The Death of a Once Great City
The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence

Baker, Kevin
http://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

Publisher:  Harper's Magazine
Year Published:  2018  
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX22997

Kevin Baker takes a close look at the changes to his home city of New York over the past forty years. He notes that while some of the more undesirable aspects of New York in the 1970's have improved, such as crime, dirt, garbage- the new and more gentrified city masks significant problems, the most notable being a growing housing crisis.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The greater problem, as Michael Greenberg spelled out in his New York Review of Books analysis, is that by its very definition new housing that is 25 to 30 percent "affordable" still means huge numbers of high-cost new rentals. It is, in other words, mass gentrification locked in for many years to come, while the city is further starved of tax dollars needed to maintain and improve its public services.

The 421-a tax break is an anachronistic tool left over from the Seventies, when both landlords and the middle class were abandoning the city in droves. Nothing could be further from the case today, and the recent evidence is abundant that continuing to use it is a counterproductive strategy, one that is subsidizing the wealthy while diminishing the amount of affordable housing available.

Not so coincidentally, as Greenberg reports, landlords have redoubled their efforts- often illegal - to bribe or intimidate their less affluent tenants into moving out. Some of the more egregious examples he cites are in Brooklyn: landlords cutting off heat and hot water, inviting belligerent homeless men to defecate and hold drug parties in the halls, not fixing collapsing walls and ceilings, nailing up plywood over doors, locking tenants out and getting them arrested, and, in one instance, even bearing false witness to get a tenant committed, temporarily, to a psych ward. The neighborhoods themselves look much improved; it's just the people that were lost.