The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  I’m reminded of the vacant lot across from Paula Segal’s apartment in Brooklyn—“that big hole in the neighborhood,” as she called it. Sometimes the literal hole, the empty lot, gets filled with a condo high-rise and the units are sold to buyers who visit a few weeks a year; at once coveted and vacant, these homes produce a new, more figurative hole in the neighborhood.

  Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, for example, used to have the hardware stores and the shoe stores and now it’s got the boutique stores and the fancy little restaurants—my neighborhood is overrun by tourists. I hardly see my own neighbors any more because they’re so lost in the tourist shuffle.

  14.

  Niko grew up in Chelsea. His Greek father owned a Greek diner on Seventeenth Street and retired in 1995. As Niko puts it, “You know, Greeks, they own diners.” He worked behind the counter but the business wasn’t his speed so he aimed higher with law school. He remembers the High Line as that abandoned, rusted railroad track running overhead.

  The High Line was something that was looked down on by developers. But in retrospect, the irony is that now any building next to the High Line is like any building next to Central Park: it gets immediate 50 percent increase in value. So it was an interesting thing to happen, not just for Chelsea in terms of the community, but also for the real estate developers.

  It brings up the question: can you artificially accelerate gentrification? Did the High Line—artificially, to some extent—accelerate the gentrification of the far West Side?

  You know, there’s a story about a parking lot in Downtown Brooklyn, in the middle of an area that no one would go to. The developers who owned it didn’t have the financing to build, and they wanted to sort of accelerate the progress of that neighborhood. So they created a flea market and it became really cool and artsy. For a whole year, you had a bunch of people coming to a community that they normally wouldn’t see because of this artificially created destination. After a year, the developers started building a hundred rental units. And the people who’d been going to the flea market were like, “Hey, maybe I’ll live here, too.” So that’s interesting. Can you artificially gentrify a neighborhood? It’s a process that I think is better done organically. A natural process seems to be better because it gives people time to change. It gives them time to save money. They can retrain themselves. But when the acceleration happens too quick maybe they’re caught off guard. And maybe that’s the role of government. To provide that safety net, that time for people to retool and adapt to that change. Because you don’t want it to happen overnight.

  And it’s going to happen. You can’t stop it.

  Niko is now forty-one years old and works at a private firm with a specialty in real estate transactions. Sometimes it’s a purchase, sometimes it’s a rental agreement, sometimes it’s a landlord buying tenants out so they’ll vacate an apartment—always a first step toward increasing the value of the property. Niko is the man who is at the table when the dotted lines are finally signed and checks are finally, finally handed over. He finesses and bends and demands according to his client’s interests and he finishes the job. Because he is good at what he does and because his services are in demand and because he sees no reason to assume any risk with his career, he will only talk to me on the record about gentrification—a “sensitive topic,” he reminds me again and again—if I grant him a pseudonym and so, indeed, I have.

  His contact list is a complex of real estate agents, banks, developers, and investors. Once a month he hosts a networking breakfast for invited clients and contacts. Forecasts are shared, maybe some leads materialize, and there is always a featured guest: the manager of a $100 million investment account, the president of a construction company carrying out 100,000-square-foot projects, the senior broker specializing in turning around distressed properties. The meetings take place in the Madison Avenue offices of a national real estate investment services firm. One recent breakfast was focused on investment opportunities in the Bronx—the next big thing, the borough of double-digit returns, according to Niko’s invitation. Every meeting takes place at 7:45 a.m. and at 7:45 p.m. Niko will likely still be at his desk answering the phone.

  He works in a neighborhood labeled NoMad—a name devised in the late ’90s for a five-block stretch just north of Madison Square Park and east of Chelsea. The area has been oriented toward wholesale business for decades. Though Niko dresses for the job, the buttons on his suit look like they want to pop off and free the tough guy inside. His hair is slicked back, his skin is tan, and his deep voice channels a hard New York accent. We are on our way to lunch.

  Here’s an example of gentrification right in front of you.

  First, focus to your left. There you see Broadway, all this wholesale stuff, dingy looking buildings. Turn around now and see what’s happening. It’s a salad shop that prides itself on the fact that everything is local. They get their stuff from Ulster County. They just opened. And you see the line?

  Niko indicates the chain of people extending to the end of the block on this muggy afternoon. He points out one of the newer hotels along this stretch of Broadway.

  Obama had a fundraising event here and it was like $40,000 a plate.

  We bypass the salad fetish spot for the Bánh mì fetish shop, opting for different bastardized versions of the Vietnamese sandwich. Niko’s sandwich shrinks in his fist before vanishing in his mouth.

  Chelsea has a lot of projects and sometimes when people look at neighborhoods they’re concerned about what impact public housing is going to have in the neighborhood. The city built these vertical housing projects that became a sort of infestation of crime. They were isolated. There was not integration. There was no access to work or transportation. Those were the failed experiments of the 1970s.

