Gentrification Killed NYC's Vibrant '70s Music Scene

https://jacobin.com/2024/02/gentrification-1970s-new-york-music-scene/

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

42 57 2 years ago

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

Gentrification has way more to do with landlords - your neighbors and a couple of corporations - than the people that can afford the prices they were offered

I’ve been to a lot of cities in various time periods and almost nobody in any of them seems cognitively acute enough to recognize this

This seems to benefit the landed gentry as the squabbling they cause from their gambles on the highest rent and ownership prices possible completely exempts them from criticism

(In this model it draws the line at renters who offer an even higher rent to close faster, since there tends to always be units available at the offered price.)

truckerbill2• 2 years ago

Yeah the phrase needs to be rent-seeking or landlordism not gentrification.

Non-productive costs are a leech on society.

eggy• 2 years ago

I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the mid-'60s to the '80s, lived in Manhattan from the mid-'80s to late '90s. My neighborhood was predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican, so it was full of the sounds of bongo drums and the early hip-hop scene. I skated at Roxy and later in the 90s at the Central Park Skating circle. Central Park Skaters have some die-hards still there, but it sort of was gentrified too in a way. Terms like "yuppy" and "dink" were used in a derogatory manner. I have always thought that class has been the true divider and not race having grown up a white minority in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. My group of friends were a motley crew of good kids and gutter snipes. I came away speaking fluent Spanish and the ability to salsa, so I never saw growing up in poverty as such a bad thing personally. I didn't have the internet or more than 13 channels to tell me otherwise. We didn't get a phone until I was like 11 and a color TV until then too.

Shout out to Danceteria and CBGBs! Memories of the Tom Tom Club's hit, "Genius of Love". Mariah Carey used it in her "Fantasy" song in 1995.

tcbawo• 2 years ago

I was recently reminded about an urban environment that I have known for more than twenty years — that cities are living and evolving organisms. Neighborhoods change composition as children grow up and adults change jobs or retire. Bars, restaurants, shops, and hangouts come and go. Immigrants and transplants pick new and upcoming areas. It’s part of a constant cycle of change and renewal. It’s sad sometimes to consider the cultural losses along the way. But, at the high level, it’s a critical part of how cities avoid ossification and retain authenticity.

addicted• 2 years ago

NYC having the same housing stock as it did in 2000 despite having more than a million more people, is what killed anything.

Not gentrification which is at best a description of one of the many effects of high housing costs.

imbnwa• 2 years ago

In Chicago, every new thing that gets built is luxury condo high rises that further amplifies housing cost in an area

marssaxman• 2 years ago

Causality goes the opposite direction: constructing a high rise is very expensive, therefore you will only see them built where housing cost is already high enough to justify luxury condos; otherwise, such a project would not be profitable.

j7ake• 2 years ago

With a sufficiently enough number of condos relative to demand, the housing cost should eventually decrease no?

tptacek2• 2 years ago

Adding new housing units at any price point lowers housing costs in the area; so long as the luxury condo high rises are increasing the number of units in the area, they are reducing the cost of housing. There are counter-theories of "induced demand" (whose premises aren't even operative in Chicagoland), but this is reasonably and recently well studied, and those theories don't seem to hold up.

Moldoteck2• 2 years ago

have you thought that those luxury condo are limiting the housing cost instead of amplifying it? I mean that maybe without them the costs would increase even more

KingMob3• 2 years ago

And what about the housing stock of the 80's, which is when the article argues the gentrification forces started?

Not sure if your comment applies here.

specialp• 2 years ago

I disagree that "Gentrification" started in the 80's in NYC. It was the 80's that made it not a wasteland of abandoned or intentionally burned buildings due to improving finances for the city government itself. However the influx of transplants did not happen until the late 90's. Crime was still astronomical compared today until the mid 90's. It was still considered unsafe. Once the city was comparatively safer, the trend started which still continues today. Areas like Bushwick are now home to transplants from the midwest while 20-30 years ago they would never set foot in there.

Places like CBGB's held on until the 2000s. Working class people could still affordably live in most places in the city until then as well.

flextheruler• 2 years ago

As someone who has done a fair bit of research on the urban decline nearly all American cities experienced in the latter half of the 20th century and parts of the 21st the idea of “gentrification” has always confused me.

Gentrification seems to be a negative way of saying these areas are returning to the norm? The parts of these cities associated with being poor and blighted haven’t always been that way. Why would anyone expect or want that to continue indefinitely?

Appeals to keeping a music/food culture fall somewhat flat to my ears when you just look at pictures of these areas or crime statistics of those periods.

schrijver2• 2 years ago

It’s like the city fails the poor twice: first they have to enjoy substandard living conditions, and whenever this changes, they get priced out.

Gentrification refers specifically to this displacement, and it shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is considered negative. No-one likes to have to move.

