Fifteen years ago, the City of Atlanta acquired a long-term lease to the site of the former Bellwood Quarry and began plans for a 280-acre park. Westside Park, which is scheduled to open next year, was supposed to spur economic growth in the lower-income areas around the park. And Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms appears to fear it is doing exactly that. Bottoms has imposed a 180-day moratorium on new development around the park, citing fears of gentrification. "A key pillar to the administration's comprehensive affordable housing plan is ensuring long-term residents are not priced out of the neighborhoods they have built," said Bottoms. "We know that every permit triggers some form of change in these communities, and it is of the utmost importance that development is carried out in a deliberate, fair and thoughtful manner."
The post Brickbat: A Change in Plans appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"For people who have lived in Austin, Texas, for more than a few years," John Langmore's Fault Lines: Portraits of East Austin starts, "two emotions often compete for dominance: how sweet it remains to call Austin home, and how quickly Austin is changing."
For my neighborhood that is especially true. In 1928, the city government enacted segregationist policies meant to push black and Latino families away from white neighborhoods. In the 1930s, federal government redlining cemented this further. Now East Austin—where the minority population put down roots—is gentrifying. Langmore's book captures essay and photo vignettes of how things used to be: joyous Juneteenth celebrations; a house with a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the yard and a rooster clucking in the driveway; tricked-out slab cars with elbow wheels and glossy paint; tortilla factories that have since been shuttered.
"What I fear most is that one day my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will never know that a thriving black community ever existed in East Austin," Wilhelmina Delco, who moved to the area in 1957, laments. Delco's essay describes how the community used to pool money to help pay for wreaths for neighbors' funerals and how elders would give teenagers advice on picking a college. In another essay, resident Johnny Limon says his dad would find plumbers at bars when their house needed work, trading tire repair services at his shop for their labor. Limon mourns the human cost of rising property taxes and the fact that families can't afford to live close to each other anymore.
Fault Lines is not angry or bitter; it's a love letter to a bygone Austin and a reminder of how complex the causes and effects of gentrification can be.
The post Fault Lines appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A major housing reform bill failed in California yesterday. Again.
The bill, SB 50, would have allowed denser housing construction near transit stops and job centers and would have legalized four-unit homes on almost all residential parcels statewide. The California Senate voted 18–15 in its favor, but the bill needed a majority, not just a plurality, of the 40-member Senate to pass. A number of lawmakers were absent or abstained, so the legislation is basically dead. (There's a chance that it could be brought up for a second vote today, but that is very unlikely.)
This is the third year in a row that a version of this bill has failed to pass.
The arguments against SB 50 on the Senate floor were varied, with senators saying it would encourage building in wildfire zones, spur gentrification, take too much control from cities, and/or demonize owners of single-family homes.
Throughout the legislative process, the bill's author, Sen. Scott Weiner (D–San Francisco), kept amending his legislation to appeal to his bill's two biggest critics: local governments and "equity groups." To appease the latter, developers benefiting from the bill's upzoning provisions would have to rent out as many as 25 percent of the new units they'd build to low-income renters at below-market rates. Another provision in the bill would have delayed the bill's effect for five years in "sensitive communities" and prevented the development of new apartments on land that hosted tenants in the last seven years.
In January, Wiener amended SB 50 again to create more flexibility for local governments. So long as they zoned for an equivalent amount of new housing, they wouldn't have to follow the bill's specific requirements about upzoning near transit and job centers.
That was enough to get a sizable number of local officials and local governments on board, including a lot of tightly zoned Silicon Valley suburbs. But Weiner failed to secure the support of a single Los Angeles–area senator. And equity advocates continued to give the legislation the cold shoulder. They argue that Wiener's legislation, by allowing for the development of new market-rate housing, will only allow unaffordable luxury developments being built, doing nothing to help low-income renters.
Last week, a coalition of these organizations sent a letter to Wiener announcing their opposition to the bill. SB 50 "will exacerbate the housing challenges experienced by low-income people, people of color, and other vulnerable people," they wrote.
The concern is understandable but misplaced. It is true that new market-rate buildings will be unaffordable to a majority of renters. But even expensive market-rate housing improves housing affordability for everyone. The more high-end apartments that are built, the fewer high-income earners will be going around bidding up the price of older, lower-rent units. That expands the number of moderately priced units available to people with incomes, helping to keep rents stable.
This process is known as filtering, and it is the foundation of the YIMBY argument for allowing the construction of more market-rate housing as a solution to California's housing crisis.
Some affordable housing advocates, including many of SB 50's critics, argue that the filtering process takes a long time and doesn't ultimately help those at the bottom of the income ladder. Yet recent research suggests that filtering can have an almost immediate, positive effect on affordability. And if the pace of filtering is the problem, the solution is to allow even more market-rate development, speeding the process along.
The post For the Third Year in a Row, California Legislators Have Killed a Promising Housing Reform Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Joey Mucha is a three-time Skee-Ball national champion and the owner of Joey the Cat, an arcade rental, repair, and events company that he started in 2010 from his one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
After winning some prize money, Mucha was able to purchase his own fleet of Skee-Ball machines and other arcade games. In 2014, he purchased a former car repair shop and turned it a private event space and a place for fixing broken arcade games.
In April of 2019, he decided to convert his space into a restaurant, bar, and arcade. His property was already zoned for this use, but despite following all applicable codes and regulations, Mucha still had to argue his case at a public Planning Commission hearing in November. His project was jeopardized by a process known as discretionary review, in which any member of the public, in exchange for a $600 fee, can ask San Francisco's Planning Commission to hold a hearing to review building permits.
