6/27/2019 Stop blaming the hipsters: Here's how gentrification really happens (and what you can do about

s (and what you can do about it)

Stop blaming the hipsters: Here's how

gentrification really happens (and what
you can do about it)

A scene from gentrifying Harlem. iStock

J
eremiah Moss writes in his new book Vanishing New York: How a Great City
Lost Its Soul that when he first arrived in New York City in 1993, the city was "at
the beginning of its end." Moss attributes what he sees as New York’s untimely
death to hyper-gentrification, the same "unstoppable virus" besieging other cities,
from San Francisco to Shanghai.
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Longtime New Yorkers have seen innumerable neighbors displaced and independent
businesses shuttered, and watched as the ranks of the city's homeless swelled to over
60,000. The changes are easy to see, but it’s not always obvious where they originated.

Sometimes the blame falls on individuals, and not even developers—we're talking about
the hipsters, the yuppies, the "creatives," arriving in neighborhoods with no awareness of
local history or concern for how their arrival might be linked to people being priced out.

Take the recent controversy over a "boozy sandwich shop" opened recently by a Canadian
transplant in Crown Heights. Its owner, Becca Brennan, hawked 40-ounce bottles of rose
and promoted the business's “bullet hole-ridden wall” as a funny reminder of the
neighborhood's violent recent history. At an ensuing protest of the bar, a man was
photographed carrying a sign
(http://gothamist.com/2017/07/23/summer_hill_protest_crown_heights.php#photo-6)
that read, "THIS IS WHAT GENTRIFICATION LOOKS LIKE!"

[Editor's note: This story was first published in September 2017. We are presenting it
again here as our weekly In Case You Missed It
(https://www.brickunderground.com/in_case_you_missed_it) pick.]

No doubt Brennan's approach was tone deaf, but rather than being a sower of
gentrification, she is more like a symptom of it. The roots of the phenomenon reach way
back through history and public policy, Moss and other close observers of New York’s
transformation say, and the transplants who arrive in a working-class neighborhood selling
$15 cocktails are just one step in a lengthy process.

In a 2015 study on gentrification and displacement (http://www.frbsf.org/community-

development/files/wp2015-05.pdf), UCLA and Berkeley researchers write that there are
three factors driving neighborhood change: "movement of people, public policies and
investments, and flows of private capital." They continue, "These influences are by no
means mutually exclusive—in fact they are very much mutually dependent."

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Moses Gates, director of community planning and design at the Regional Plan
Association, says that when it comes to gentrification, “The general argument that you run
into is over whether city policies drive demand through upzoning," that is, allowing the
construction of taller buildings, "or if they are reacting to demand and, without new
development, the situation would be worse. That is where most of the tension lies. I think
both and neither are true—it’s all part of the story.”

(https://www.brickunderground.com/sites/default/files/styles/magnify/public/170912Lo

Looking west along the Grand Central Parkway from Kew Gardens in 1946. A
combination of whites-only home ownership support programs and highway building
propelled white flight and the suburbanization of the U.S. Department of
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State/Wikimedia
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_view_of_a_complex_of_Long_Island
_NARA_-_518064.jpg)

The role of public policy and private investment

Celia Weaver, research director at the activist group New York Communities for Change,
says gentrification has roots in public policy.

"When capital flows into a neighborhood, people are displaced. Bankers and landlords
speculate on low-cost neighborhoods with the assumption that they’re going to be able to
raise the rent and in order to make that work, they then have to," she says.

Banks make loans to developers, and investors fund the purchase of buildings, with the
agreement that the loans will be repaid at certain rates, or that they'll get a certain return
on investment. Baked into these agreements often is the notion that tenants and
apartment buyers will soon be paying much more than they do now. Without the building
owners following through, i.e. renting and selling at new, higher rates, they are liable to
fall behind on their payments.

Thus, Weaver says, "Bankers speculating on low-income housing need to create a

displacement crisis so they can bring in new people, in order to make their gamble work."