It’s also an effect of how the housing market works almost anywhere, so it’s not so easy to imagine an alternative within these market economies—a challenge the article doesn’t really touch upon.

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

What do you think about this development

https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/01/22/affordable-housing-lotter...

? Some people think it is not a good thing to give people a preference to stay in the neighborhood they are in because this entrenches racial segregation.

dublinben• 2 years ago

Gentrification and displacement are distinct concepts, even if they are usually conflated in colloquial usage. Obviously nobody wants to be forced out of 'their neighborhood' if rent is raised, but this isn't an inevitable consequence of improved conditions. This Vox article does a great job explaining possible policies to mitigate this harm, like building more housing, stronger tenant protections, and upzoning wealthy segregated neighborhoods.[0] As you say, existing residents of a neighborhood should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased investment and improved conditions in their neighborhood.

[0] https://www.vox.com/22629826/gentrification-definition-housi...

aniftythrifrty• 2 years ago

Being in a big city is supposed to come with opportunities. If people don't take those opportunities and then get priced out, whose fault is that?

hackeraccount2• 2 years ago

Fails twice or can't win - it's hard to figure out which.

jrm4• 2 years ago

"The norm?"

The problem with this analysis is that it prioritizes physical locations and comfortable people over, well, pain?

I get that its weird, but it appears as if "society/culture" whatnot has a lot of trouble paying attention to pain unless expressed through fun art.

So what people are perhaps subconsciously lamenting is the possibility of really changing things for a lot of people because our focus is at an interesting place being bulldozed by "the rich." Again.

dsr_• 2 years ago

The arts are not profitable, except by accident.

If you want art in a capitalist society, the options are to make it cheaper or to give it money. The cheapest places to live and work in a city are also the least desirable.

asow92• 2 years ago

Something that's always confused me in contemporary American discourse is that it's "white flight" when white people move out and "gentrification" when white people move back in. Can someone help me grok this?

lordloki• 2 years ago

Sure. White people bad.

alistairSH3• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what you're asking. The terms describe inverse/opposite movements of mostly middle-class, mostly white populations. And (very generally) white flight occurred from the 60s to the 90s or 00s. And gentrification became a "big deal" in the 00s and into the 20s (very rough year ranges - varies significantly by city).

krapp• 2 years ago

Gentrification is more about class than race - it's entirely possible for all black neighborhoods to be gentrified to cater to a wealthier black establishment at the expense of poor black base. At its core, gentrification is simply the result of capitalist government incentives to maximize tax revenues the way companies maximize profit. Poor people are driven out so that rich people can come in. In the US, the effect of a long history of white supremacist power structures is that class more often than not (although not always) maps to race.

White flight, however, is entirely just about white people just wanting to get away from black people.

harimau7773• 2 years ago

I think that they are looking at slightly different things.

As I understand it white flight criticizes that white people (at a population level, not each white person obviously) displaying behavior that suggests that they don't want to live in a multi-cultural society. Alternatively, white flight might be a criticism of defacto segregation either due to redlining or due to minorities being priced out of white neighborhoods.

Gentrification refers to the residents of areas that are low cost and low income being priced out by an influx of more wealthy residents. It's also used to refer to development designed to cause that influx. Race is only a factor to the degree that wealth tends to correlate with race in the US.

gentleman11• 2 years ago

Gentrification == making it too expensive for low income people and businesses to be there?

schrijver2• 2 years ago

Isn’t that the common definition?

alistairSH3• 2 years ago

Yes. The typical pattern I've seen in DC is...

1. Neighborhood is old, run-down, inexpensive (for numerous reasons)

2. Young professionals (usually white) start moving in to save money

3. Investors/developers notice the trend and start rebuilding/redeveloping at a faster rate

4. The end result is what's frequently perceived as a bland upper-middle-class neighborhood.

Somewhere between 2 and 3, the previous residents are driven out by price increases. They take their culture with them. Between that loss of diversity and zoning restrictions (typical 5-over-2 building pattern), the result usually is pretty bland (IMO).

KingMob3• 2 years ago

Parts of this article are a little ignorant, in particular the way New Wave is framed as a "gentrifier" of punk.

For starters, some of the more ambitious punk bands became New Wave: Wire went from raw punk to brilliant new wave, and even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols went on to form Public Image Limited.

the New Wave scene was created mostly by middle- to upper-class white musicians ... after graduating from private art colleges

Guess the author has some weird beef with the Talking Heads, who went to RISD?

Also one of the first punk bands, the Ramones, were essentially a bunch of white kids from Ridgewood, Queens, which is pretty suburban itself, let's be honest.

