I always find it interesting when people, usually liberals like me, complain about “gentrification,” particularly the yuppification of working class neighborhoods. We bemoan how the migration of upscale residents force rents and home prices up, forcing the original residents out of their homes and changing the character of the neighborhoods — often the very character that attracted the affluent invaders in the first place. Of course, what’s always funny is that the people who complain about gentrification are the very people who would never DREAM of actually moving into those areas before they gentrify.
I understand the concerns about gentrification to the extent that they focus on the needs of displaced residents who find themselves priced out of neighborhoods that they’ve called home for a long time. And I certainly think that more should be done to ensure that people have affordable places to live in areas where they’d like to live.
But let’s be real — most of the places that get gentrified were not such particularly nice places to live to begin with. You want to complain about how Manhattan exiles are changing the character of Williamsburg? Fine, but tell me when you’d even heard of Williamsburg before they started building upscale condos there. You want to complain about Times Square — okay, but then tell me about all the times you used to actually go there when it was porn shops and abandoned buildings. Yes, it’s terrible that places like Soho and Tribeca pushed out all the artists who lived there, back when you never went south of 14th street. So just shut up.
Moreover, most of the places where these pretentious romanticizers live now were themselves gentrified; it’s just that the process took place so long ago that they don’t remember what the neighborhoods were like in the old days. Take, for example, the Upper West Side, one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the country, and where I lived happily for about 15 years. People don’t remember, for example that West Side Story was actually set in the lower UWS. And it’s not like the gentrification process was 50 years ago. When I bought on 82d Street in 1994, the general sense was that the Upper West Side was great, but you didn’t want to buy north of 86th street. My next-door neighbor told me that she bought her whole brownstone in the early 1970s for about $25,000, when no one wanted to live there. She said she remembers hearing gunshots every night. She did pretty good with that investment, but the larger point is that everyone who lives on the Upper West Side, complaining about the changing character of Brooklyn, lives in a gentrified neighborhood. It’s just that they probably moved in long after gentrification took place, once it was “safe.” So unless they want to claim that the statute of limitations has passed on bemoaning the gentrification of the UWS, they need to shut up.
I’ve seen the same thing in Nyack, where I live now. When I was growing up in Rockland, Nyack was just starting to emerge from decades of neglect, epitomized by racial unrest, decaying infrastructure, poverty, all of that. You want to say things were better than, before all the antique stores and restaurants moved in? Okay. For who?
Indeed, Nyack is now one of those places that gives you some of the benefits that people normally attribute to urban living — diversity, ethnicity, walkable downtowns — while still providing the benefits of a suburban lifestyle. That is, it’s one of those places that people who move from the city say they want. And you see this sort of thing in pockets throughout the Manhattan suburbs, places like White Plains, which is a mini-city with a growing downtown area that has gone through its own renewal.
I got to thinking about the history in Nyack when reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s riveting article in New York Magazine about the crime problems in Newburgh, a small city in Orange County about 20 miles north of me:
Beautifully situated on a picturesque bend in the Hudson about a 90 minutes’ drive north of New York City, Newburgh does not look, from a distance, like a community mired in High Noon levels of lawlessness. But in actuality, it has less in common with bohemian Beacon, just across the river (“Williamsburg on the Hudson,” as the Times recently anointed it), than it does with, say, West Baltimore. Despite its small size and bucolic setting, Newburgh occupies one of the most dangerous four-mile stretches in the northeastern United States. “There are reports of shootouts in the town streets, strings of robberies, and gang assaults with machetes,” an alarmed Chuck Schumer said in a Senate hearing last year, describing the situation in Newburgh as “shocking.” With a higher rate of violent crime per capita than the South Bronx or Brownsville, little Newburgh, population 29,000, is the murder capital of New York State.
The article goes on to recount the steps being taken by James Gagliano, the head of the Hudson Valley Safe Streets Task Force, to clean up the city, and the difficulties of revitalizing an impoverished community. What’s interesting to me is that someone could have written that same article about Nyack in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the area started to turn around. I know Newburgh very well. My real estate company has an office in the area, and I’ve been to the city to talk about the investment potential there a few times. It’s one of those great old Hudson River cities, and it always seems to me that the city has the potential for recovering just the same way that Nyack did.
As we say in the real estate business, it has “good bones”: great architecture, beautiful old buildings, great access to the Hudson, close to what might become the fourth major metropolitan airport at Stewart, and convenient to the Thruway. And there are parts of it right now that are terrific. I have friends who live in Newburgh, whom I’ve visited a few times, and they have a whole community of young, interesting, vibrant people who circulate through the city. It’s just that, like a lot of emerging areas, there are good parts and bad parts.
Keefe captures this potential of the city, and the historical legacy, really well:
One of Newburgh’s crueler ironies is the way today’s depressed urban landscape is overlaid on a rich architectural foundation full of vestiges of bygone wealth. In the nineteenth century, the city flourished as a hub for river-borne commerce. Thomas Edison built one of the nation’s earliest power plants there in 1884. But eventually the factories relocated, the ferry was discontinued after the construction of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, and Broadway emptied out after malls opened outside town. In the sixties, the city undertook a disastrous experiment in urban renewal, demolishing the historic waterfront but failing to replace it with anything.
It feels almost spooky to walk today among the Gilded Age mansions of long-dead industrialists on Montgomery Street, some of them boarded up, others carved into low-income apartments. Abandoned buildings abound, many of them gone to rot. “We’re not unique,” Nicholas Valentine, a local tailor who serves as Newburgh’s mayor, tells me. “It’s happened to many communities up and down the Hudson. Poughkeepsie. Peekskill. Things die.”
Yes, things die. But they’re sometimes reborn. It’s good to see that the authorities are taking such an aggressive approach to cleaning up Newburgh. It’s one of those places that I would love to see recover, and not just for business reasons. I just see how a place like Nyack has become a real jewel of the region, and think that Newburgh could do the same thing. Then again, I’ve been saying it for ten years, and it hasn’t quite happened yet.
But I do feel there’s a very good chance that 20 years ago people will be complaining about how the “character” of Newburgh has changed, how homes are so expensive. They’ll romanticize the past, and talk about how gentrification has destroyed the essential authentic nature of the city. And none of those people, none of them, would move there today. So, again, shut up.
