Gentrification

My friend Laura once observed that I have the unique ability to piss off both the left and the right simultaneously, almost without effort. But that doesn’t mean I’m a centrist. I have strong opinions, but as a trader, they are loosely held, and open to revision and interpretation with the arrival of new information. I am a bundle of contradictions—pro-choice and anti-tax, a drug warrior (in most cases), but I also don’t think this gender identity craze is that big of a deal. But you can be sure that my opinions are the correct opinions. I spent more time thinking about them than you.

One of my correct opinions concerns gentrification. For context, I lived in New York City from 1979-1981, during the Travis Bickle days. New York was very dangerous back then, much more dangerous than it is today. It was also filthy, polluted, uncouth, and had little social cohesion—it was every man for himself. It was, in a word, hell. For example, my wife’s father was a taxidermist and fur trader who lived in Pennsylvania. Periodically he’d drive into the city with a vanload of furs and deliver them to the garment district. Two men would appear brandishing long guns to guard the payload while it was being unloaded. Keep in mind that these were raw furs, basically bloody carcasses. Back then, people would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. Talk to someone who lived in the city during this time period—they had their apartments broken into five, ten, twenty times. If you follow the New York Post on Twitter you might think that crime in New York City today is pretty bad. It is nothing compared to what it was back then.

New York was basically a shitshow throughout the eighties, during the Dinkins years, culminating in the crack epidemic at the end of the decade. We all know the story: Rudy Giuliani was elected in 1992 amid a populist revolt and things immediately started getting better. Giuliani can certainly take some credit. I don’t agree with broken windows policing writ large, but if you enforce the small stuff, the big stuff tends to take care of itself. Giuliani, as you know, is a Republican. He was elected mayor in 1992 by a very narrow margin of 51-49, and it was accomplished with the support of the blue-collar demographic in Brooklyn and Queens. Nowadays, parts of Brooklyn are pretty much large C Communist, so there won’t be another Republican mayor in New York in our lifetime. Bloomberg was elected as first a Republican, then an Independent, and then a Democrat. While running for president, he proposed wealth taxes. To say that he’s had ideological drift over time would be an understatement.

But Bloomberg was an amazing mayor. The city was so nice while he was mayor, right? Clean and antiseptic. Maybe there were a bit too many Duane Reades. He did a bunch of things—cleaned up City Hall, started the 311 line, banned smoking in bars, but most importantly, approved the construction of dozens of office and residential buildings, permitting development out decades. Even if de Blasio was smart enough to fuck it up, he couldn’t fuck it up, though he fucked up plenty. Almost to the day of his inauguration, there was homelessness, drugs, crime, and even the squeegee guys came back. New York underwent a process of de-gentrification under Big Bird, which is a fancy way of saying that things got less nice.

Why do I bring all this up? I worked in New York again from 2001-2010—smack in the middle of the Bloomberg years. I liked the city then. It was like a shiny, new penny. I never got mugged. Nobody ever tried to sell me drugs. The only place I got panhandled was by the die-hards in Times Square. It was so safe, I thought nothing of going out clubbing until four in the morning and then walking forty blocks in the middle of the night. I didn’t even miss the graffiti, and I rather liked the graffiti as a kid in 1980. There were new restaurants and new stores and new buildings. Everyone was happy.

Well, not everyone.

Believe me when I tell you that not all New Yorkers were happy about the Bloomberg years. They actually liked the Dinkins years better! They liked the crime and the drugs and the filth, because it gave the city “character.” Nothing like someone pointing a gun smartly at your temple to experience some character. Now, don’t get me wrong—New York was a lot more culturally interesting back then, especially to someone like me, a music lover. I was a Limelight kid, and years later, I was a Pacha and Cielo kid. Progressive puritanism has killed, mangled, murdered New York City nightlife. Ex-the Brooklyn Mirage, it is a shadow of what it once was. So I do wish there were some decent clubs. But you can keep the crime and the drugs. Crime and drugs don’t give the city character, they just make it uninhabitable.

But I’ve often wondered about this impulse (almost uniformly from people on the left) to live in a shittier New York. People wanted a shittier San Francisco, they got it, and now they are doing some introspection. My hometown, Norwich, Connecticut, is an example of a town that hasn’t gentrified at all. It hasn’t changed a bit in 50 years. It is also a dump. A competent manager would lower taxes and cut regulations and fire the army of city inspectors that harass businesses, and then offer incentives for corporations to set up shop within city limits. Funny, nobody has yet come up with this idea, because everyone likes things as they are—no matter how bad it is. They seek to preserve, to hold time still. They are against change. Change is scary, right?

But I think there’s something more sinister about this. I think that the people who are against gentrification really just want to live in garbage. I think they genuinely want things to be objectively worse. It’s a death cult of destruction. You know what I want for people? I want them to get richer, be happier, live in nicer apartments, have nicer cars, new phones, and new computers. I want people’s standard of living to increase. I want people to experience prosperity. Don’t get me wrong, I know all the usual arguments against gentrification—property prices go up and people have to move. I don’t see anything wrong with this. I mean, it’s an inconvenience to live up in Inwood and ride the subway for 45 minutes to get to work at Starbucks in Grand Central. But that is…inevitable? A natural consequence of growth and development? You see this happening all over the country. People got priced out of California, so they moved to Idaho. Then Idaho started getting expensive and people moved to Ohio. And so on. It’s an economy, and flows of people and capital are entirely normal. What’s not normal is wanting everything to stay the same.

I am a supply-sider. Most people misunderstand what the word supply-side means—they associate it with Art Laffer and Ronald Reagan. What supply-side means is that there isn’t an economic problem on God’s green earth that can’t be solved by increasing the supply of something. If the rents in a neighborhood in New York are getting expensive, you know what would solve that problem? An increased supply of apartments. But the left (and sometimes the right) tends to focus on demand-side solutions. Instead of allowing rents to go higher, and incentivize the building of apartments, we’re going to hold them fixed by fiat, otherwise known as rent control. And it was the rent control of the 60s and 70s that was responsible for turning New York City into a wasteland. Of all the demand-side solutions out there, this is the worst. You should read about what is going on in Berlin.

Myrtle Beach is undergoing a process of gentrification. Myrtle Beach still has its bad parts, for sure—lots of creepy-crawlies on the South side. And what you see sometimes throughout economic history is that some neighborhoods are resistant to gentrification, no matter how good things get. People have been saying they were going to clean up the Tenderloin for 100 years. Spanish Harlem has been resistant to gentrification, but some brave souls are finally starting to move north of 96^th Street on the East Side. That will be gentrified in 20 years, out of necessity—it is too expensive everywhere else. Bedford-Stuyvesant used to be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York City. Now, rents are $3,000 a month. This is good. This is progress. I don’t want to go backwards in time. What I remember about the 80s and 90s was how poor we all were, and how much everything sucked. I had a wooden TV with carpet on it. We don’t have flying cars yet, but we will soon.