So far in 2019, the commission has publicly heard 91 requests for discretionary review. Since every building permit in the city is subject to this process, it can add significantly to the construction costs.
"Commissioners are empowered to reject most any permit, regardless of whether it satisfies the underlying zoning code," wrote Reason's Christian Britschgi in a piece about Mucha's fight.
While Mucha did end up getting permission to move forward with his renovations, the story of how the project was nearly stopped, and what Mucha endured in order to prevail, underscores how even the most benign land-use changes in San Francisco can be hampered by red tape.
Produced by John Osterhoudt. Additional camera by James Marsh and Zach Weissmueller.
Music Credit: Sadstorm by MADGOHAPPY
Fiona Ma Photo Credit: Randy Pench/ZUMA Press/Newscom
The post Activists vs. One Man's Skee-Ball Arcade: How Red Tape Is Ruining San Francisco appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gentrification is often condemned for forcing poor people out of their homes and businesses, dismantling long-established communities. But what happens if a property's owners don't change, and in fact stand to richly profit from hipsters who want to sell each other rotisserie chickens and craft beer?
This is the situation unfolding in Holly, my neighborhood in East Austin. Lou's Bodega opened a few weeks ago at 1900 East Cesar Chavez Street. This rapidly gentrifying street is home to a handful of dive bars, art studios, and shops; south of Cesar Chavez, much of the neighborhood is residential. The pattern is the same here as it is all over the country: Lines of sleek new houses inhabited mostly by white, childless couples are springing up next to smaller cottages built in the 1950s and '60s. Holly is historically Hispanic and working-class, with a still-bustling Catholic church, Cristo Rey, that's almost exclusively attended by Latinos.
If the proprietors of Lou's thought they could move into their new spot without generating controversy, they were mistaken. The spot was formerly the home of Leal's Tires. (The tire shop relocated to a nearby East 7th Street location. In a nice-guy and/or PR-savvy move, Lou's provides free coffee to its employees.) The real estate where Lou is located is still owned by members of the Leal family, Emenencia and Abel Rodriguez, according to a spokesperson from McGuire Moorman Hospitality, the design, development, and management company responsible for Lou's. So the Rodriguezes are still profiting from their stake in the neighborhood, and the tire shop employees are moving just a few blocks away.
That didn't stop around 50 protesters from voicing their complaints at Lou's on January 26. "Not a dime, not a cent, for hipsters trying to raise my rent," they shouted. Organized by the activist group Defend our Hoodz, the protesters took issue with Lou's use of the word "bodega," given that Lou's is not a Puerto Rican-owned corner store (as the term originated), but rather a purveyor of decidedly bougie rotisserie chickens, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes, and craft beer.
Writing on Facebook, the group demanded "that Lou's Bodega immediately end any use of Chicano and indigenous imagery in their branding, whether on merchandise, packaging or on their website. This includes their 'woman warrior' tote bags, their T-shirts with 'Bienvenidos' on them, and indigenous patterns on hats and elsewhere."
The activists were also angry at Lou's for keeping the Aztec warrior murals on the front and side of the building, a relic from the Leal's days. Had Lou's removed the Aztec art, of course, neighborhood preservation activists could've complained that wealthy hipsters have no appreciation for the unique character of Holly and East Cesar Chavez. But they kept it, so they get to be taken to task for culturally appropriating Aztec imagery.
The group also wants Lou's to stop selling the beers Pacifico and Modelo, both owned by Constellation Brands. This complaint has more to it: Constellation is trying to open a $1.5 billion brewery in Baja California, where the grassroots group Mexicali Resiste claims the company could deplete the local water supply, using more than three liters of water for every liter of beer produced by the brewery. NPR reports that the activists fighting the project "claim to have been harassed and threatened, beaten and had their offices burglarized."
Taking a broader view, it's hard to get a sense of what the protesters' ideal outcome for the neighborhood looks like. McGuire Moorman Hospitality reports that violent threats have been made against the restaurant's owners, and the spot has been vandalized repeatedly in the few weeks that it's been open.
In the past, the same activist group has protested the development of a cat café a few blocks further west on Cesar Chavez. The group also exercised its First Amendment rights by protesting an art gallery opening this past November, but the situation turned less free speech-y and more violent when an activist assaulted a 68-year-old man.
It's hard to say to what degree hipsters are, in fact, raising rents. In many gentrifying neighborhoods, the original occupants, if they own their property, are able to sell their houses for far more profit than they expected on purchase. The process can produce problems—in some cities, newly arrived whites have started calling the police over "criminal activity where none exists"—but neighborhoods becoming more diverse isn't in itself a bad thing.
And the complaints about the term "bodega" and the Aztec murals are absurd. Corner stores and delis are hardly an original concept, and Lou's is riffing on that by selling whole meals, beer, smokes, and gum to go. And keeping the murals is a sign that the new shop is trying to respect the neighborhood culture rather than erase it. If we can only enjoy art created by people of our same ancestry, we need to seriously rethink a lot of things, starting with museums.
When Eater Austin pressed Defend our Hoodz "for examples of businesses they felt were considerate of the neighborhood," a representative responded, "The only way to begin to stop gentrification is through mass organizing and people building power outside of capitalist institutions."
Hard to know where to eat, then.
The post Is Gentrification Still Bad If Local Owners Profit from White Hipsters? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A deadly fire in San Francisco's Mission District has spawned a heated battle between a landowner looking to replace his burned down building with market-rate apartments and local activists willing to go to some extreme measures to stop that from happening.