  And maybe twenty years ago when someone was considering buying an apartment in Chelsea, they saw public housing and thought how can you have the projects across the street from million dollar homes? It’s not going to happen. But it did. It happened in Chelsea, it’s happening on the Lower East Side, and in parts of Harlem. Definitely seeing it in Downtown Brooklyn. Now I have investors looking at the Bronx, because they’re not seeing the kind of return they want in Brooklyn. At least from the New York point of view—again, I’m sort of limited from my sort of middle white perspective—but I think for New York, the experiment is going pretty well. So is that a testament to the fact that you can have gentrification and have people of different socioeconomic categories living in the same place? Sure.

  But now the projects are underfunded because there’s not the revenue anymore. And there is a proposal out now that they should be selling either the retail space or the parking lots to private developers in order to raise revenue, because maintenance in the projects sucks. But sometimes organizations see this as the first step to privatization. If you privatize the retail and privatize the parking lots, tomorrow you’re going to privatize my apartment just like Stuyvesant Town, where MetLife came in with other people’s money and deregulated everything and privatized one of the largest public housing projects in the city. That’s the resistance.

  But in terms of gentrification and housing projects, I can’t think of a neighborhood, if my spectrum is from 1970s to today, I can’t think of a neighborhood that has regressed and become a poor neighborhood again. I mean, one might argue, “Expand your horizon, Niko—let’s go to 1920s.” In 1920 there were neighborhoods like South Bronx and Bushwick that were flourishing neighborhoods and then the ’60s and ’70s occurred and for a host of reasons those neighborhoods decayed, but those neighborhoods are now back to their peak.

  All this talk of gentrification, there is another underlying principle that—nationally, I think—people want to live in urban environments and walkable communities. No longer do we have the risk, at least in New York, of white flight. No one wants to live in the suburbs anymore. No one is saying I’m going to start in Brooklyn, get a good living, and move out to the suburbs. Brooklyn and Queens are the new suburbs.
And I think that has an impact on gentrification.

  Now I’m doing a lot of stuff in Bushwick. This is a neighborhood with a lot of rent-stabilized product, and there’s definitely a lot of transition going on. So there’s a lot of people buying there now. But if it’s rent stabilized the tenant has the right to stay in their apartment as long as they’re paying the rent, so you have to do a buyout. And you definitely have community organizations in Bushwick that are informing the tenant community of their rights—and they should. Just because a landlord comes knocking on your door and says you’ve got to get the fuck out, you really don’t. And if you’re going to consider a buyout, be smart about it.

  The buyout has to be negotiated. I’ve seen buyouts for $100,000 and I’ve seen buyouts for $10,000. I’m doing a buyout right now where the tenant is getting $100,000 for something they really didn’t work for. There is an irony here that capitalism drives such a transaction but yet it is not an exchange between labor and wage. It is a transaction whereby an individual’s rights are acquired.

  Public policy shouldn’t be dictated by the effect it’s going to have on one person. What’s the impact of that policy going to have on a larger community? If you ask one group of sort of laissez-faire capitalists, when you deregulate the one million rent-stabilized apartments in this city, you’re going to flood the market with supply, so you’re going to lower rents throughout the city. That’s their opinion. So maybe there’s an argument for privatizing everything. But the alternative side is, well, that’s false. You’re going to have to evict people from their homes, and that’s going to cause a big disarray and the sky’s going to be the limit in terms of rents.

  I can tell you rent-stabilized apartments will not be privatized by legislation. It’s political suicide because there’s more tenant votes than landlord votes. But it is happening from the market side. Because every year, even a small percentage, the number of rent-stabilized apartments decreases through buyouts, and that once-stabilized apartment is probably getting deregulated. That’s what’s happening: the efficiencies of the market. It’s happening at a very slow pace. And maybe that’s how it should happen so there’s less of a shock impact on the tenants.

  Put the frog in the water before you turn up the heat.

  15.

  Toussaint Wortham lives alone in a three-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. One bedroom has a deflated air mattress on the floor; the second has a weight-lifting machine and various free weights; the third has a full bed, which is unmade. The hallway is empty and looks to run downhill. Toussaint is a bachelor and points out—correctly—that the apartment is entirely too big for one person. It makes him think the place might be haunted.

  He takes me to the big windows in his bedroom, looking out onto the street. He points at a building in the distance. It is roughly ten stories high, much taller than the surrounding brownstones, and all the windows are boarded up.

  The whole building: gentrified. You see what I’m talking about right? With the plywood? I knew about two families in that building, and they’re all gone. Probably in the Bronx now, or Jersey or something.

  That’s what’s going on.

  They’re saying most of these rent-stabilized tenants are depreciating the values of these buildings. A lot of them are, you know, and some politicians are saying we could probably do better without them. Send them down South. Send ’em to the Bronx. Send ’em to the outer most parts of the city—East New York, Brownsville—let’s put you out there now. It’s not like we’re saying you won’t have a home, we’ll just put you out there. And when we’re ready to gentrify that neighborhood, we’ll move you further. I got friends living in East New York and Brownsville. And I asked them, “Are you experiencing this problem?”

  They’re like, “Naw.”

  They don’t even know what gentrification means.

