Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Transforming Brooklyn

Fascinating feature at the NY Times on how Williamsburg, Brooklyn went from a working-class neighborhood known for crime and ethnic strife to a booming, largely wealthy community. Above, North 6th Street in 1992, featuring an abandoned sawdust factory. 

And the same view in 2023, with an art gallery called National Sawdust and big new condominium buildings.

The change began in the 1990s Williamsburg when became the new home of the bohemians driven out of Manhattan by high prices. In 1992 one hipster said, "In the 70s, it was Soho. In the 80s, the East Village. In the 90s, it will be Williamsburg." Above, a 1991 photo of people working to turn an abandoned warehouse into The Fly Trap, a music and arts venue that hosted a lot of raves.

This was done with the cooperation of the borough authorities, who approved all of this, including the use of old, dodgey warehouses as music venues. The government also helped stage a long series of street music festivals that solidified Williamsburg's status as an art mecca. In my experience no neighborhood is ever transformed without both private initiative – from both nonprofits and businesses – and a lot of input from government. The presence of all these Bohemians drew restaurants, and by 1994 the Times food critics had noted the arrival of Williamsburg as a dining destination.

Williamsburg hosted breweries for a century, but by 1990 they had all closed, part of the gradual takover of American beer by a few enormous companies. But then we got the craft beer revival, and in 1996 Rudy Guiliani served as brewmaster for the opening of the new Brooklyn Brewery. (Honestly Rudy was a pretty good mayor before he went crazy.)  But the city modified its zoning laws to allow most of the old factory district to be converted to residential space.

Things really took off during the Bloomberg administration, 2002 to 2013. Bloomberg's people rezoned 37% of NYC and did everything they could think of to promote housing construction, which was built in NYC faster than in any older city in the country. This included 175,000 units deemed "affordable." Bloomberg also pushed the construction of the new commerical district in downtown Brooklyn, which was soon covered with high-rise buildings. During Bloomberg's time in office more than 10,000 new apartments and condomiums were built in the new downtown, and more than 4,500 in Williamsburg. From 1950 to 1980 Brooklyn lost 500,000 inhabitants, or 18.5% of its population; it has now regained all of those people and probably passed the 1950 level last year. Since the average household is smaller, that means many more units.

One of the spots that captures this history is the McCarren Park Pool, which was built to a New York scale, measuring 50 by 100m. This was built by the Works Progress Administration in 1935-1936. It eventually became a derelict site of drug deals and gang fights and was closed in 1984. During the 1990s revival various dreamers tried to bring it back to life, but no plan ever took off. 

In 2005 to 2008 it hosted concerns, especially hip hop.

Then in 2012 it was reopened as a pool.

But along with all this growth came the first complaints about "yuppification" and "gentrification". Upscale retailers like Hermes arrived downtown. Bohemians who came in the 1990s became opponents of development, trying to block new condo buildings so as to keep their neighborhoods as they were. They waged a decade-long fight to prevent the redevelopment of the old Domino Sugar factory on the waterfront, which they finally lost in 2014. Nearby music venues closed and moved to grittier spaces in other neighborhoods.

The Williamsburg waterfront in 2015.

It's a story many American cities have seen over and over: neighborhoods get run down and dangerous, which drives rents very low, which pulls in people like rave promoters and artists who need big loft spaces, which draws in hipster bars and restaurants, which draws in yuppies, which drives up housing prives and eventually drives out the music venues and the hipster bars.

But I don't think there is any realistic alternative to this. The world doesn't stand still. Yes, there is something weird about the repeated, rapid transformation of neighborhoods by capitalism and the quest for cool, but what really kills cities is for things to stay as they are. Living beings are always changing.

7 comments:

  1. But I don't think there is any realistic alternative to this.

    I mean... governments could actually side with the common people who were willing to move into a derelict area and rebuild it with their own hands to fulfill their own vision, instead of siding with the massive corporate interests who were happy to leave it a blighted hellscape and only showed up like vultures once they smelled potential profits?

    I know, I know... you said "realistic"... but it's only unrealistic because our government is a farce in which the rich have all the power and we simply pretend that democracy exists in any real measure, as the politicians are all beholden to them for re-election.

    We actually started to accomplish that, for a brief time, with the Federal Elections Campaign Act in 1971, with further amendments in 1974... until the Supreme Court ruled (with considerable internal dissent and not all Justices being able to rule) that portions of it were unconstitutional on the basis that limits on spending were somehow "violations of free speech".