On October 11, San Francisco business owner Hawk Lou filed a permit application to build a nine-story, 129-unit apartment building— of which 24 units would be rented out at below market rates—on a vacant lot he owns at the corner of 22nd and Mission Streets. This project would replace the three-story, 47-unit retail-residential building that had previously occupied the site before it was destroyed by a 2015 fire.
A net gain of 82 units in housing-starved San Francisco would strike many as a good thing. For local community activists, it's wholly unacceptable.
After the 2015 fire—which left one-person dead, and displaced some 60 mostly low-income tenants and 27 businesses—many in the Mission District nursed hopes that the building would be sold to a community non-profit who would then rebuild it more or less as it was, while also guaranteeing the displaced residents a right to return to their old home.
What Lou is proposing would essentially shut the door on this possibility, while allowing for even more tenants to take up residence in the neighborhood.
On Monday, less than two weeks after Lou filed permits with the city, some 40 people met to discuss how best to stop this project from ever getting off the ground. According to news site Mission Local, their plans "boil down to, essentially, making Lou's life hell so that he will come to the bargaining table."
Ideas for turning up the pressure on Lou included holding a press conference opposing the project, picketing a meat market Lou owns, and even going door-to-door in Lou's neighborhood attempting to shame him into abandoning his plans.
All three options met with group approval, according to Mission Local.
Before any of that happens however, a group of community members will "go pay him a visit," says Roberto Hernández, a prominent Mission activist who attended that Monday meeting, to Reason. "We're hoping and we're praying that [Lou] will come to his senses and recognize that you got to do the right thing."
Hernández levelled a number of charges against Lou, including that he kept his previous building in a poor state of repair, and that he had made a verbal agreement with the late Mayor Ed Lee shortly after the fire to repair the burned structure. (San Francisco law allows rent-controlled tenants displaced by fire the option of returning to their old units after they've been renovated.)
Lou did not respond to a request for comment.
Hopes that the previous structure could be saved were dashed after two subsequent fires broke out at the already charred building. The city ordered it completely demolished in February 2016.
This likely shut the door on any legal right Lou's former tenants have to return to a now destroyed building. Lou has also rejected offers from local non-profit Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) to buy the property, opting to build a market rate building instead. (Market rate units can be rented out to anyone at any price. In contrast, affordable units of the kind built by MEDA are heavily discounted and reserved for tenants falling below a certain income threshold.)
This has inflamed fears that a new, pricy building will spur gentrification in the predominately Hispanic, but rapidly changing, Mission District.
"We've had 10,000 people evicted from the Mission in the last seven years because of all the tech companies moving into San Francisco," says Hernández.
A recent study from a U.C. Berkeley graduate student who looked at formal eviction notices in San Francisco dating back to 2003 found no evidence that new construction led to a rise in evictions in the Mission District.
Missions activists' opposition to the project has not been mollified by its inclusion of 24 below-market rate units, given that these would be assigned by lottery, not reserved for the displaced tenants who previously lived at the site.
In addition to the squeeze that activists can put on Lou personally, San Francisco's permitting process gives ample opportunity to delay, appeal, or condition a development's approval. These tactics have been deployed by Mission activists to delay otherwise zone-compliant projects for years—including San Francisco's famed 'historic laundromat'—and to otherwise wring onerous concessions out of developers.
It's possible that using this process against Lou will eventually convince him to withdraw his project or otherwise alter it to make it more politically palpable. It's also possible that he will choose to fight demands made of him by activists, which would likely see the project end up in litigation.
All that can be said for certain is that while this battle plays out, the site at 22nd and Mission will sit vacant, housing no one.
The post San Francisco Activists Irate That Developer Wants To Replace Burned Out Apartment Building With—Wait for It—More Apartments appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Amid an outpouring of protests from New Orleans strippers and their supporters, city regulators have opted against a plan to limit the number of French Quarter strip clubs to one per blockface.
The plan, proposed by the New Orleans City Council last year, would have capped the number of strip clubs in the area at 14 and prevented any new venues from opening on the same blockface as an existing club.
At a public hearing on Tuesday, the City Planning Commission voted in favor of a modified proposal drafted by city planners, who rejected lawmakers' per-block limits and recommended only a "soft cap" of 14 live adult entertainment venues around the Bourbon Steet area (which the city calls the "Vieux Carré Entertainment District").
The proposal leaves open "the possibility of more than 14 venues being allowed to operate so long as any applicant businesses above that number receive conditional-use approval," explains The Times-Picayune. And it "does not outright recommend changes to French Quarter zoning rules related to strip clubs" but "offers up recommendations 'if' the council decides to move forward with enacting changes."
The commission explicitly rejected the idea that limiting the number of strip clubs in the area was a good crime-reduction strategy. Any "negative secondary impacts…cannot only be attributed to the concentration of" strip clubs, it stated in a report:
Staff believes that the nature of Bourbon Street and particularly the Vieux Carré Entertainment District is in itself a cause for higher crime because of the concentration of entertainment uses including not only [strip clubs] but mostly bars, live performance venues, and live entertainment, and the concentration of visitors drawn to these uses in a small geographic area. Because of this particular characteristic, staff believes that there is nothing inherent to [strip clubs in the district] that causes crime.
Writer and dancer Reese Piper, who tweeted live updates from yesterday's hearing, said the room was "packed with dancers," who spoke out against the proposed caps and recent police actions against the clubs. "In New Orleans, women of the night do not go quietly," one speaker told the commission.