  I tell Toussaint I don’t think anyone really knows what it means, which prompts him to try for a definition of his own. After a minute of contemplation and a series of aborted sentences, he gives up and insists he doesn’t need to describe gentrification because he knows what it feels like.

  This word gentrification, incidentally, is not the first time language has failed to capture the phenomenon Toussaint is trying to pin down: Australia had trendification and in 1971, The New York Times tried out brownstoneurbia, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. The descriptors come and go but the patterns remain—Toussaint’s description of Crown Heights, for example, sounds a lot like Friedrich Engels, who noted two centuries earlier: “The bourgeoisie has only one method of settling the housing question … The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere.”

  “We’ll just put you out there,” says Toussaint.

  We move into the kitchen, bright with sunlight that streams through the apartment’s biggest windows. Toussaint offers me water. I accept, and he opens the refrigerator, which has nearly nothing inside save for several large shrink-wrapped bundles of twelve-ounce bottled water. He grabs two of the chilled bottles and joins me at the table.

  I have to ask about the refrigerator full of water. When I do he laughs it off, almost sheepish, and apologizes for the pile of empty bottles pouring out of a cardboard box behind my chair. He tells me that they await the recycling machine—Toussaint’s not going without his nickel returns. His warm, earnest smile reveals gold-plated front teeth. He wears a baseball hat and a large black T-shirt that hangs nearly to his knees.

  Toussaint drives an Access-A-Ride bus—paratransit for travelers who qualify under the Americans with Disabilities Act. He hates the job. His routine experience: get a call from the dispatcher with thirty minutes lead time for a pick up that is an hour away; endless traffic; an angry traveler; and thus one unkind interaction after another. Calm and soft spoken, Toussaint seems to like keeping things civil.

  Though Access-A-Ride is a public service, the city subcontracts the job to a private company and, by doing so, gets the job done for twelve dollars an hour instead of having to hire a higher-paid employee who belongs to a public union. This is another reason Toussaint hates the job. He says the word hate calmly and thoughtfully, despite the raw emotion it carries. He missed his shift yesterday to go to housing court. Unsure where to begin, he shakes his head then points to the sink area near the window:

  These are the cabinets in question that they want to evict me for.

  These cabinets were installed before the new owner took over the property. The previous management was aware of these cabinets and the previous management even gave me money toward these cabinets. This was five years ago, they gave me $1,000 toward them. The judge said that she would look into it.

  I looked the landlord up but of course all these landlords hide behind these management groups. They do all of their dirty work. They initiated the case about three months ago.

  There are four cabinets in the kitchen—two below the counter and two above. They are made of wood, painted blue, and sturdy when I thump them with my hand. They are clearly insignificant—they have no impact on the structural integrity of the apartment. In fact, aesthetically, they are the best feature in a room otherwise defined more by the thrashed flooring and peeling wallpaper.

  It’s been thirty-five years with very little repairs. I’ve lived here since 1979. I was in first grade when we moved. We moved around summer, around the time that Reagan was campaigning. I remember all the stickers and flyers. We started school that year.

  My mother passed away in 2000, and when she passed away the succession rights kicked in. The apartment automatically went into my name. We’d had the same cabinets since ’79 so they were deplorable. I told the previous management that I want to make a change and they agreed. I told the landlord’s attorney yesterday, “Look all this could have been avoided. All you had to do was call the previous management.”

  And she sa
id, “Well, I didn’t know.”

  I said, “At least you could call prior to going through this extreme action, taking me to court. I had to take off work.”

  And once I mentioned the word gentrification she looked at me like, its absurd! The minute I said the word gentrification, the landlord’s lawyer started interjecting and went on with something else. They don’t even recognize that that’s even a remote possibility. It’s so obvious to people who see it but to them—it’s like a scientist, right? Scientists only like to deal with the facts. We want hard-core facts—period. That’s how she came across to me. Don’t come to me with this theory of gentrification. To them3 it’s a theory. It’s not facts. That’s something that people are just saying. She didn’t want to hear that. And I didn’t override her. I didn’t want to get into a fight. So she took the conversation somewhere else.

  I asked the judge, “So if it’s proven that these cabinets were installed prior to this management taking over this case should be thrown out, right?”

  And she said, “Not necessarily. It’s depending on what type of deal the previous management made with the current management.”

  “That, I don’t understand. So I’m still in hot water even if I can prove these were done with approval? What’s the worse case scenario?”

  And she says, “Well, you can be evicted.”

  I didn’t really think the cabinets would equal eviction. But that’s the case now.

  My victory yesterday was that basically they agreed that I could start paying my rent again—he laughs but he is serious—they haven’t been taking my rent for three months now. They’ve been saying they can’t take my rent until the case is resolved. They bank on the idea that you’ll mess that money up. These are the tactics they’re using. It’s been three months so they figure I might see a nice coat that I want, or nice pair of jeans, and I’ll spend it, which most people do—they’ll spend it. But he’s got me misconstrued. I’m not that kind of person. I’ve got one pair of jeans.