Chip,
A lot of privilage and entitlement has been imported as the city has become somewhat surburbanized.
Much has been torn down and redeveloped. Perhaps this is the fourth year that as a group more young people are moving out rather than moving into the city.
NYC is the seventh most expensive city in the world with Paris, Hong Kong and Singapore all being tied for the most expensive. Affordability is a big problem, but these young people are the future, so I see a tipping point with this reverse migration.
Seems like everything is packaged, commodified and sanitized to make NYC a safe place for the wealthy. 57th Street is becoming Billionair's Row. There is a new skyline of very tall narrow buildings with a clear view of Central Park. Units are entire floors or duplexed or triplexed floors. I'm talking skyscrapers that are unusually skinny and narrow.
There are entire blocks on Fifth Avenue in the seventies that are "bunkers" set up as LLC's for weathy oliarchs that are only ocupied for three months of the year. These bunkers are for wealthy Asians and Russians who might have to flee their countries, and they set up these bunkers so that their wealth will not be or can not be confiscated. No one knows who owns these properties that other people would call mansions.
Meanwhile the homeless problem is getting worse. Some young people come to NYC to scratch it off their "Bucket List" so they can return home and say they are a New Yorker. It has become more and more about money than living. Mucho mentally ill people are not being taken care of nor are they getting the services the need/deserve. The quality of life is slipping, and this I blame our current mayor.
They are building a new development called Hudson Yards. In promotional material the promote Hudson Yards as a luxury community that one does not have to leave. Some critics say that it is basically kinda like a gated community for the rich. I find it insulting because as a gentrifier I made the banks, the landlords, and the developers tons of money and got little in return.
I am not a fan of Amazon and I'm glad I'm not subsidizing a billionair named Jeff Bezos. Pretty much a bait and switch.
When they built the new Yankee Stadium they made all these promises of public space and affordable housing, but I was told by a resident that these promises did not happen. Also they tore down many historical buildings that should have been saved.
Pretty much the city that I helped make great is showing me the door. I'm the kinda person that people from all around the world would want to meet: someone who's father was an illegal immigrant and was poor who has a B.A., a M.A., MFA and school loans that struggled in the arts for decades doing: painting, performance art, writing and currently for the past dozen years or so been a photographer.
One of the reasons I am creating an photographic archive of a disappearing New York is to have a sense of "home" to take with me.
Go visit
WWW.NYC.org and look at the zoning and the infrastructure projects. Pretty easy to connect the dots. NYC use to hover above and below 8 million for decades. Today we are 8.6 million, but with Hudson Yards and Queens South in Long Island City within 5 years NYC will soon have a population of 9 million.
Not hard to imagine the next rumored project is Sunnyside Yards which could add another million people. The infrastructure being built out is to have a population of 10 million not too far away; mostly wealthy people.
It may take some time but San Francisco I was told is a city of wealth and homeless, and this is what is happening. I am pretty much am being forced to leave as I approach retirement. Not by choice.
Cal
