But as the city transformed into an exceedingly safe and exceedingly
expensive place to live over the past two decades, it's not
only the crime and the pervasive decay that have fallen away, but
the close proximity, creating a social commute that echoes and
exacerbates a work commute that, at more than six hours a week,
is the longest in the nation
...
Manhattan, once the center of the world, is not even the center
of the city anymore. Or, at least, it's not the only center.
The peerless urban theorist misunderstood the suburbs and failed to see how gentrification would make urban neighborhoods unaffordable to all but the rich.
"The most successful urban neighborhoods have attracted not the
blue-collar families that she celebrated, but the rich and the young.
The urban vitality that she espoused--and correctly saw as a barometer
of healthy city life--has found new expressions in planned commercial
and residential developments whose scale rivals that of the urban
renewal of which she was so critical. These developments are the work
of real estate entrepreneurs, who were absent from the city described
but loom large today, having long ago replaced planners and our
chief urban strategists."
...
Cities, as Jacobs hoped, have indeed experienced a renaissance,
but not in the form she preferred. To be sure, this revival is
a hell of lot better than the urban dystopia that developed in the years
after Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities first appeared.
But it's time to recognize that we are not seeing a renaissance
of the kind of middle-class urbanity that she loved and championed.
That city has passed into myth, and, unless society changes in very
radical ways, it is never going to come back.
New York Landlords hoping to pay tenants to move out of the city's
1.3 million rent-regulated apartments will face new limitations
on extending offers under measures signed Thursday to rein in a
practice that has come under scrutiny in a roaring real-estate market.
...
Under state laws, vacant rent-stabilized apartments often can be
renovated, deregulated and re-rented at triple the price or more --
$5,200 a month instead of $1,700 for a Manhattan two-bedroom, for example.
Citywide, about 266,000 apartments have been deregulated since 1994.
We did leave our hometown because of all these aspirational New Yorkers. But we didn't leave to get away from these people, exactly. We left because those of us who grew up there were less willing to bear any burden, pay any price, to stay. The dreamers simply outbid us for our New York, and in the process, they created a city we no longer loved quite so much. This is apt to make such musings hard reading for us.