Two People Discussing Jane Jacobs, Because it’s looking like a slow week for content
Interlocutor A: Gentrification and Its Discontents … This is a pretty good article. Kinda blames Jane Jacobs and her ilk for being the first of the gentrifiers by preventing big housing projects from knocking down the village. The result being it stayed so quaint and nice that yuppies and trust-fund hipsters priced people like Jane Jacobs right the hell out.
Agree with Jane that modern architecture is needlessly bland and uninspired. Agree with the author that NIMBY’ers are almost always a bunch of sanctimonious faux-liberal yuppies.
Basically, Jane Jacobs’s Village was our Lawrenceville (ed note: neighborhood in Pittsburgh).
Once upon a time, you could get invited to an underground electroclash-rollerboogie after watching experimental ladder-based dance, or an 80’s dance party in an abandoned Bally’s (ed: this was in Oakland, not L’ville), now Erin can’t afford to buy a house there.
I’ll give Jane Jacobs the benefit of the doubt and assume that back then, neighborhoods didn’t get “discovered” turn hip, then gentrify yet. Or it could just be my theory of New York bumpkindom, whereby New Yorkers never bother to learn about, or forget about if they’re transplants, anything of the outside world, and assume that everything happening to them has no precedent at any other place and time in human history. See an old NYT trend piece on “hipsters” reading in the subway I don’t care to find the link to (ed: this?).
Interlocutor B:I’m going towards the bumpkindom - not for Jacobs, but for both the author of that Atlantic piece and the authors he’s critiquing. Furthermore, I think its not just a NYC thing, just that NYC just amplifies the standard American inability to contrast and compare, or more accurately to find asinine reasons as to why lessons learned elsewhere in the world are absolutely inapplicable to situation X here in America.
I’m only at the beginning of the book, but what’s really made it resonate with me has been spending the last year in a city that’s essentially the wet dream of the architects and urban planners that Jacobs is fighting against with exactly the irritating faults and idiosyncrasies that she warned about. For example, pretty much all of west Denver is little Mexico with fantastic restaurants, super cheap Mexican grocers and tortillerias and so on and so on. The south and east corners of the city have huge eastern European and east African populations. Sounds like a good place to live, right?
However, because all of Denver is designed almost purely for cars, these areas are literally inaccessible on bike, foot or public transit. I live about a mile and a half from west Denver but it may as well be in Wyoming because I have to cross at least one interstate highway to get there.
Basically what I’m outlining here is a city as gentrified as New York or Boston. The center is all middle-class white people and all minorities, working class schmoes and immigrants have been pushed so far out into the burbs that they may as well not even be here. Gentrification will happen to any area that is desirable given enough time, but wouldn’t you rather live in a gentrified neighborhood with shops, interesting stores and a modicum of culture rather than one of parking lots, chain restaurants and ugly architecture?
Finally, Lawrenceville. That’s rough, but I think the point that everyone here has missed is that its the fleeting nature of places like the village in the fifties and Lawrenceville several years ago that makes them such awesome places to be. If every city in America could consistently have a place where you could drink free wine and watch ladder-based modern dance set to Idioteque and follow it up with a slightly-too-literal rollerskating party, then what sort of shit would you have to pull to get noticed?
Interlocuter A: Well yea, those authors are sort of ridiculous yuppie strawmen, but I think what the author was saying about Jacob’s Village and I was saying about Larryville, was that it was awesome, but of necessity fleeting. He mentions that it happens fast enough now for us to have seen the whole process hit like 3 neighborhoods while we were in the burgh, so it’s possible I take for granted a social education in this stuff that she wouldn’t have had. The neighborhood I’m in right now which is cool but I don’t for a second expect to stay that way for many more years.
She lived in Larryville B.C. but thought that she could freeze it in carbonite by keeping the projects out. Maybe she’d just never had an experience like ours, but more likely, she just confused privilege with right (see Park Slopers freaking out about new bikelanes taking up their parking spots) Trouble is, transplants like her have to price out someone “authentic” and so on until the soul is lost anyway. (She’s from Scranton. Ugh.)
The car thing I don’t think necessarily comes form gentrification, I’m gonna have to call American exceptionalism on that one. European cities are also priced up and gentrified (Maybe more so than American cities, I’ve been wondering for a while at what point valuing and cherishing history starts strangling a vribrant growing culture. Given a long enough timeframe, *EVERY* building or neighborhood or whatever will have something happen that will make people not want to knock it down when times change. But that’s another discussion.), Venice, to take an extreme example, is freaking out because it’s been almost completely hollowed out by billionaires. If we weren’t car crazy, our cities would look the same, just scaled inwards. I’m just saying if the progressive reformers got their way and busted down a few old houses for high rises, it would be uglier, but it would be cheaper, and the poor would be able to live closer, (but probably still not in the village) Supply and demand.