"What happens in New Orleans matters to citizens everywhere," said Lyn Archer of the Bourbon Alliance of Responsible Entertainers.
Speaker with BARE asked for those in crowd who stand with dancers to stand up. Whole room stood up. pic.twitter.com/xB8UyJQLvN
— The_GambitLIVE (@The_GambitLIVE) February 6, 2018
No one at yesterday's meeting spoke out in favor of a strip club cap.
"In New Orleans, ladies of the night will NOT go quietly into the night!" witnessing stripper power in full force at this CPC meeting pic.twitter.com/bQ3lHvp0vN
— Beck (@fictionalbeck) February 6, 2018
But the city HEARD us. They heard us in the streets and at their meetings and it made a difference. They amended their proposal and agreed that "adult entertainment does not increase crime"
— Reese Piper (@TheNudeReporter) February 6, 2018
soft victory today with CPC approved recommendations: reducing club numbers by attrition, no limit of one block per block face, holding a soft cap at 14, using a conditional use process to go above 14. No true win until they leave us alone! #LetUsDanceNola
— BARE NOLA (@bare_nola) February 7, 2018
It's now up to the New Orleans City Council to decided whether it will incorporate the planning commission's proposal into the city's Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance.
The post New Orleans Nixes Plan for Strict Cap on French Quarter Strip Clubs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just in time for Mardi Gras, strippers and their allies have been taking to the New Orleans streets to protest recent police operations at French Quarter strip clubs. The investigations and raids, conducted under the pretense of stopping sex trafficking, have led to the temporary shutdown of eight clubs and are seen by many as part of the city's plans for a more gentrified Bourbon Street.
"Fuck the cops and fuck the raids, all we want is to get paid," chanted some protesters last Wednesday, as Mayor Mitch Landrieu and city officials detailed Mardi Gras preparations at a press conference in the background.
The raids—a joint project of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) and the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control—took place over a 10-day period in January. They were the result of months of undercover operations in late 2017.
New Orleans authorities did not find evidence of underage prostitution or human trafficking, their stated reason for the investigations. The worst they turned up was some dancers offering undercover cops a little more than just a lap dance, and a few instances per club of entertainers baring their breasts or genitals. But this was enough to revoke the businesses' liquor permits, using a law that prohibits alcohol-serving establishments from "permitting any prostitute to frequent the licensed premises or to solicit patrons for prostitution."
As of last Friday, four clubs (Scores, Stilettos, Rick's Sporting Saloon, and Rick's Cabaret) had reached resolutions with the state that would allow them to reopen and serve alcohol again pending a several-week suspension and a $5,000–$7,500 fine. But one club, Temptations, will have its liquor permit permanently revoked. The remaining three are scheduled for hearings this week.
The closures put a lot of dancers and other club employees out of work during the city's biggest tourism season of the year.
Club workers and their allies showed up during a city press conference on January 31 to protest the closures, which they said will hurt them economically and put more people at risk of violence and exploitation.
"Chants of 'Let us dance!' drowning out the press conference," tweeted one attendee.
The next night, hundreds showed up for a protest that wound through the streets of the French Quarter, chanting things like "Keep your tyranny off our titties" and wielding homemade signs. "You Are Making Us Suffer Not Keeping Us Safe" read one. "I May Strip My Clothes But You Stripped My Rights," said another.
Other slogans included "Stop Fucking With Our Livelihood," "Closing Our Clubs Will Only Exacerbate the Sex Trafficking Problem In Our City," "Decriminalize Sex Work Now," "#BourbonStNotSesameSt," and (my personal favorite) "Twerking Class Hero."
"Starting on Bourbon Street near numerous still-shuttered clubs, the protest [ended with a rally] where strippers shared stories of the hardships they've faced without work since the raids and denounced what they said is politically motivated enforcement," reported The New Orleans Advocate. They "questioned why the raids were timed at the start of Carnival and argued that a crackdown on 'vice' in the French Quarter is an attack on the business that fuels the city's tourism industry." And they criticized the city for fighting fake sex trafficking at the clubs when there were plenty of sex workers on the streets who could genuinely use some help.
"While the protest largely focused on the recent raids, it also touched on other issues, including a planned City Planning Commission hearing next week on whether to cap the number of adult businesses in the Quarter, plus a state ban on strippers under the age of 21 that is being challenged in federal court," the Advocate noted.
The City Planning Commission is considering a cap on the number of strip clubs allowed in the French Quarter and ways to reduce the number of existing clubs. Under the proposed motion, drafted by the New Orleans City Council last October, a new strip club could not open in the place of a closing one if there was another strip club on the same block.
"[The police] laughed and said. 'You lost your right to decency when you became a stripper.' I looked at him and was like, 'Every person has the right to decency.'"
-Anonymous NOLA dancer @NOPDNews https://t.co/EFEVjbIOyL— BARE NOLA (@bare_nola) January 29, 2018
The city has justified all this by citing concerns about human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
"The people of New Orleans have been told repeatedly that the months-long investigation and outpouring of law enforcement resources was necessary to uncover widespread sex trafficking in the strip clubs on Bourbon," said Michelle Rutherford, legal adviser for Bourbon Alliance of Responsible Entertainers, in a statement. Yet "neither the undercover investigation nor the raids revealed any instances of trafficking or exploitation of dancers or other women in the clubs."
You wouldn't know that to hear the city authorities talk. NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison cooed last week after the raids about how his department, alcohol regulators, and state police had "worked together over a period of several months to gather intelligence and build strong cases against criminals using these clubs as a hub for illegal activity." City cops are "committed to keeping Bourbon Street and our entire city free of criminal activity," Harrison said.