Speculation is easier when it's supported and encouraged by politicians. Moss sees the
recent spate of changes that have come to New York—the influx of wealth, exponentially
increasing housing costs, the disappearance of independent businesses, and the
displacement of longtime locals—as originating in the 1970s, when city leadership began
implementing policies favoring privatization and deregulation.

"Under Mayor Ed Koch, City Hall’s goal became to recreate New York, making it friendly
to big business, tourists, real estate developers, and upscale professionals," he writes. "The
city brought in big real estate developers and corporations with generous tax abatements

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and other government subsidies. Public money for the poor was rerouted to the rich."

The wave of gentrification that resulted from these policies stalled during the recession of
the late 1980s, he continues, but returned under the tenure of Mayor Bloomberg. In 2003,
the billionaire businessman described NYC
(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/08/nyregion/mayor-says-new-york-is-worth-the-
cost.html) as a "luxury product" that should brand itself like a private company, an
outlook reflected in his administration’s approach to rezoning.

"The rules were changed for thousands of city blocks," writes Moss. The changes
prohibited building taller in certain areas, most of them majority white and high-income
(https://citylimits.org/2017/05/10/the-high-income-neighborhoods-the-city-could-look-to-
rezone/), while encouraging it in others.  

Weaver notes that the Bloomberg administration "didn't increase development capacity all
that much. What it did," she says, "was protect white, homeowner voters, while putting
renter neighborhoods in the line of fire" for being displaced.

Another far-reaching policy change was Bloomberg’s model of affordable housing.

"'Affordable' really means income-targeted, because the model is mixed-income

developments where most of the building is unaffordable to the neighborhood and in fact
above the market rate of that neighborhood, to create a planned new market," Weaver
says. The centerpiece of Mayor de Blasio's affordable housing plan is rezoning certain
low-income neighborhoods and requiring that developers include a certain portion of
income-restricted housing in each new building. In other words, he is continuing the
Bloomberg approach, albeit with greater requirements for the amount of below-market
apartments they must set aside.

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Weaver points to new development in East New York as one example of how even the
addition of ostensibly "affordable" housing can further the pushing out of a
neighborhood's existing residents.

"A lot of the affordable housing in East New York is for renters earning 80 percent [area
median income], which is well above the neighborhood’s median income," she says. The
combination of upzoning, allowing mostly market-rate housing in the new buildings, and
setting aside the remaining apartments for people making more than what's typical in the
neighborhood, she says, "creates a higher-level housing market at a scale that’s
unprecedented."

Compounding the problem is that as housing costs have risen out of reach to many lower-
income New Yorkers, the number of rent-regulated units has diminished. Rent
stabilization was created in the 1960s (https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/history-
of-NYC-rent-stabilization) in response to growing housing scarcity and complaints of
rising prices, and the system protected many renters from being rapidly priced out of their
homes.

The regulation is still with us. In fact, nearly half of all rental apartments in the city are
still rent-stabilized.

But beginning with a 1994 City Council vote (https://www.propublica.org/article/the-

vote-that-made-new-york-city-rents-so-high) that allowed landlords to deregulate
apartments once the rent hit $2,000 (today it's $2,700), legislators created a series of
(http://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2015/01/dear_sam_major_capital_improveme
escape hatches (http://www.brickunderground.com/rent/landlords-abusing-preferential-
rent-loophole) in the rent regulations that enable owners to take units out of stabilization.
Under the setup that exists now, landlords stand to make the biggest profits if they can
compel their rent-stabilized tenants to leave. Pro Publica reports

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(https://www.propublica.org/article/the-vote-that-made-new-york-city-rents-so-high) that
of the 860,000 apartments that were stabilized in the mid-'90s, almost 250,000 have
become market rate in the intervening two decades.

Children of the suburbs return to the cities

Benjamin Grant, urban design policy director at the San Francisco-based think tank
SPUR, says that in order to understand hyper-gentrification, you have to go back further
than the 1970s.

It began with the suburbanization of the United States during the mid-20th century, he
says, which was supported by federal policies that underwrote mortgages, but only for
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill) white people
(http://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-
government-segregated-america), and subsidized the building of interstate highways.

