The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  Communities that do have some control over their own development and are doing it as a self-improvement thing—that’s how I’d like Red Hook to see what it’s doing, instead of seeing it as all these others coming in and redeveloping. I think that’s what happened in the Lower East Side, it was all these others coming in and developing. It wasn’t a controlled situation from within. And I think, ideally, Red Hook would be able to do that. But it’s very hard in the United States, it’s privatized, all the land is privatized, so you can’t really make stipulations. That’s a more socialist mentality.

  The rebuilding required in Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy has expedited a collision between the socialist tendencies Gita is describing and the various bundles of private capital vying for the chance to do the new construction.

  It’s funny, you’d expect real estate prices to plummet after the storm but they’ve actually gotten higher. Building more in flood zones doesn’t really make sense but at the same time we need millions of new houses to satisfy the population.

  There was this huge fight in the spring because the Environmental Protection Agency has been studying the Gowanus Canal and after two years they’ve decided part of their remediation plans need to consider local economies. And they had a willing participant in John Quadrozzi who owns a lot of the waterfront, he’s a concrete manufacturer, and he was willing to use part of his property to house a remediation facility that would take toxic sludge and use it as aggregate inside these concrete blocks that can be built into piers and all sorts of things. There were lots of open meetings, lots of yelling and screaming because Red Hookers really don’t want the toxic sludge there. There was a big push to say, “No, we don’t want your toxic stuff, take it somewhere else,” which I think is okay and I understand. My problem is that then it just makes for environmental exportation because all that toxic sludge has to go somewhere. It’s going to go to a community that can’t say no. So it will go to West Virginia, or Florida, or Georgia—it’s going to travel and get put somewhere else. Which I don’t think is a great solution.

  I’m the co-chair of this city neighborhood revitalization zoning board. Governor Cuomo created these twelve zones around the city, specifically to have community input into how the city will be reconstructing and so the committee meetings start this month and we’ll see how much they actually take the community voice into account. In the planning process, I have to say, the state and the city have realized that they need more community input.

  There’s a lot of talk with all this funding coming down the pipeline through the community block grants and the federal millions of dollars for the post-Sandy construction, there’s a lot of talk about how to use that for community good. How do you create a sort of off-the-grid Red Hook? Or how do you create a community banking situation? It will be interesting because Red Hook could develop in this really weird way where it could attract all these wealthy people, or it could attract these really do-it-for-yourself and scrappy worker people who could potentially live side by side in this interesting way. And I don’t think that type of model exists in New York City right now. I think it exists in other places like Portland where there are really wealthy people but also starving hippies, and they sort of manage to live side by side because they have this singular notion of living off the grid whether you’re a millionaire or you’re not. And it’s almost the same in Vermont where everybody’s there because they want to be close to the land despite how much money they might have. Ideally there might be something like that that emerges out of Red Hook. We’ll see.

  25.

  I’m curious about this inextricable link Gita identified—and lamented—between design and our most negative assumptions about gentrification, so I ask her for examples. She doesn’t hesitate:

  NYU has money coming out of its ears and they have the ugliest buildings going up across the Lower East Side, and instead of making it a beautiful place, it’s the opposite. They could have at least made it a really beautiful neighborhood. I even know those architects who build that stuff—it’s bad.

  In recent years, criticism of New York University’s expansion has come from several places, including its own faculty. Sitting in a former arms factory that the university acquired in 2004, Andrew Ross, professor of sociology and an uncloseted working-class revolutionary agrees with Gita:

  There are many people who are in opposition to the university’s expansion plan—like myself. I don’t think it’s necessary development; it’s debt driven. It’s a debt-driven growth machine, NYU, like many urban universities. We just seem to be that model on steroids. I don’t think there’s a need for it in terms of academic space, and I’m much more in favor of the dispersed campus anyway, I don’t like campuses that are a concentrated cluster. In fact, I think the way that NYU has been quite dispersed and integrated in the city is one of its virtues and more urban universities should be like that.

  I think it’s a very good thing that students are exposed to the variety of urban life and that they don’t live in a bubble. From the point of view of the residents I think it’s better to have exposure to students in small numbers than on one whole block.

  He laughs.

  The more dispersed they are the more they are treated like human beings and fellow residents.

  NYU is one of the three biggest landowners in the city and that’s one of the reasons there’s so much controversy over their expansion plan. Spending $5 billion to put these towers up south of Washington Square in an area that was really ground zero for someone like Jane Jacobs. It was really Jacobs and her peers that saved Washington Square. That’s often seen as a turning point in American urbanism. And NYU had a part to play in all of that. The upshot was NYU took over the area south of the square.

