The Fall of a Great American City is the story of what is happening
today in New York City and in many other cities across America. It is
about how the crisis of affluence is now driving out everything we love
most about cities: small shops, decent restaurants, public space, street
life, affordable apartments, responsive government, beauty,
idiosyncrasy, each other. This is the story of how we came to lose so
much--how the places we love most were turned over to land bankers,
billionaires, the worst people in the world, and criminal landlords--and
how we can - and must - begin to take them back.
Co-published with Harper's Magazine, where an earlier version of this
essay was originally published in 2018.
The landlords are killing the town.
As New York City approaches the third decade of the twenty-first
century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never
been before: unremarkable. By unremarkable I don't just mean periodic,
slump-in-the-art-world, all-the-bands-suck, cinema-is-dead boring. I
mean flatlining. No longer a significant cultural entity but a blank
white screen of mere existence. I mean
The-World's-Largest-Gated-Community-with-a-few-cupcake-shops. For the
first-time in our history, creative-young-people-will-no-longer
want-to-come-here boring.
Even, New-York-is-over boring. Or worse, New York is like everywhere
else. Unremarkable.
This is not some new phenomenon, but a cancer that's been metastasizing
on the city for decades now. Even worse, it's not something that anyone
wants, except the landlords, and not even all of them. What's happening
to New York now--what's already happened to most of Manhattan, its core,
and what is happening in every American city of means, Boston,
Washington, San Francisco, Seattle, you name it--is something that
almost nobody wants, but everybody gets. As such, the current urban
crisis exemplifies our wider crisis: an America where we believe that we
no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.