"Center cities were hugely abandoned and space was available and cheap, and people who
were either not wealthy enough or the wrong color or otherwise couldn't participate in
suburbanization were able to find places to live," Grant says. "People of color and
immigrants... did their best to ride out the disinvestment."

The United States is an outlier in this respect, he says. In Europe, cities, with their dense
agglomeration of services, transit options, and infrastructure, have historically been
perceived by the wealthy as desirable, while many affluent Americans came around to this
point of view only recently.

"Starting in the 1970s and picking up steam in the 1990s, people with resources and
choices 'rediscovered' cities, and the downside of the suburbs became very apparent,"
Grant says. "Naturally, prices started to come up [in cities] and investments were made."

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In this sense, gentrification is fueled by individuals—those with the financial resources to

move back to the cities doing so en masse. These wealthier buyers and renters, seeking the
same dense, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods that lower-income communities
sought or were stuck in before them, began competing with these communities for limited
housing, which resulted in displacement pressure.

"If the existing community owns housing stock, as is the case in many cities, they have the
option of cashing out, for better or for worse, as land accrues value," Grant says.
However, "It’s very different in renter neighborhoods. Renters are much more vulnerable
and they have no way of benefiting from investments, unless they’re able to stick around
because of rent regulation."

New York, as it happens, is a city of renters, with only 31 percent of residents owning
their apartments.

The notion that development causes gentrification is a fallacy, Grant adds. In fact, it’s the
other way around.

"Development goes in to meet demand because people want to live in a neighborhood,"

he says. "People tend to see rents going up and they see a new building and think, 'That
building caused my rent to go up.' But both are in response to the demand of people to
live in that neighborhood."

Clamping down on development in response, then, may only exacerbate the problem, by
further limiting the supply of housing in a neighborhood that people find desirable. Grant
points to the West Village, where restrictive zoning and landmark laws limit the ability to
build, as an example of gentrification occurring independently of development.

"One reason we have such intense gentrification pressure in urban neighborhoods is that
we stopped building them in 1929 after the stock market crash. We started building again
after World War II—in suburbia," Grant says, speaking very broadly. "So now we have a

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scarcity of urbanism when the cultural preference is for urbanism. Who's going to lose the
bidding war? Low-income people and people of color."  

(https://www.brickunderground.com/sites/default/files/styles/magnify/public/170912N
Over 6 in 10 of the apartments in 72-story CitySpire, center with dome, were being used as
pied-a-terres or investment properties in 2015, the New York Times found
(https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/realestate/new-york-citys-emptiest-co-ops-and-
condos.html). Nearly a quarter of the apartments in the city fell into one of these categories,
according to the report. Henning (https://www. ickr.com/photos/photohenning/)Klokkeråsen
(https://www. ickr.com/photos/photohenning/16604885095)/Flickr
(https://www. ickr.com/photos/photohenning/16604885095)

Potential solutions: Upzoning, penalizing absentee

owners, and more
Articles explaining how to be a "good gentrifier" abound. Take this one
(https://www.bustle.com/articles/171201-can-you-be-a-good-neighbor-if-youre-a-gentrifier-
9-tips-from-advocates) from Bustle, which advises newcomers to gentrifying areas to talk
to their neighbors and support long-running businesses.

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This is well-intentioned, Weaver says, and it is a good idea for gentrifiers to be aware of
their advantages and join the fight against policies that benefit them at the expense of
their neighbors. But at the end of the day, she says, the actions of atomized individuals
won’t suffice. 

Gates of the Regional Plan Association sees the potential to mitigate displacement in
government taking a different approach to development.

"The idea is that people are priced out of Brooklyn Heights, so they move to Park Slope.
Then they’re priced out there, so they move to Bed-Stuy, and we have to build in Bed-Stuy
to meet demand," he says. "Instead, we could up-zone Brooklyn Heights to meet demand.
There are a lot of places that don’t enter the conversation" in terms of where to rezone
and develop, he says.

