Full Lattes and Empty Lots
My niece recently sent me a piece in the Daily News about a café opened in Harlem by real estate agents eager to improve the empty storefronts on a block where they had property to either rent or sell. The café is now jammed, even though they are charging $4 for a latte. She asked me, “What do you think?” Well, that’s a good question. I think a number of things about this, several of them contradictory. And the issue blossoms out to include the whole history of our city over the past twenty years.
Is gentrification bad? There is no simple answer to that question. On the one hand, these storefronts described in the Daily News article were both derelict and vacant. Derelict vacant ground floor space bodes ill for any neighborhood. No urban community can survive without vibrant street life – and vacancy is the enemy of vibrancy. So clearly the people who clean up the storefronts and turn them into going concerns are helping the neighborhoods. In this case the landlord gave them a big break on the rent to reclaim the space. This also seems reasonable. And no one can blame the new café owners for having a profit motive. If their goal in renewing the block is to profit by making the units above more commercially viable either as rental apartments or condos, that’s how the game is played. We have seen that happen over and over again as New York neighborhoods clean up and become prettier and more desirable places to live.
And there’s the rub, of course: prettier, more desirable places to live cost more money. And that is frequently more money than the current residents can afford. The lure of those $4 lattes probably doesn’t resonate for many of the current residents, who are struggling just to get by in an increasingly expensive city. Where will they go if their local housing stock becomes unaffordable to them? Often these people have inhabited these blocks since childhood; now little by little more affluent residents are displacing them.
All New Yorkers feel committed to the diversity of incomes, ethnicities, and talents which animate our city. But when does this diversity fall victim to the beautification and gentrification of more and more of our neighborhoods? Already artists and lower income workers are being driven out of Manhattan: the lower part of the island is almost completely gentrified and condos are creeping through Harlem and Washington Heights. The same changes are sweeping through northwest Brooklyn and western Queens.
New York looks more beautiful than it has in my memory (with the exception of a few overly tall midtown condo projects!) The sidewalks are cleaner, the parks more verdant, the waterfronts accessible and inviting. Crime is at historic lows, tourism and population expansion still at record highs. But there is a flip side to all this improvement. It isn’t for everyone. There are fewer opportunities for young people starting out, for older people who have lived their whole lives in areas they can now no longer afford, for artists and writers and musicians who add enormously to the city’s cultural mix but less greatly to its GUP (gross urban product.) So what do I think about $4 lattes at the new cafes in Central Harlem? I think it’s great. It breaks my heart.