And this probably sounds like CRAZY entitled whining, but NYC has a pretty busted transit system, at least by international standards. SoKo and Moscow absolutely demolish it, Athens and Barcelona were its equal. Cleanliness has obviously been entirely exempted as a judgement criteria.
You live in the bronx and want to get to queens, and don’t have a car? Tough shit asshole, head to 42nd and transfer. I would go to Williamsburg for concerts when I lived in *Brooklyn* and the “fastest” way to get there was to take a train to west 14th and ride in from Manhattan. About 5 miles in around 50 minutes, could have run it in less, but then I’da been sweaty.
New york has a wonderful transit system if you live in, or work at midtown, the village or the financial district. It’s there for getting the wealthy and their support staff (janitors etc) there and getting them back out. There was a piece done recently about how (no surprise) the train stations and track are more poorly maintained the further out of the manhattan nexus you get. Not only do all roads exclusively go to Manhattan south of 50th, the tourists and Don Drapers of the city move around at twice the speed of folks like I did, or you would.
I’ve gotten a bike since then which is awesome. But any old east coast city is going to be good for that, just like any thing west of Chicago is going to be a terrible, if not outright hostile place to bike in. Just a car culture thing.
Obviously I’m considering mass transit to be a function of the government as necessary as police or sewerage. Just cause NYC has the best in America doesn’t mean it’s anything for American cities to try to emulate
Interlocutor B: Public transit pretty much works the same way here. Its more or less designed to get people from the burbs to downtown and is horribly inefficient if you need to not travel in a straight line. Changing buses is an absolute nightmare.
But here’s what I’m getting at - Denver, like pretty much every city between the end of the Rust Belt and California not named Chicago has been consistently torn down and rebuilt over and over again. There are a handful of buildings here and there that are around a hundred years old (I actually live in one. Its fantastic until the winter comes and it more or less turns into a straw hut), but it seems that people have enjoying ripping stuff down and putting up new stuff every twenty years or so. In some neighborhoods, this is really interesting because you can have a three block area with 19 separate architectural styles. On the other hand, what I’m getting at here is that we’re underestimating the American real estate industry’s ability to gentrify something. The only thing stopping people is location - everything else can be made desirable with a competent marketing team.
For example, my old apartment building was pretty much a low-rise project from the fifties. The landlords had never really done much work on it, the wallpaper looked like it belonged in Bobby Fischer’s childhood bedroom and there was a crackhead on the first floor who smoked enough to stink up the hallway on the fourth. On the other hand, there was an apartment building that shared the parking lot with us that was owned by some entrepreneurial types how had redone the exact same style of building to look like a moderately stylish replica of a Modern and swanky 50’s apartment building. I paid $400 a month for rent. They advertised for twice that and I’m sure they filled it out. One of my landlords was getting dementia, so I’m sure when the time the owners of the building across the alley would be more than happy to purchase, renovate and yuppify my old building.
What I’m getting at in my characteristic roundabout way here is that my old neighborhood did exactly what Jacobs was railing against, and here we sit in 2011 and because of it’s desirable location, even the hideous, beige project buildings that its made of are being gentrified. Given a certain amount of time, the old adage of “location, location, location” will win out and low-rent districts will continue to be pushed to the margins of cities. So, as a middle-class white person who enjoys living relatively close to city centers, I’m all for not building hideous, soulless buildings in order to put off the inevitable for a decade or three.
I would go farther to say that this doesn’t mean that it’s a one way street. Every city is doomed to eventually experience a downturn of one type or another which will inevitably lead to the flight of the wealthy from the center to the suburbs (or to other cities) after which we get to start this whole rollercoaster ride all over again. To play the devil’s advocate, its entirely possible that European cities who are protecting centuries-old buildings may be able to fight off this trend indefinitely. Helen says that getting housing in Sweden is an absolute motherfucker.
Mildly off-topic: a lot of Mexican cities (I’m thinking of Veracruz in particular) have these amazing colonial city centers that absolutely no one wants to live in, laws forbid people from altering and the city doesn’t have enough money to keep presentable. Its because the Mexican Dream is to live in a gated community inconveniently far from the city but as close to a comically sized big box store as possible. This permits you to drive a giant car around a city designed for walking and ensures that you’ll constantly pay a 500% mark-up on food for no good goddamned reason. The best example of this is Veracruz. When Berlin finally stops being the international mecca for artists looking for cheap rent, I’m tipping Veracruz as the new hotness. Its also comfortably out of the way of drug trafficking routes, which means you can hitch all around there with anyone commenting on your complete and utter lack of regard for your own health and well-being.
