Dan Grantham
Weighty and cumbersome, I drag my wheeled carry-on sized suitcase — stuffed beyond the point of its aforementioned convenience — through the streets of New York City. Dropped by a taxi cab in front of a block of neat but worn row houses more than two hours before I said I would arrive, I reluctantly put off ringing the doorbell of a friend’s duplex where I would crash for two nights. Instead, with my overpacked suitcase in tow, I decide to be a tourist, at least for two hours, in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens.
According to Sharon Zukin, an author I have cited numerous times in my I.S., Ridgewood is both an authentic neighborhood and also one that is endangered. Nine stops from Williamsburg, Brooklyn and only another stop to Manhattan on the L Train, Ridgewood stands in stark contrast to these bastions of gentrified urbanity. Instead of boutiques, Myrtle Ave. is lined with densely-packed, budget-minded department stores, take-out restaurants, and specialty grocers — stores all unfamiliar to a Midwesterner.
A lesser known, but even more important feature is the neighborhood’s abundant diversity. I am from Hudson, Ohio, a place where many feel it within their rights to tell a first-generation American to speak English. But here in Ridgewood, I am given a taste of what it is like to be on the receiving end of such ignorance. I struggle to communicate with many shop owners and their employees, and I so desperately wish I could speak to them in their own tongue. It seems that everyone in Ridgewood is bilingual; most of the cashiers at McDonald’s, the bodega owners, people of all races and ethinicities, speak Spanish and other languages as well as they do English. It is this cosmopolitanism that makes Ridgewood so very authentic, and throughout my brief visit to this part of the most diverse city in the world, I feel the longing to move here.
But as I get closer to the core of New York, I am constantly confronted with the reality of the implications of such a move.
Throughout the urban United States, from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from Louisville to Minneapolis and most dramatically in New York, gentrification has pushed those with lower incomes into the peripheral areas of cities. This has endangered those who still live in the core of urban areas with the prospect of being forced out by redevelopment or increasing rents, and this increasing lack of economic diversity has meant that these neighborhoods have become the home of the upper middle and extremely wealthy classes. 40 years prior, this same group abandoned the city and retreated to the suburbs, and at that time many would have no doubt thought the idea that Brooklyn would be the capital of cool would have been a farce.
Visit New York now and you will hear scholars, activists and zinesters talk with impassioned longing for the good-old days when Times Square was porn town and the Village was a dormitory for artists, not students. New York has always been an expensive city, a city constantly confronted with the reality of out-of-control rent and a high cost of living. But the changes are now occurring under what the more radical political scene of New York would call the neoliberal myth.
Neoliberalism is a catch-all term for the privatization of public goods and services—in other words, the application of capitalist, and thus privatized, values onto communal, civic and public entities. Examples: go to a park, particularly in Manhattan, and often you will find that these spaces are managed by private-public corporations headed by neighborhood business interests. They are more pristine than they once were, but their increasingly privatized nature means that they are implicitly for only a certain type of person. Private management of public space means that the homeless and transient can be asked to leave. This, as Zukin claims, stands in startling opposition to the classical philosophies of the public arena. While homelessness in areas reduces those areas’ property values, New York’s gentrification crisis in the age of neoliberalism, according to the “Atlantic Cities’” Stephen Smith, has not come with efforts to replace housing for the poor that has been reestablished as housing for the rich. As such, homelessness is on the rise and little has been offered in the way of solutions.
Homelessness is on the rise in a city which represents one of the world’s great portages, not only for goods and services, but for cosmopolitan populations of immigrants. These groups continue to believe, and rightly so, in the opportunities New York provides its residents, but access to those opportunities are becoming more exclusive.
Increasingly, New York has become a place with a price of admission—one that is too high for many to call the city home.
Dan Grantham is a Viewpoints Editor for the Voice and can be reached for comment at DGrantham13@wooster.edu.