"Many see strip clubs as a symptom of the city's dark underbelly, a place of exploitation and abuse," wrote dancer Reese Piper in an op-ed on the raids. "But to me, they represent student loan payments, education and freedom. For the hundreds of people working in the clubs, the crackdowns are a threat to our livelihoods and survival."
For all the months of undercover investigation, ample taxpayer-funded trips to the strip club, and the myriad raids, the only actual violations the clubs were cited for include a handful of dancers per club offering to engage in paid sex acts with undercover police and/or engaging in "lewd acts" such as briefly baring their full breasts or caressing a patron's clothed genitals. At a few clubs, dancers also offered to share or sell marijuana and cocaine with undercover officers.
At Hunk Oasis, for instance, two dancers are accused of flashing their genitals at patrons and one dancer sold a small amount of marijuana to an undercover officer.
At Hustler's Barely Legal Club, officers were allegedly solicited for prostitution six times during their month of visits, saw dancers "encouraging the touching of their [clothed] genitals" by customers on two occasions, and saw employees baring their breasts or genitals five times.
At Rick's Cabaret, officers were allegedly solicited for prostitution five times, flashed four times, and offered a bump of cocaine once during their multiple visits.
These are the sorts of things—done discretely by individual actors—that cost these clubs their liquor licenses, weeks of business, and thousands of dollars apiece in fines. (If widescale sex trafficking had shown up, it might be hard to argue that club management knew nothing. But how the heck are they supposed to know whether a dancer briefly bares her breasts to a customer in a private room?)
This all highlights how arbitrary rules like anti-lewdness laws and strip club regulations can be. A dancer can grind on someone's lap legally but crosses a line if her hand brushes over the customer's clothed penis. She may wear the tiniest of bikinis, but must never expose her nipples for even a second. These are silly distinctions to begin with, made even sillier by the fact that New Orleans cops would spend months of undercover operations enforcing them—especially in a neighborhood where curbside flashing for beads and drinks is commonplace.
The post 'Keep Your Tyranny Off Our Titties,' Say New Orleans Strippers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The New Brooklyn: What It Takes To Bring a City Back, by Kay S. Hymowitz, Rowman & Littlefield, 198 pages, $27
Some decades ago, the great divide in New York City culture was between uptown and downtown. The former contained the prominent museums, the commercial publishers, and the WASP establishment. The latter held the less established artists and writers, the best galleries for selling recent art, and the independent intellectuals. Uptown New Yorkers often took pride in never going downtown, where people lived in shabbier lodgings, often renovated from factories. Those of us residing downtown, as I did from 1966 to 2010, thought we might get a nosebleed if we traveled north of 14th Street.
Toward the end of the last century, as downtown Manhattan became slicker, uptown people and institutions started to move downtown, often creating replicas of the areas they had left in a process commonly called gentrification. SoHo, the downtown neighborhood south of Houston Street, started as an industrial slum but became within 40 years a populous artists' colony and then a high-end shopping mall. Kay S. Hymowitz's The New Brooklyn describes how, in the late 20th century, a comparable gentrification developed across the East River in Brooklyn, a borough that had previously been a bedroom community for people who couldn't afford Manhattan.
The crucial truth of this sort of gentrification is that it's essentially extragovernmental. Politicians can't encourage it, because it starts with decisions made by individuals about where they want to live, often renovating newly purchased buildings for themselves and their partners, legal or informal. Developers, who by definition build for others, sometimes follow; other times, not. Governments customarily acknowledge gentrification at the behest of developers and voting residents, who are often in conflict with each other. In SoHo, the most extraordinary concentration of artistic excellence in American history wasn't "planned"—not by individuals and not by any public agency. Major developers never entered SoHo proper because some artists campaigned early to have it officially declared a "historic district" whose architectural integrity couldn't be violated. (The Trump SoHo hotel is actually several blocks west of SoHo proper, exploiting the neighborhood's fame at another address.)
The central setting of The New Brooklyn is Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Hymowitz and her family moved during the 1980s. Running slightly downhill from magnificent Prospect Park to the once-polluted Gowanus Canal, it was a century ago a mostly Irish working-class neighborhood filled with uniform-looking handsome brownstones arrayed on long streets.
Into Park Slope after 1980 moved young urban professionals, customarily called yuppies, who, 'tis said, couldn't afford the similar housing found on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They renovated the brownstones, often quite elegantly and sometimes idiosyncratically, as they occupied the streets running down from the park. The lower the number of the nearby crossing avenues (running down from No. 8), the less classy the side-street housing. Different subway lines could get Park Slope residents into Manhattan within 30 minutes.
While this story of What It Takes To Bring a City Back, to quote the book's subtitle, is a good and true account for Park Slope, Hymowitz appears to know less about other Brooklyn neighborhoods with slightly different histories. Just east of there, on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, is Prospect Heights, which had fewer white people than Park Slope; east of it is Crown Heights, which is still occupied by West Indians and ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews.
Well north is Boerum Hill, which had obstacles in ominous public-housing projects absent from Park Slope. Curiously, Hymowitz thinks the novelist L.J. Davis, whose 1971 book A Meaningful Life described an early Brooklyn renovation, resided in Park Slope when he actually lived in Boerum Hill.