Opening up low-rise, rich neighborhoods of homeowners to new development would be a

heavy lift politically, as any number of NIMBY activist campaigns against tall buildings, in
neighborhoods affluent and otherwise, have shown. There are also legitimate
infrastructure capacity issues to consider, as anyone who has ridden the L train through
Bloomberg-upzoned Williamsburg lately will tel you, not to mention anyone who is
contemplating the effects of the impending L shutdown.

Another options that Gates proposes is optimizing existing property to boost the housing
supply. He points to Bay Ridge as an example of a neighborhood with restrictive rules
about keeping houses single-family, a policy that could be changed to allow for houses to
be subdivided into multiple apartments. This has already been done in other brownstone
neighborhoods. Another group has proposed legalizing basement apartments
(https://www.6sqft.com/study-suggests-more-basement-conversions-as-a-solution-to-the-
citys-housing-crisis/) as a way of tapping into residential space in the city with out having
to fire up a single backhoe.

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Gates also sees potential in creating policies—a pied-a-terre tax is an oft-mentioned one —
to curtail the use of second homes in the city.

"Manhattan has 44,000 second homes, a three percent vacancy rate, and the most
expensive rents in the nation," he says. "There probably should be policies in place to deal
with that."

Weaver, too, says that the housing supply has to be increased in order to offset
gentrification and displacement.

"The city needs to use public land to build deeply affordable housing for people who are
at most risk, as speculative capital flows into neighborhoods," she says. "The entire city is
attractive to investors, and the role of city government should be to build at the bottom
and implement strong anti-displacement measures. There’s no reason for them to do
planned gentrification—the market is doing that on its own."

At the close of his book, Moss shares his wish list for addressing gentrification, including
a moratorium on luxury construction, an expansion of residential rent regulation, and the
creation of affordable housing independent of high-end development. He concludes that
despite all the casualties, "The True New York is still there, hidden in the gaps... This is
why I stay." 

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(https://www.brickunderground.com/sites/default/files/styles/magnify/public/170912Ci
The New York City Council is one of the places where decisions get made that affect the facts on
the ground for housing in the city, and where everyday New Yorkers can go to voice their
concerns. Costumes allowed. William Alatriste/New York City Council
(https://www. ickr.com/photos/nyccouncil/15210249493/in/photolist-q5Nnw8-pb5vfV-qAiUu9-qSSj2z-
DgTch2-CX2Zis-EFd4S2/)

What can the average New Yorker do about all of

this?
The City Council and the mayor make decisions on land use and zoning
(https://council.nyc.gov/land-use/). New Yorkers concerned about these issues should
learn where their representatives stand , and reach out to make their voices heard. Find
out who your councilperson is here (https://council.nyc.gov/districts/).

For information on contacting the Mayor's Office, click here

(http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/contact-the-mayor.page). For a more detailed
rundown of contacts at city agencies, as well as county, state, and even federal agencies,

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check out the New York City Green Book (http://a856-

gbol.nyc.gov/GBOLWebsite/GreenBook/Online).

The bulk of rent regulation laws are the purview of state government, which means New
Yorkers may want to familiarize themselves with the positions of their Assembly members
and state senators. To find out who your senator is, click here
(https://www.nysenate.gov/). To find your Assembly member, click here
(http://assembly.state.ny.us/).

President Trump is also seeking to cut as much as $6 billion nearly $9 billion

(https://therealdeal.com/2018/02/12/trump-white-house-proposes-even-deeper-cuts-to-
hud/) from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including funding for
whole programs that New York and other cities rely on to finance the construction and
operation of affordable housing. For information on how to contact the White House
click here (https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact). Directories for the House and Senate
are here (https://www.house.gov/representatives) and here
(https://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_index_subjects/Directories_vrd.htm).

On the most tangible level, New York tenants have more power in numbers when fighting
to improve conditions and keep neighbors from getting evicted. Click here for our guide
on how to start a tenant association
(https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2015/07/ask_sam_starting_a_tenants_associa

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