By Kevin Baker
New York has been my home for more than
forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975,
when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and
bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance
and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did
the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the
systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the
obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the
idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling
excitement that make a city great.
As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it
is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before:
unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a
significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community,
with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its
history, New York is, well, boring.
This is not some new phenomenon but a cancer that’s been
metastasizing on the city for decades now. And what’s happening to New
York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core—is
happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by
tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity;
they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially chartered buses to
work in Silicon Valley, using the city itself as a gigantic
bed-and-breakfast. Boston, which used to be a city of a thousand nooks
and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream
parlors hidden under its elevated, is now one long, monotonous wall of
modern skyscraper. In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the
city in recent years, smoothing out all that was real and organic into a
town of mausoleums for the Trump crowd to revel in.
By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making
them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on
to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so
exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to
improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we
now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any
ability to control the systems we live under.
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Source: Harper's Magazine