Yet another part of Brooklyn, this one north of the active downtown area, is Williamsburg, which attracted artists who might have gone to SoHo before prices there suddenly escalated in 1980. Williamsburg offered artists empty factory buildings that were scarce in Park Slope and Boerum Hill. (Hymowitz notes that between 1950 and 2000, the number of blue-collar jobs in NYC declined from 1,000,000 to 43,000, leaving behind many empty industrial spaces now called lofts.) Indicatively, Hymowitz fails to mention the art galleries, once so populous here, perhaps because she doesn't know about them or, since they were scarce in her Park Slope, because she cannot recognize their importance in gentrification.
Though gentrification displaces people, she notes that the urban working class consists of apartment renters who are as inherently mobile as people in their 20s: Both are prepared to relocate to cheaper housing. Another truth about gentrification that she doesn't mention is that fearsome neighborhoods can be self-policing. One reason that my own Brooklyn neighborhood is not as foreboding as it used to be is that the bad guys have gone, if not to jail, at least elsewhere. During my own years here, a West Indian-Panamanian who worked evening security with his uniform suit and tie would come down my street most afternoons screaming Spanish epithets at the drug dealers operating out of a bodega and a cigar store. Now they're gone, and he's quiet.
While this book's chapters about Sunset Park and Bedford-Stuyvesant are informative, Hymowitz doesn't seem to know anything about Bushwick, which has become the favorite for artists and art lovers born after, say, 1980. The development of this "New Brooklyn" is yet more remarkable and surprising, because the 'hood resisted the efforts of urban planners for so long. What the wise guys couldn't imagine, and were slow to recognize, is that a semi-industrial neighborhood far from any large park or waterfront—as geographically distant from Park Slope as it is from Manhattan—could attract urban pioneers prepared to purchase and renovate.
The City of New York responded to these developments in the early 2000s by refurbishing the Canarsie subway line, now called the L-train, that services Bushwick. (This also benefited the developers who built high-end high-rise apartments along Williamsburg's coast on the East River.) In my 2014 book Artists' SoHo, I suggest that the current successor to SoHo is not a single circumscribed neighborhood but areas near stations along this L-train, most of which are east of Williamsburg. Now that its western precincts have become more expensive, I think gentrification will continue in Bushwick east of the Morgan Avenue stop, which has been for several years now the outpost of art galleries that have survived.
It might even reach my own (mostly Latino) neighborhood, which is four subway stops farther east, although one discouraging factor on my immediate avenue is a huge automobile junkyard with spare parts for the many small car-repair shops that constitute the principal business around here. A second obstacle is the presence, opposite the junkyard, of a vivero—a store traditionally selling live fowl. This one also offers live winsome sheep and goats, thanks to a young halal butcher in residence, and it stinks into the street, to put it mildly.
Jeuri Live Poultry Inc. has occupied its single-story building for decades, so it is likely to stay put until its customers for very fresh meat evaporate. (Free market rules.) Meanwhile, the owner of the junkyard told me recently, as he was closing his outer fence, that no developer has ever made him an offer for his land, even though the height of his piled wrecks has visibly declined over the past few years.
Conversely, my 'hood might mark an Old Brooklyn—an outlier of modest two-story residences between factories (and a mammoth Amazon distribution center), all of which resist development. Just east of me is a huge cemetery, which can't be violated. Either way, whatever happens, the city government can't move us.
The post From SoHo to Bushwick appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The hippies didn't much like the Beatniks and they really hated the punks. The punks didn't much like the hippies and they really hated the hardcore kids. So it's been this cycle of bohemians hating each other," says Ada Calhoun, author of the acclaimed book St. Mark's is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street.
A native of the four-block-stretch in Manhattan's East Village which has served as the nation's capital of the counterculture for more than a hundred years, Calhoun spoke with Reason TV about her book which lovingly details the endless creative destruction that has kept St. Mark's Place a vibrant home for everyone from early 20th century anarchists to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, to the punk rockers of the CBGBs era, to the hardcore kids and skaters of the 80s, to the lamented NYU students of today.
In an area where the only constant is upheaval, Calhoun thinks it's "sweet" that every generation of cultural iconoclasts that have set up shop on St. Mark's is certain their time was the only "authentic" time, and that the area is still a "magical" place for young people even today.
Runtime about seven minutes.
Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Jim Epstein with help from Dan Rogenstein.
Music: "Dirt" by Jahzzar
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notification when new material goes live.
The post America's Hippest Street: "A Cycle of Bohemians Hating Each Other" appeared first on Reason.com.
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The Atlantic right now has one of the world's great hell-no headlines, by which I mean a headline ending in a question mark whose only proper answer is a four-letter word followed by "no." Ready for it?
Jesus Christ on a (small-batch, organically hand-crafted) popsicle stick, what the living Fletch is wrong with you people?
The article focuses on a group called Right to the City, a "national alliance of community-based organizations that since 2007 has made it its mission to fight 'gentrification and the displacement of low-income people of color.'" These allies, inspired by French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, reckon that gentrification is
the result of a "systemic" effort to drive up profit margins for real-estate developers. Through rezonings, tax abatements for developers, and the privatization of public spaces, local governments and federal agencies often work to change low-income neighborhoods at the encouragement of developers, they argue.
It is the resulting displacement of people who can't afford increased rents that, in the eyes of these activists, amounts to a human-rights violation.
I mean, why not a war crime? Or perhaps some light genocide?
