in every f ve New in ten renter households pay 50 percent New York.1 Whereas most New Yorkers Yorkers. When the “near poverty” or more, according to the latest New used to rent apartments of all sizes, rate—those making up to $47,634 a York Housing and Vacancy Survey. year for a family of four—is thrown in, And the situation is getting rapidly 1 Although New York hosts what is estimated it means that almost half the city is worse. According to the same survey, to be the largest population of homeless people in the United States, it is no coincidence that living what has become a marginal the price New York landlords wanted the other cities in the top ten are also generally existence, just one paycheck away from for vacant apartments from 2014 to seen as “success stories.” Tracking total disaster. By comparison, the city’s pov- 2017 increased by 30 percent, while the numbers of the homeless has never been an erty rate in 1970—in the wake of Lyn- median household income for all rent- exact science, but other cities that have some of the largest homeless populations include don Johnson’s war on poverty—was ing families from 2013 to 2016 went up Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, just 11.5 percent. By 1975, during the by 10 percent. The burden has fallen Washington, San Francisco, Las Vegas, supposed collapse of New York, it had hardest on those who can least afford Boston, and Philadelphia. 26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 Drawing by Steve Mumford more and more of the buildings their by tenants who cannot be evicted or analysis that appeared in last August’s families made home for generations denied a lease renewal without due New York Review of Books. “Today it sells have been either torn down and re- cause, and whose rents cannot be for perhaps thirty or forty times that placed or “converted” to condomini- raised by more than a set amount de- amount, or ten times what the rent roll ums or “cooperative apartments,” termined every year by a government- would be after regulated tenants have which sound like something socialistic appointed panel. This does not mean been dislodged.” but are not. The average condo and the rent doesn’t go up. The rent on the co-op sale prices in Manhattan shot up rent-stabilized apartment that I’ve hat plagues New York, past the $2 million mark for the f rst leased since 1980 has more than tripled though, is not only the as- time ever last year, while a townhouse in that time.