[URBAN NOTE] "Ask A Native New Yorker: Is Queens Doomed To Be The Next Brooklyn?"

[rfmcdonald]

Gothamist's Jake Dobson writes about the homogenizing effect of gentrification, in New York City's boroughs and in the wider world.

Have you ever noticed that all gentrified neighborhoods are alike, but each ungentrified neighborhood is cool in its own way? Like I could drop you in any hipster area anywhere in the world—Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, Berlin, Tokyo—and you'd be surrounded by the same scene: coffee bars with people tapping away at Macbooks, an upscale dive bar filled with guys with beards, a bunch of restaurants selling farm-to-table food. Even the graffiti would look the same!

Why is that? Why doesn't gentrification look different everywhere? Maybe it's because it has the same basic ingredients in each place: students and artists and gays looking for an affordable place to live, and the small business owners they attract who cater to their tastes. Or more likely, because a lot of gentrification is engineered by property owners and banks working from the same template, and it's a lot easier to copy a place which has produced investment returns, like Williamsburg, than it is to try a new idea. Or, ultimately because capitalism is all about commodification, even when the commodity that's being sold is authenticity. That's some next-level post-modern Marxist critique right there!

Media plays a sad role in this. But they have a good excuse: they do it for the money! Allow me to explain: the New York Times is not a monolithic business. In reality, it is composed of many important bastions of journalism, like the international section, the Metro desk, Science, etc. These are valuable and very important for our democracy. But these sections are expensive to run and often lose money, so they must be supported by more advertiser-friendly areas of the paper, like Style and Real Estate, or the odious billionaire ball-cupping that gets done at DealBook.