New York, like a lot of expensive progressive cities, has some of the most "systemic" pro-renter policies (or intended pro-renter policies) in the country, the results of which include artificially suppressed housing stock, sky-high rents wherever markets are allowed to set prices (to compensate for losses where government manages prices), and of course a whole lotta millionaire gentrifiers holding onto cheapo apartments. But forget the policy, can we talk about the language here? And the assumption that those who pay rents for shelter or commerce have an enforceable "right" to have those rents encased in amber? Here's how you arrive at such a fanciful place:
The UN Declaration of Human Rights already asserts that everyone has the right to be protected against "interference with his… home." Lenina Nadal, the communications director for Right to the City, says the group hopes to build on this idea. "It is an ideal time to expand the idea that inhabitants not only have a right to their home, a decent, sustainable home," she said, "but also to the community they created in their city."
Now I'm confused. Isn't rent control "interference with" the owner and sometimes inhabitants of that home? (Example: I rent a floor in a house owned and occupied by my landlords, in a rapidly gentfrifying Brooklyn neighborhood.) Isn't one of the characteristics of gentrifiers that they help "create" community and improvements thereof? Do they have a "right" to that community after a certain amount of time, or will they be shipped off to The Hague?
The best bits in the article, though, are the to-be-sure sentences. Like these:
The organization is up against the fact that there isn't even a consensus that gentrification is bad in the first place, much less bad enough to be classified as a human-rights violation. What some see as gentrification, others see as revitalization.
You don't say.
(Hat tip to Brooklyn human-rights criminal Scott Ross.)
The post Brooklyn Idiots Claim Gentrification Is a 'Human Rights Violation' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For decades, liberals complained that American society is segregated because rich, white people don't want to live in ethnically-mixed neighborhoods. Sometimes, liberals had a point.
From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called the neighborhoods "blighted" and moved many of the poor into rent-subsidized apartment complexes called "projects." Many quickly became slums.
Now times have changed. Some rich, white people want to move into poorer, non-white neighborhoods because they like diversity (and cheaper real estate). So today the newcomers are attacked by liberals because they cause "gentrification."
Movie director Spike Lee, who lives in Brooklyn, said gentrifiers behave almost like "Columbus and kill off the Native Americans." Of course, the new gentrifiers don't actually kill anyone, but because their arrival often leads to rising real estate values, critics complain that they drive poor people out of the neighborhood.
Two women in Brooklyn got so angry about it, they pulled out a gun, forced two white people out of an apartment and moved in (they were later arrested).
Columbia urban planning professor Stacey Sutton calls gentrification a "manifestation of inequality" that may "fundamentally alter the culture and character of the neighborhood" in ways that hurt the poor.
Yet her own school did something worse. Columbia colluded with politicians to use eminent domain law to take pieces of the Harlem neighborhood that surrounds Columbia. In court, the school argued that it had the right to take neighbors' land because it would "benefit West Harlem."
Who owns the land is something that ought to be decided not by government but by free people making their own decisions about where they wish to live. When gentrification happens that way, spontaneously, price rises are often accompanied by drops in crime, new job opportunities and better connections to the rest of the culture. What the left calls "gentrification" is often called "improvement" by people who live there.
Another Columbia urban planning professor, Lance Freeman, found to his surprise that gentrification didn't even mean significant displacement of the previous population. In his book "There Goes the 'Hood," Freeman writes, "poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods."
That's because gentrification often means the neighborhood gets safer and more interesting. That's something the old residents enjoy as much as new ones.
The Economist reports that a 2008 study of census data found "no evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighborhoods" and found that black incomes "soared" in gentrifying neighborhoods.
That doesn't stop some people—often rich, white liberals—from complaining that gentrification destroys the quaintness of the neighborhood. They sound almost like the people who think that the developing world should never be sullied by modern technology. Actually, sometimes the same people make both arguments.
In San Francisco, some longtime residents got so angry about Google employees moving in that they surrounded Google employee shuttle buses, waving protest signs.
It's a fight between hippies and tech geeks, with the hippies calling for regulations to prevent change. Such regulations have perverse effects, however. They lead to long waits for building permits and subsidies for housing that end up getting used by the well-connected and rich.
When regulation makes it harder to build or to alter old buildings, the effect is higher costs and reduced choices, which only makes things harder for the poor. Regulation saves some old things people like, but those people will never even know what new things they missed out on.
If nothing like gentrification ever happened in the world, we all still would be living in the same caves our ancestors lived in thousands of years ago. I say, let free people keep transforming the neighborhood.
© Copyright 2015 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Gentrify! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Park Slope cops have been ticketing and seizing dollar vans since January, a move activists are calling a racially motivated blow against drivers trying to make a living.
Prospect Heights' 78th police precinct has cited nine drivers and seized 14 of the vans, which these days charge $2 for sometimes-wild rides along major thoroughfares such as Atlantic and Flatbush avenues…
Dollar van drivers and company owners unsuccessfully lobbied to get a shot at the 6,000 livery-cab street hail permits the city sold off for $1,500 each starting in 2012. All but 10 of the permits have been sold, according to city records.
To read the rest—which includes quotes from cops who say the vans are unsafe and quotes from activists who say the crackdown is state-enforced gentrification—go here. My sympathies are entirely with the dollar vans' drivers and their clientele, who are challenging the New York taxi cartel from one end while Uber and similar companies chip away from another direction. Let a thousand transit flowers bloom, especially the most inexpensive and flexible kinds.
The post Brooklyn Cops Crack Down on Cheap Public Transportation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2012, Kennedy and I made a video (click above) poking some fun at the community opposition to the building of a new Whole Foods grocery store in Brooklyn—an example of the anti-development impulse taken to the point of logical absurdity.