There's some I agree with, but all in all, kind of a meh musical take from a non-cultural socialist mag.

psunavy03• 2 years ago

Jacobin is not a source to take seriously. They're a very politically-slanted outfit that generally starts with a conclusion in mind from their particular political point of view and then works backwards from there. Like OANN, but on the left.

drewcoo2• 2 years ago

For starters, some of the more ambitious punk bands became New Wave

That backs what the article is saying. As punk became more settled and palatable to more people (musicians learned to play their instruments?) first wave punk turned into new wave music.

Guess the author has some weird beef with the Talking Heads, who went to RISD?

Note that's a college. In the 70s, before college became the new high school. That's fairly upper-middle class. Devo and R.E.M. also met in college.

the Ramones, were essentially a bunch of white kids from Ridgewood, Queens, which is pretty suburban itself

The Ramones started as a high school garage band in Forrest Hills, Queens (also the home of Spider Man!). Every kid goes to high school, unlike college in the 70s. And I'd call it urban even though it has some greenery.

That said, some things cannot be tamed. Even when Bruce Springsteen covers them, Suicide is still raw post-punk from before there was post-punk. And I think that's where the author's analogy really breaks down - all of the many examples that don't at all parallel gentrification.

KingMob3• 2 years ago

Gentrifiers are usually outsiders, not original residents going upscale. That's why I don't think that bands that went from punk to new wave support the author's theory.

I wasn't talking about college as a marker of class. I was referring to the quote "graduating from private art colleges that had prepared them to work in the culture industry". Private art colleges are way fewer in number than college in general, and off the top of my head, I only know of Talking Heads as a new wave band coming from a private art college (Rhode Island School of Design). It's so specific, I wonder why the author didn't name the Talking Heads specifically. (I checked, and Devo and REM didn't go to art colleges.)

The Ramones started as a high school garage band in Forrest Hills, Queens

Ahh, I misremembered the particular nabe. But from the NYC perspective, that's still the suburbs. I lived all over NYC for almost twenty years. Good place to raise a family, and a bit boring. Not many subway lines, thanks to Robert Moses, so it's car-heavy, which is part of why it's suburban. Just because it's in NYC city limits doesn't make it urban. And it was probably similar when the Ramones were there.

namlem• 2 years ago

Gentrification didn't kill it, overly restrictive planning rules did

Moldoteck2• 2 years ago

imo most us gentrification is caused by car infra expansion(parking reqs+highways), zoning and slow growth of housing stock

screye• 2 years ago

As a major proponent of gentrification, I feel obligated to put in a good word.

Compared to global cities, American cities are woefully under-built and underutilized. 70s white-flight, interstates and inner cities made cities the place for poor people. As things normalize and as young people return to cities, this anomaly is beginning to resolve itself.

This is a great thing for the poor who lived there. They can sell their suddenly expensive land make a big buck. Except, they never owned the land they lived on. They never purchased even so much as an apartment when the prices were rock bottom. Now they don't have any assets to liquidate.

This highlights the key enemies of poor people. Not yuppies or gentrification, but instead.

1. Slumlords - you couldn't have owned cuz they won't sell. You can't built because of horrible housing policy.

2. Bad education and cultural aversion to investing - you could have owned, but you never bought.

3. Bad Public transport - makes the inevitable displacement be a zero sum game.

Don't hate the yuppies who are being forced move to cities to work for companies there. Blame the city for limiting their local populations ability to make money of an a great opportunity.

What about neighborhood character though? Well, what about it. Every neighborhood's character has changed through the generation. The 'my suburb will be the same in 50 years' mentality is a uniquely recent take from American suburbia, and is already being proven wrong as the youth abandons them and maintenence costs are picking up.

truckerbill2• 2 years ago

1 - These are bad. But you can change slumlords to landlords and you would be making a more pertinent point. Because gentrification is really driven by the market making slumlords less relevant.

2 - Poor people can't invest because they have no wealth... But you are correct in that people are intentionally not taught to think this way. 'The poor' (people) generally aren't dumb enough that they wouldn't buy a house if they could. In other places where renting is more popular it's because renting is a safer bet.

3 - Good transport would be nice, but without solving underlying inequalities it may make the problem worse (yuppies can commute easier and outprice people)

timcobb• 2 years ago

Shout out to Mars Bar! This was probably the last of this scene that I experienced in its twilight years ~2009-2012. https://www.grubstreet.com/2015/11/hank-penza-rip-mars-bar.h...

nbaugh1• 2 years ago

This feels like a swing and a miss. Sure, expensive rent pushed artists and musicians out of those neighborhoods, but they just moved elsewhere within NYC. The genres outlined in this article were fully mainstreamed in the 90s. The concept of "Selling out" and thus becoming uncool had way more to do with killing underground music scenes that real estate cycles.

Also, the Hip Hop scene is alive and well in NYC, maybe just not so much in Manhattan anymore.

EDM, DJs etc are doing just fine despite these factors as well

Gentrification Killed NYC's Vibrant '70s Music Scene

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