New York After Rent (post prop f director's cut)
Now that Airbnb has proved it can beat regulation we return to the post-gentrified city. Two! new segments: we meet a landlord (named Benny) who built an illegal artists space in Bushwick, and we visit Astor Place, the embodiment of the New New York, with writer Ada Calhoun (Saint Marks is Dead).
8 comments on New York After Rent (post prop f director’s cut)
What’s that song that plays in the party scene?
What’s that song that plays in the party scene?
Brazilian Girls – “Good Time”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J50khpqR8tA
Finally listened to “New York After Rent (post Prop F director’s cut). Your finest hour!
Though I did not live through the change in the East Village, I am part of the Mission District diaspora—the creative class that gave way to The Creative Class and is being pushed out of San Francisco entirely—and just about every moment of the podcast was bittersweet and, in the best way, infuriating. And just really, really great radio.
Thank you for doing this.
– Doug Gorney
I think the most important part of the podcast is the brief interview of Ada Calhoun at the very end. It always bothers me when people lament that the “New” New York City isn’t what they remember it. To live in a place famous for its perpetual state of “creative destruction” and then act shocked that things are actually changing always seemed disingenuous. Calhoun and her book provide some much-needed counter-programming to an episode that came off as a series of nostalgic whining.
Take the description of the lousy party mid-podcast as a “glimpse of the new New York.” Right, I’m sure obnoxious, drug-and-cocktail fueled parties filled with self-important business types NEVER happened in NYC before 2008. You’d never see something like that in 1998, 1988, 1978, 1968, etc., etc. In an attempt to complain about the changes brought on by gentrification, Benjamin may have discovered the city’s one true constant!
Loved Ada Calhoun’s commentary – the middle class extermination of humanity…
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa