For so long change had gone in one direction: toward flight, ruin, and entropy. Then the great crime wave subsided, and the tide reversed. In many of the places where real estate prices have skyrocketed, from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, little has changed in the neighborhood’s actual fundamentals. Like those buildings along the park, these places always featured proximity to subways, beautiful architecture, and tree-lined streets, and they have been, for decades, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods. The only thing that made them cheap was the self-fulfilling financial logic of the ghetto: no money was to be made in improving the place because only poor people were going to live there.
It wasn’t the race of the residents of these neighborhoods that changed first but the levels of crime and danger and (perhaps even more importantly) the perception of same. And with that change in perception, access to capital opened dramatically. Getting a loan for a brownstone in, say, Bed-Stuy in the mid-1960s had been difficult if not impossible. In the Bronx, capital was so scarce that an entire system of government programs and nonprofits was created to funnel money into building renovations and improvements. (I worked summer jobs at one of these organizations, the University Neighborhood Housing Program.)
That chapter of urban history now feels very remote. Today interest rates are low, cash is cheap, prices are going up, and the holders of great wealth—banks, hedge funds, individual rich people—are looking to invest in New York real estate. The sheer amount of real estate wealth created in the city in the last twenty years is staggering to contemplate. At the beginning of 1998, according to data from Zillow, the total value of all New York City residential real estate was about $283 billion (adjusted for inflation). By April 2014, that value had more than tripled to $935 billion. That’s $650 billion in just residential real estate value created in less than two decades.
New York is the place where crime dropped the most, and where the cumulative value of real estate almost certainly exploded with the biggest boom. But city after city has experienced versions of the same thing: drops in crime, spikes in real estate prices, and a process of gentrification that has pushed up rents for poor and working-class people, creating a nationwide affordability crisis. In 1984 poor Americans spent 35 percent of their income on rent. By 2014 that was 41 percent, with fully half of renters below the poverty line spending most of their total income to keep a roof over their head.
In Evicted, Matthew Desmond shows a snapshot of how this played out in one American city, Milwaukee. Due to rising rents, the poor are constantly behind on their bills, their homes are contingent on the generosity of their landlords, and they move from apartment to apartment in a state of constant desperate disruption.
From Milwaukee to New York, the process of real estate wealth creation has often come at the direct expense of the city’s poor. “Whatever positive effects the demographic shifts in Brooklyn are creating,” Raphael Ruttenberg, who works as a tenants’ lawyer in the borough, tells me, “the devastation has been profound. The poor of the city are being crushed under the wheel of progress. Entire neighborhoods are being effectively cleansed of the working poor who have been there for decades.”
Ruttenberg gave me an example of how this works in practice, in a building in the far eastern reaches of Brooklyn, a bleeding-edge frontier in the city’s gentrification map. The neighborhood is firmly in the Colony now, but not for long if its new owners have their way. In one building he represents, the landlords who bought the place in 2014 offered the tenants, all black and Hispanic, $10,000 to leave. When most balked ($10,000 sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t go far in the Brooklyn rental market), the landlords lowered the buyout fee to $4,000. Then as Ruttenberg described it to me:
The landlord later told the remaining tenants that they’d better take the (now $4,000) buyout offer, because he was planning to renovate the vacant apartments, which he threatened would be hazardous to the health of the remaining tenants’ young children. The renovations seem designed explicitly to harass the tenants, including knocking down parts of the ceiling in one apartment. There is dust and debris throughout the building, and holes and cracks in all the walls. The renovations may have even made the building structurally unsound. And the landlord has flouted stop-work orders from the Department of Buildings to continue his harassment by construction.
It’s not just this one building—stories like this are commonplace throughout the borough. “Brooklyn is in the midst of a gold rush,” Ruttenberg says, “and true to the Wild West metaphor, there is plenty of illegal activity and very little policing happening.”
I laughed when he said that. Of course, there’s a whole lot of policing happening in those neighborhoods—just not of this particular kind of activity.
The signature achievement of the reign of order is that a person can live in the Nation and never know what hardship may befall the Colony. “I like to tell people that there is a war going on,” Ruttenberg says, “which most of us in New York are dimly aware of.”
Maintaining ignorance of life in the Colony was a good deal harder in the New York of my youth, when disorder imposed itself on you. The problems of the poor tugged at your attention. Today new wealth created in the “revitalized,” “reborn” American metropolis has put that unpleasantness out of view. An endless cultural conversation swirls about the lives of the young, highly educated citizens of America’s hip urban neighborhoods. TV shows and articles discuss what they like and don’t like, where they eat and don’t eat. The city as an entity now means a different thing entirely. Fort Apache has given way to Girls.