vivian shaw

Living in “Nowhere”: the 20somethings construct in New York City

A sociologically important function of Facebook is its ability to aggregate issues that networks of people value culturally and socially. Having spent my college days at NYU, my social network is largely New York-centric. Much of what turns up on my Newsfeed is similarly oriented toward the city, and its related stories of NYC’s high cost of living, “delayed” adulthood, and stylish frugality as embodied by the New York hipster, frequently painted against the backdrop of our Great Recession. This demand is well-met by the New York Times—case-in-point their recent article, “The Price 20-Somethings Pay to Live in the City.” 

Paired with a glossy slideshow-audio feature, the article interviews several post-college 20-somethings who have pilgrimaged to New York City and their sweet hells of unbounded inspiration and 6 feet x 8 feet bedrooms. It’s an archetype itself, this narrative: the sacrifices young people make to live out their dreams in the so-called greatest city on the planet. With this decade’s cultural emergence of hipster Williamsburg, Brooklyn has firmly planted itself in the New York story. And for those not lucky enough to live on North 7th Street, Brooklyn is often narrated as the site for daring artists to break ground in some of the borough’s “seedier” neighborhoods. Or to state in less romantic terms, to gentrify.

“Before this I was living in a loft in Bushwick,” said Mr. Cavin Quezada, who grew up outside Washington. “This apartment is nicer, and has more amenities, but the neighborhood is noticeably fishier. In Bushwick, I never really felt threatened. Now, the sounds around are more aggressive. I’ll see 20 guys ride by on motorcycles, or hear gunshots outside my window.

“And one day,” he said, “in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, I saw a guy on a motorcycle with a handgun. It was not a reassuring sight.”

The New York story is rebellious, sexy, and very marketable, and mainstream news media contributes frequently to its prose. But since news media is itself a resource, by which populations of readers seek to learn “truth,” there is something very problematic about the allocation of so much word and time to this particular narrative. This is not to be reductive and suggest that the story is frivolous and that we ought to reserve our attentions for more pressing political concerns, such as America’s wars and the global economic downturn. Rather, these soft stories of white, middle class young people finding their dreams amidst a particular irony of “bourgeois poverty” are themselves instruments of neoliberal media, which sells urban stratification as a “lifestyle” at home and apologizes for military-enforced colonialism abroad.

The article’s inneundoed approach in talking about gentrification is particularly telling of the New York Times’ position as a taste-maker of white, intellectual privilege. As Quezada and his peers have been framed in this article, inhabiting a “bad neighborhood” is a choice—an inconvenience balanced by more significant opportunities to rise upwards in career and lifestyle. Living in a “bad neighborhood” is a temporary experience for the 20-something, transient. Mainstream media privileges the protagonist who has the option to leave his bad neighborhood, prudent not to engage the life experiences of those who can’t afford to upgrade and/or have more lasting stakes in their communities. Or the parallel story, celebrating transformation—a migration of creators who might shape neighborhoods that first appear bleak, hopeless, and characterless into environments suitable for their own image. This depicted binary of individuals of promise vs. communities of decay is colonial, imagining Brooklyn real estate as a commodity, available to any person savvy or adventurous enough to exploit.

The effects of this soft-selling of gentrification have been profound. I titled this post Living in ‘Nowhere’ because neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyvesant (among others) are often framed as undiscovered and uncultivated territory—where, as Quezada suggests, you can get relatively quality real estate for “cheap.” The reality is that what is cheap for middle class migrants to New York is often unaffordable for the many families who have historically lived in these neighborhoods. So unaffordable that they have been pushed out to the margins of Brooklyn and/or crowded in, with multiple families often sharing a single dwelling. Not surprisingly, while media sources like the New York Times have focused their attention to the “hipster” apartment experience in New York, they have simultaneously ignored very serious housing issues that disproportionately affect marginalized groups, such as African Americans, Latinos, undocumented immigrants, and women of color with children. In response to a $45 million budget gap this year, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) made massive cuts to Section 8, a voucher program that has historically enabled hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to avoid homelessness. In contrast to its unending reportage about attractive, white 20-somethings, the New York Times provided minimal coverage to the Section 8 story. From what I was able to research, they last discussed this crisis in April of this year, before the cut had even been finalized.

NYCHA is no longer offering Section 8 vouchers to new applicants nor to pending vouchers, in other words, clients who were approved for the program but had not yet received their subsidized apartments. Brooklyn has the highest concentration of public housing projects in North America, so this policy change has enormous implications, with the potential to destabilize thousands of families, especially given a virtually barren job market that disproportionately excludes African American men and women. This lack of reportage is especially problematic as the media tends to characterize certain urban neighborhoods as “ghettos” where bad things “culturally” occur, ignoring the many institutional factors that often precipitate violence and crime. If we read mainstream news without criticism, we might not wonder if the “guy with a handgun” was himself a 20-something.