  Universities are being asked to play a much greater role in this city. You know if you think about some of the formulas for turning around urban economies in the last couple decades there was a period when downtown managers were building new sports arenas or convention centers or museum complexes. And every city had to have that downtown. And they weren’t very good economic drivers, at all. Then there was the period of the creative city, and there was the “meds and eds” formula. It’s one that is focused on the kinds of jobs that aren’t likely to disappear. Urban universities and large hospitals aren’t likely to relocate overnight. They’re not going to relocate at all, in fact. So they’re much less risky than recruiting corporations or hi-tech industries. They attract a lot of young creative people who are likely to stay. They bring in a lot of money in terms of research grants. And in return, I think city managers increasingly turn over ad hoc responsibility to universities for their neighborhoods. They’re often the biggest employer in the city—they’re so large, they should be stewards. They don’t often behave like stewards, but they could be stewards of urbanism. I don’t think my university has done a great job of that. But it could do—it’s ideally placed to be a steward of urbanism.

  The problem is when you hand over de facto planning powers, they become so big and powerful that they get anything they want in terms of zoning variations, or permissions for all sorts of expansions, new buildings, and that’s essentially what happens around the country now. Quid pro quo. And so universities have become part of the urban growth machine. It seems counterfactual if you consider that the prestige of the university, the degree should be predicated on a scarcity, not its proliferation.

  With his earring, uncombed shoulder-length hair, and jean-blazer combination, Andrew’s more record producer than academic. He tends to have the energy of someone who just woke up from a nap—slow moving, no wasted movement—and he takes time to slink back into his thoughts before speaking them with a deliberate cadence, marked by a soft lilt from the lowlands of Scotland.

  I’m thinking about my own patch of Manhattan, which is on Hudson Street south of where Jane Jacobs lived, but which is actually a block that sits on a square that has been through many, many different phases of settlement. Some of them res
idential and some industrial. It’s undergone gentrification several times. In fact, St. John’s Park, which is now basically a traffic complex where the Holland Tunnel exits, was a very elegant park in the late eighteenth century. It was originally a plantation that had a tobacco house on it actually. Trinity Church took it over under a patent from the crown in 1705. They still own some of the land there. They’re one of the biggest landowners in New York. So they built a church, which, at the time, was an anchor for gentrification.

  He laughs.

  You build a church and churchgoing people congregate around it. And then they made this private park and it was intended to spur residential development all around the site. It was privately held; there was a board of trustees. They would flood the park in the winter to make a skating rink and open it up to the public. So there was this sort of noblesse oblige.

  Then, of course, the price of land went up and they sold it to this central Hudson River Railroad, to Vanderbilt. He built a huge railroad terminal there, a freight terminal, which was the main freight terminal for his line. The gentry weren’t going to hang around near a freight railway station so they’re moving farther uptown. And if you go and visit now, of course, you’ll find the Holland Tunnel exit has taken over, but it’s surrounded by very affluent converted warehouse loft spaces—some of the most expensive in New York once again. So it’s actually undergone two waves of what some people might call gentrification but of course it’s a term that has a very broad spectrum of interpretations. You could do a whole history of that block and come up with shifting land uses, shifting populations, the whole history of New York in that one block. Who knows, in fifty years time it may once again be a park, or something else—a moon port.

  He laughs.

  People often talk about gentrification being formulaic at this point. Now it’s really studied and cultivated and monitored by the real estate industry and I think that it’s true in certain neighborhoods, you can pretty much see the signs, “We’re at stage two, we’re at stage three, we’re at stage four.” But not all neighborhoods are on the same path of development. I think that’s true of my neighborhood, even though people consider it the home of the gentry, or one of the homes of the gentry in New York.

  I haven’t always lived in Tribeca. I used to rent a loft in SoHo—the spice warehouse is where I used to live. One of my old neighbors, who is a little crazy, claims that she can still smell cardamom in the summer time when it gets too hot. Maybe she can?!

  He laughs and smiles.

  Eventually it became too expensive so I looked for the cheapest loft I could find in downtown Manhattan. That’s the reason that I bought the loft that I currently live in, twenty years ago. And at the time I joked to my friends that if something bad happened to Lower Manhattan, I could just run through the Holland Tunnel. And in fact it was only months after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, so something very bad did happen—and would happen again.

  At the time, in ’93, I got very interested in bombs, the history of bombs in Manhattan. Which is a very interesting history. Most people know about the bombing of the J.P. Morgan building in 1920 but in the 1960s there was a whole spate of bombings, third world and leftist groups. But actually, the real violence doesn’t come in the form of explosions. It is visible spatially. It’s in the slow transition—sometimes much more rapid—the slow flow of capital through the city, block by block. It’s the relentless pursuit of rents, surplus capital. And that’s a form of violence, some theorists of gentrification see it as a form of violence. And you can see it in a lot of neighborhoods. Did I see it in my neighborhood? It’s more difficult to say.

  When I moved to Tribeca there was nothing there that would lead one to believe it would be what it is today—which is a sort of residential adjunct to Wall Street. It’s one of the favorite residential places for the 1 percent. At the time, there were a lot of vacant bombed-out buildings, there were still a lot of artists left living down there. I used to play soccer in the streets. I mean people talked about the gentrification of SoHo at that time but it seemed unlikely that Tribeca would follow that path. And to a large extent it hasn’t because it’s a residential enclave, and the commercial rents are too high now for the kind of shopping mall that is SoHo.

