New York After Rent (part 3 of 3)
Our series concludes with an attempt to examine the suburbanized commodified inner cityscape of New York. Author and activist Sarah Schulman tells us about the Gentrified Mind, plus we hear from one of the first Airbnbers of New York. PLUS a sneak preview of a new rock musical everyone will soon be talking about.
*********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********
10 comments on New York After Rent (III of III)
I visited NYC for the first time two weeks ago and my friends living there pointed out some of the very same issues that you addressed. I had no idea.
I also wanted to congratulate everyone that works on this series. I enjoyed this particular three parter immensely and think that this podcast in-general stands out above many others in its quality and thoughtfulness. Each show is always refreshing and enlightening. Keep up the great work!
Wonderful series! I’m very curious though. You have RENT as a major anchoring point to discuss gentrification, and you have Sarah Schulman on to discuss the interior gentrification of our heads, but it would have also seemed a perfect moment to tie-in all the factors you deftly juggle by mentioning how RENT seems to have taken liberally from Schulman’s novel People in Trouble, something that Schulman herself recounts in her book, Stagetruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998). I mean, RENT is also La Boheme and bits of the author’s life and no doubt other elements in the patchwork of inspiration, too, but was there simply no time to include that, or was it more a matter of avoiding any surprise RENT-based litigiousness? I ask because it would have been a curious echo to the story about the updated RENT for the millennial set.
In many ways, these three podcasts were made for me. I just moved away from NYC because I lost my apartment and wasn’t going to be able to afford another, certainly not in a part of town I wanted to live in (I spent 15 years in East Harlem). But it wasn’t such a painful decision, not like it would’ve been 10 years before. I moved to the East Village in 1982 and as crazy as it was in those days, the city seemed in so many ways the one sane place in the entire country, the only place to live. And it was exhilaratingly lively and messy and lovely even in its ugliness. Post 9/11, it became more and more corporate, more and more expensive, and time and again in the last few years in East Harlem, we ran into problems with new residents who complained when neighbors who have been doing it for their entire lives played music too loud on weekends or sat on their steps and entertained, the very thing I loved about the city in the first place. Maybe what’s happening is inevitable, I mean, in many ways, I was an agent of gentrification — in the East Village and then in East Harlem, but I’m long past thinking NYC is the only place a sane person can live.
What’s the song during the last segment. It played under the discussion with the first AirBnB user.
Maybe someone will finally take Wendell Berry seriously now that its happening to New York City.
This series was interesting and absolutely necessary – gentrification is a major issue across the country (including here in Austin) and we need to understand it better and do something about it and about the society and culture that is feeding it.
However, I will never understand why New Yorkers insist on putting their city on such a pedestal. Gentrification is an issue everywhere but when New Yorkers talk about it, I feel they exaggerate the issue… it becomes not just about growing socioeconomic inequality but about a threat to what they believe to be the only noble and true way to live in the only city worth inhabiting.
And Sarah Schulman has a point about art becoming banal and corporate, but why does everyone have to subscribe to what she thinks art should be? Why can’t we just like the things we like, even if they are banal? It is a little culturally elitist.
Great art that echoes throughout history is culturally elitist.
I live in Boston and we’re being gentrified by gentrified New Yorkers. So the cycle continues.
I live in Rio de Janeiro and a lot of the folks complaining about gentrification in NY come to my recently gentrified neighborhood — here in Rio — that is loved by hip foreigners for being “authentic”. And I do the same thing when I visit Madrid or Galway or Montevideo. We’re all cannibalizing each other.