A few weeks ago, Brooklyn's Whole Foods had its grand opening, which The New Yorker took as an opportunity to reflect on how gentrification and the opening of high-end supermarkets are a mixed bag for cities. In an article
titled, "A Whole Foods Grows in Brooklyn," Elizabeth Greenspan wrote:
Abby Subak, the director of Arts Gowanus, said her group decided to work with Whole Foods to reach its shoppers, who might include art buyers and supporters. But she said the group is treading "a fine line": it wants to broaden the audience for Gowanus's artists, but it doesn't want to promote big development. "The concern is that, by collaborating, we are perceived as endorsing development," Subak said. "We are not endorsing big-box development or luxury development."
She has good reason to be sensitive. As in a lot of communities Whole Foods is eying, development is already transforming Gowanus. In addition to the new grocery store, a seven-hundred-unit condominium building is breaking ground. "People are freaked out," Subak said. Residents have protested against both of these projects, part of a broader debate over how to develop Gowanus sustainably and inclusively.
Is the value of building a grocery store on an desolate street dotted with storage facilities, gas stations, and gated warehouses—on a lot that's been vacant for 132 years—really something worth debating? Are Brooklyn residents "'freaked out'"? As Kennedy and I discovered, not really.
The post Brooklyn's Whole Foods Opens in a Location That Sat Vacant for 132 Years. Are Locals "Freaked Out"? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Whole Foods is finally coming to gentrifying Brooklyn. The reaction is as hilarious as you'd expect, as told in this arch yet poignant New York Observer article. Excerpt:
"I have concerns about the politics of the Whole Foods founder," said Mary Crowley on Saturday morning, walking through the Grand Army Plaza farmers' market with her husband. John Mackey, the company's co-founder and CEO, is a self-taught businessman who believes in small government, and he once compared working with unions to living with herpes—"It stops a lot of people from loving you." In August of last year, he wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal arguing that the government should not interfere in the health-care business. "He's very conservative," Ms. Crowley continued. "And we have good stores here already, so I don't know if we need another one."
Ms. Crowley's husband, John Denatale, walked over with their tall, long-haired dog. "I think people in the Slope get over things quickly," he said, their dog pushing his snout between his legs.
"I think they'll be upset. I disagree," said Ms. Crowley.
There was a strong wind blowing down Eastern Parkway. "People in Park Slope don't like change," explained Mark Germann, a young attorney standing over his son in a stroller while his wife, Beth Aala, a filmmaker, looked at yogurt drinks in the Ronnybrook Farm Dairy stall.
"Chains or change?" she asked, coming over to secure an extra blanket over their son.
"Change," he said.
"Maybe both," she added.
And I just love this dude:
No bricks [for the new Whole Foods], however, will come from the landmarked Coignet Stone Company, constructed in 1873, on the corner of the Whole Foods lot. The structure will sit just behind the new store.
"I don't know. I just don't want them to tear it down. Do you? Maybe they should. What do you think?" asked artist Dustin Yellin on Sunday afternoon, after a flight back from Art Basel, talking about the Stone Company building. "They should donate it to artists to have a small museum there! I want to build a museum." […]
Mr. Yellin described Whole Foods as a "weird art installation, a postmodern clusterfuck of like 55 kinds of the same kind of granola and 55 kinds of the same kind of chocolate." He doesn't like grocery shopping very much.
"If it's not going to be a museum, and it's not going to be a park—'cause those are two things that I think enhance communities—then I say to myself, 'Well, a Whole Foods isn't terrible because a strip mall would suck. And Whole Foods isn't terrible, because don't they have good stuff?' I could definitely shop there to cook dinner for my friends. It's not Wal-Mart."
Reason's voluminous Mackey file here, including his participation in 2005 roundtable on "rethinking the social responsibility of business." Short version of our 2009 ReasonTV interview with Mackey below.
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]]>Courtland Milloy's post-election column on the political come-uppance of just-ousted D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty cannot accurately be described as an "endzone dance," given that the NFL banned histrionics like these years ago. It's more akin to professional wrestling, or, well, just read it:
Fenty boasted of being a hard-charging, can-do mayor. But he couldn't find time to meet with 98-year-old Dorothy Height and 82-year-old Maya Angelou. Respect for elders—that's too old school for Fenty. Dis the sistas—his supporters will understand.
Watch them at the chic new eateries, Fenty's hip newly arrived "creative class" firing up their "social media" networks whenever he's under attack: Why should the mayor have to stop his work just to meet with some old biddies, they tweet. Who cares if the mayor is arrogant as long as he gets the job done?
Myopic little twits.
And lordy don't complain about [D.C. schools chief Michelle] Rhee.
She's creating a "world-class school system," they text. As for you blacks: Don't you, like, even know what's good for you? So what if Fenty reneged on his promise to strengthen the city from the inside by helping the working poor move into the middle class. Nobody cares that he has opted to import a middle class, mostly young whites who can afford to pay high rent for condos that replaced affordable apartments.
Don't ask Fenty or Rhee whom this world-class school system will serve if low-income black residents are being evicted from his world-class city in droves.
You blacks, always playing the race card.
I guess we can't all just get along.
If Milloy thinks that the influx of white-collar professionals into D.C. is a mayor-driven phenomenon, he's as stupid as he is intolerant. And he is surely bound to be disappointed when, even after the removal of the "friendly fascism" of the "dictator"-like "Napoleon wannabe," the District continues replacing pawn shops with Bang & Olufsens.
Link via the "social media" network of Matthew Yglesias.
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