  I never much liked living in Tribeca. I didn’t spend a lot of time there actually for the first decade. Most of my life was just north, most of my social and intellectual life. There wasn’t much in Tribeca that I needed. And then I had kids. If your kids go to the local school, your neighborhood becomes something that’s much more fully integrated in your life. It becomes well populated with people that you not only know but depend upon for all sorts of things. So now the streets of Tribeca are filled with people that I know, mostly from the school. And that was not the case before. The place didn’t change so much as my own particular needs and pathways changed and I became more of a functional resident.

  My kids they go to the public school there now, and most of the families have at least one person who works on Wall Street. And that’s the reality of it. I have to keep my mouth shut a lot of the time.

  He laughs.

  If I know them well enough, they know my politics. And they think that’s cool, to have a radical or left-wing acquaintance.

  He laughs.

  The debate about gentrification among a lot of scholars tends to break down on the production side or the consumption side. How much of it was push, how much of it was pull. How much of it was making an offer you can’t refuse on the part of the real estate industrial complex and how much of it was a “let’s get out of this dirty city.”

  A lot of it is a power struggle, I’m afraid, people vs. profits. But within that broad terrain there are all sorts of models that do soften the conflict and can bring some reason to the outcomes. If you go to the end of this corridor you will see that the blocks on the other side are part of the Cooper Square community plan, which is the first successful community plan in the city, a wonderful example of what happens when you do community planning at the grassroots level.

  Or take a city like Phoenix. There was this real effort to do downtown revitalization, and to do it in an affordable way. The reason I started studying Phoenix was because the artists were playing a role in downtown development. It was a little different from what I’d seen elsewhere. It wasn’t acting as an involuntary agent of gentrification. Artists were trying to seize control over blueprints for downtown development and they’d learned how to become urbanists, and educated themselves in a very admirable way and had become full-time urbanists, urban activists. And they had bought downtown property in areas so they couldn’t be evicted. They had strongholds in place. And then came the housing crash so whatever was happening collapsed. So you can draw conclusions about that. But for me it was a lesson in the unevenness of the landscape. It’s by and large not very prudent to assume that the same development is happening everywhere in American cities. And the worst thing you can do from a New York–centric position is assume that what happens in New York is going to get emulated elsewhere. It just doesn’t happen.

  Despite the protean quality of gentrification as it moves from one city to another, one country to another, there has always been the temptation to cluster cities along ideological or geographic lines. In the early 1960s, academics and politicians presented the idea of a “megalopolis,” an urban development running down the East Coast from Boston to Washington, DC. And in 1967 the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis took the idea even further, predicting that “Ecumenopolis,” an enormous universal city with no boundaries, would cover the earth’s surface—total urbanization of the planet.

  Since leaving office, Bloomberg has played a big role in the C40 climate group of city managers from the world’s big cities. They exchange a lot of policy knowledge. Especially the police forces, the zero-tolerance policies that were pioneered here under Bratton. These things are exchanged and swapped and shared with counterparts in different cities. It’s a fairly smal
l world and with a footprint of globalization being what it is, these cities have much more in common with one another, especially these so-called global cities. New York has a lot more in common with London or Shanghai than it does with Philadelphia at this point. And that’s a kind of rupture of scale and a geographical anomaly, historically speaking. But it’s the world we live in. And the world that a fraction of the highly paid creative class operates in now. So it doesn’t surprise me that a consultancy like Bloomberg’s would set up shop. Richard Florida did it—set up as a consultancy for creative city making—why can’t Bloomberg do it?

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when cities had tired of throwing money into new stadiums and shopping districts, the urban theorist Richard Florida suggested a change in tactics: luring what he calls the creative classes—those working in science, engineering, education, computer programming, research, arts, and media—for capital and cultural growth. These “high bohemians” represent forty million US workers, or 30 percent of the workforce. Citing places like Silicon Valley, Austin, and Seattle, Florida makes a case for these professionals as an ascendant economic force.

  Richard Florida has been very influential in a lot of ways: there’s been a scramble on the part of a lot of Midwestern or second-tier cities trying to turn around struggling economies. They go out and try to attract gay graduate recruits to come to Midwestern cities and the like. I can understand why it would appeal to city managers because it was a very cheap urban formula. It didn’t cost very much. A few bicycle lanes here and fair trade coffee shops there.

  He laughs.

  But it costs nothing even remotely in the same league as what you would have to spend on tax exemptions to attract a corporation. And nothing in terms of public expenditure, nothing to match the stadium-building complex of the ’80s or ’90s. So a very cheap formula—and the prospect of rising land value. I think that was the most attractive thing to city managers—that the creatives would boost the rents and housing prices. Maybe they did for a while, but I don’t think the evidence is in on that. And that trajectory was broken, anyway, by the housing crash.