ABlog

Surely it cannot be the case that New York City is experiencing a latter-day “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers”? Surely it would be indefensibly superstitious to attribute our real estate wars and gentrification woes to some extra-terrestrial surge or supernatural viral affliction? I know better than to indulge such fantasies; I do believe, truly I do, that our worst miseries have a rational explanation. Still, the melodramatic contagion metaphors feel awfully tempting, especially in light of a broad range of anecdotal and journalistic evidence:

·My friend and union colleague Joel Schlemowitz, who is an experimental film-maker when he isn’t enforcing faculty labor contracts, reports on having taken part in a guerrilla film showing in the Meatpacking District. (The Meatpacking District used to be what its name implies, an area of warehouses, sparsely populated and often desolate after dark, but has been turned into a trendy zone of high-end restaurants frequented by Wall Street types.) The point of the ad hoc, open air film event, as I understand it, was to expand the public’s sense of the possibilities of the moving image by simultaneously projecting lots of different films onto the sides of buildings. Joel reports that, as the light show unfolded, one well-heeled passerby appealed to him in wonder: “But how do you make money doing this?” “When you find out, let me know,” he shot back.

·The Harlem Tenants Council plans a June 21 march and rally against gentrification. Demands include: Build and Preserve Low income housing; Protect Public Housing; Fund legal & anti-evictions services; Protect Local businesses: Re-establish Mart 125th for Local businesses & Street Merchants; Re-establish NYC Youth Boards for jobs for youth in crisis; Provide equal access in construction industry jobs; No Eminent Domain; Moratorium on zoning/rezoning; Conflict of interest investigations on EIS Studies; Landmark & monument for African Burial Ground in East Harlem; No skyscrapers in Harlem; Landmark historic resources in Harlem; and include the local community in a transparent and accountable public review process on development.

·I read in Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006): “There are probably more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to more than a million people. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities whose total population exceeds 20 million. ‘Megaslums’ arise when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery. Mexico City, for example, in 1992 had an estimated 6.6. million low-income people living contiguously in 348 square kilometers of informal housing….As the anarchist architect John Turner famously pointed out, ‘Housing is a verb.’ The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety. For some people, including many pavement-dwellers, a location near a job…is even more important than a roof. For others, free or nearly free land is worth epic commutes from the edge to the center” (p. 27).

·The New York Times Real Estate section reports on the rah-rah spirit of newly minted Brooklynites who reside in rental apartments and condos whose “lavish amenities are persuading people they can live a Manhattan lifestyle across the river.” Kevin Reid, a 30-year-old African-American event planner, pays $2,550 a month for a two-bedroom rental in a luxury building in Bed Stuy. He explains, “My peers who have their M.B.A.’s and their new master’s degrees and new jobs, they’re looking for new condos; they’re not into the traditional houses or brownstones….You cannot put a fitness center in a brownstone. You don’t have a doorman in a brownstone.” (“They Love [The New] Brooklyn,” New York Times, June 15, 2008, real estate section, pp. 1, 10)

·In the midst of all this, my beloved Prospect Lefferts Gardens forges (hobbles?) ahead with what promises to be a guerra prolongada against the invasion of the neighborhood snatchers. Demolition proceeds apace on the proposed glass tower site at 27-35 Lincoln Road. We fuddy-duddies who are emphatically not “the New” Brooklyn and want to keep it that way are staring down the barrel of Big Money. The specter of a glass tower rising in our midst is only the most symbolic (not to mention “transparently” phallic) of the incursions. We ragtag, all-volunteer, minimally organized organizers continue to gather stories of landlord abuse, harassment and pressure directed against the denizens of rent stabilized apartments and those receiving Section 8 housing subsidies. What will it take to rally the long-time tenants, the demographic backbone of any successful anti-gentrification effort? In a sense, they are the ones who stand to benefit most from organizing, but they are also the ones who, rightly, feel most vulnerable and who have the most incentive to lie low and hope they’ll be spared somehow.

·And then today I glance at the metro section of the Times and discover a prominent article about the fight being waged at 47 E. Third Street in the East Village, where my friend and former student Barry Paddock is part of an anti-eviction campaign that’s been going on for more than four years. The building’s owners, wealthy employees of a real estate management firm, are trying to empty out their rent-stabilized building by making twisted use of the clause in the rent control law that lets landlords kick tenants out if they want to take apartments for their own use. “Own use” in this case involves the projected conversion of fifteen rent-stabilized units into an 11,000-square foot home slated to include seven bathrooms and a gym. (More information is available at www.47e3.org.) At times it seems like everyone I know in this benighted city has either been in the thick of this oh-so-literal struggle for our very homes since forever or, like me, is coming belatedly to it.


What does it mean, I wonder, that in a time when so much cries out to be done—from preventing an attack on Iran (just forget about the seemingly impossible project of bringing the troops home from those other hideous and criminal wars) to fending off domestic fascism to campaigning for some minimal measure of environmental sanity that could help us avoid total eco-death—so many of us are having to fight for our most basic rights to an urban space—a “community,” if you will—that allows us to go on recognizing each other and acting in concert? Because, let’s face it, that is what is truly at stake for those of us who’ve been fortunate to find some sort of minimally secure roost. We came here in our youth, so many of us who are now middle-aged, artists and activists, above all because connections could be made here. It wasn’t just that the rents were cheap then. It was that art could be indulged, little magazines could be published out of walkup apartments, food coops could be started on a shoestring. You could demonstrate and rally, and it might not have the desired or even any measurable effect, but at least you could come together with like-minded others, not be shunted and penned behind those aluminum police barricades. How cleverly those Giuliani-Bloomberg-era barriers attenuate the heady sensation of coalescence, reducing public protest to a theatrical rite of submission to The Authorities!

“How do you make money out of this?” is the question of the age. I recognize now that my art-life is like my neighborhood life: coming to the metropolis from the provinces at a young age, I was fortunate to find a “place,” a community, before the reduction of absolutely everything that matters to me, including literary judgment and the sense of “home,” to that question of making $ $ $. But all it means is that I’ve found a sort of cushion. My private property boundaries, my literary circles mean next to nothing in the larger context. I don’t want to see my neighbors being evicted when I walk out the front door of the “property” I “own.” Besides, I know that my writing will never be understood or valued in a world where the ability to make money, to “sell” a “product” to a mass audience, is not simply the predominant but in truth the only recognized gauge of the worth of any endeavor.

Housing is a verb. Community is a verb. Neighborhood is a verb. Environment is a verb. The folks with all the money are active, transitive. They wake up in the morning full of the evil energy of end-stage capitalism (if they even sleep at all, which I’m beginning to doubt). I see no recourse for the rest of us except to get cracking.