    Alas, we live in a world where corporations are somehow "people", and where "speech" is somehow not the power of one's words to sway others, but the depths of one's pocketbook.

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  3. Let me try this again.

    Goto this link and about 1/3 of the way down you will find a map and list of the 48 (violent) youth gangs that roamed the Williamsburg area back in the 70s.
    https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2014/12/screaming-phantoms-tomahawks-phantoms.html

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  4. FWIW, on the general point John makes at the end, my experience is that change in itself, particularly at the rate described in the article, is not necessary to maintain a feeling of life, nor does its absence necessarily equal an absence of life. One finds plenty of vital places where things seem to change, if at all, very slowly. And some changes are simply bad. I'm reminded of Emperor Charles V's comment, which I think I've cited here before, on the boring Renaissance church a bunch of clergy caused to be erected in the middle of the old mosque of Cordoba: "You have taken what was utterly unique in the world and marred it with something you could have built anywhere."

    Along with this line of the emperor's, I return in my mind frequently to the dictum of that great aesthete and philosopher, Butthead: "I like stuff that's cool, and I don't like stuff that sucks." If replacing something cool with something that sucks is life, then give me unlife.

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  5. As I keep saying, people do not transform decrepit neighborhoods "with their own hands." It happens only with massive support from city governments, foundations, HUD grants, and so on. You folks seem mad at the real estate developers who come toward the end of the process, but what about the hipsters who drive our the poor folks at the beginning? How is that any less destructive? I find it absurd to come into a neighborhood, displace the people living there (with government help) and then launch a big fight to keep other people out.

    America needs TENS OF MILLIONS of new homes. I do not want to see the whole east and west coasts covered with suburban sprawl. That means increasing density in the urban neighborhoods where we can persuade people to move. Hundreds of thousands of people want apartments in Brooklyn. Are you prepared to tell them, too bad, get lost, you didn't get here soon enough? If we don't build more housing, where are poeple going to live?

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  6. @John

    I'm not sure who you mean by "you folks," but I for one don't actually have strong feelings or thoughts either way about any of the specific developments in Williamsburg. As I said, I was responding solely to the concluding paragraph. The arguments you just made were much stronger, seem much more to the point, and might have made a better concluding paragraph.

    Clearly, the raw need for housing is great, and building more dwellings in Brooklyn and many, many other places is surely necessary, and should be done--but I'd spare a bit of sympathy for the people who will miss the old neighborhood.

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  7. We do desperately need new homes - which is why my sympathies are going toward the people who are transforming abandoned industrial neighborhoods into houses and commercial venues for "hipsters".

    (I'm not at all sure what John is talking about regarding "hipsters driving out poor folks" in that regard - does he think people are somehow living in abandoned or empty industrial properties, and then being driven out when those get turned into actual housing? For placing such an emphasis on government involvement in the transformation of these neighborhoods, you'd think there'd be a greater awareness of the fact that a massive part of such transformations is the rezoning of these areas by the government, which they only ever seem to bother to do because of "hipsters" lobbying for it.)

    It's also why I'm so incensed at the real estate moguls who them move in, snatch up those neighborhoods, and REDUCE the amount of housing available. The standard practice in real estate these days, in virtually every situation, is to focus on high cost units and sell them to the wealthy - particularly in cases where land values have increased, and where they are expected to keep increasing.

    For a given size and footprint of a building, splitting it up into a large number of small, inexpensive units is less desirable than splitting it up into a small number of large, expensive units. Why build a high-rise which will cater to 500 poor families, when you could instead build one which will cater to only 50 rich households?

    You have 1/10th the sales to negotiate; you only have to provide 1/10th the parking spaces; you can focus on selling your units outright rather than renting them; each big luxury unit fetches FAR MORE than 10x the price of a single small affordable one; and here's the big kicker - you're only reducing the demand for your own products by 1/10th as much.

    That's the truly damning thing about modern real estate - they've realized that they can make so much more money by ensuring demand always vastly outstrips supply. Deprive people of housing - frequently artificially, by buying up properties when they're cheap and then sitting on them rather than renting or selling - and you force people to meet your prices or not have a place to live.

    It's a classic case of 'The Invisible Hand' failing to provide what is best for / needed by society, because it's simply much more profitable to NOT do that, and damn the people who get caught in the middle of the graft.

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