Longtime ‘authentic’ residents of 2011 find themselves priced out by newer authentic residents of 2026
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Cycle, Documented
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Marcus Chen, 38, moved to Williamsburg in 2011 when it was, in his words, still kind of rough but really interesting and the rent was manageable, attracted by the combination of affordable housing, proximity to Manhattan, and a creative community of artists, musicians, and early food entrepreneurs who were collectively producing what would become one of the most influential neighborhood transformations in American urban history.
Marcus is now being priced out of Williamsburg by people who moved there in 2019 when it was, in their words, still authentic but accessible and the rent was manageable, attracted by the combination of affordable-relative-to-Manhattan housing and a creative community of slightly younger artists, musicians, and food entrepreneurs who had moved in after Marcus’s generation had softened the neighborhood into something that their generation found viable.
Marcus is considering Crown Heights. Crown Heights residents who have been there since 2016 are considering East New York. East New York residents who have been there since 2020 are considering neighborhoods outside the five boroughs, at which point they would, strictly speaking, no longer be New Yorkers, which adds an identity dimension to what begins as a financial calculation.
The Economics, Explained
Gentrification in New York operates through a series of overlapping and self-reinforcing mechanisms. Early movers, typically artists and young professionals with low incomes and high tolerance for rough conditions, establish the creative density that makes a neighborhood interesting to subsequent waves. Each wave of residents increases demand, which increases rents, which displaces the previous wave, which moves to the next affordable neighborhood and begins the process again.
This cycle would, in theory, reach the outer edge of affordable geography — the point where the city runs out of neighborhoods to gentrify — and then stop. In practice, it appears to continue beyond the city limits, with areas of New Jersey, upstate New York, and Connecticut experiencing the downstream effects of the displacement that begins in Manhattan and moves outward like a wave from a stone thrown in still water, except the stone is a luxury apartment building and the water is a metropolitan housing market.
Gothamist has covered Williamsburg’s transformation in real time since the early 2000s and could write a book about it, and several people have, and the books are now available at the coffee shops that replaced the coffee shops that replaced the bodegas. The City NYC continues to document displacement with the rigor that the subject requires. Marcus continues to look at apartments.
What Marcus Says Now
When asked about the irony of his situation — that he is now in the position of the displaced, having once been among the displacers — Marcus said something that landed in the space between self-awareness and defensiveness that tends to characterize these conversations. I know how it looks, he said. But when I moved in, the neighborhood was actually affordable. It’s not the same thing. This is a sentence that Marcus’s predecessor in the neighborhood said about Marcus, and that Marcus’s successor will say about someone else, in a chain of self-exculpation that extends through the entire history of New York real estate and will continue for as long as the city exists and desirable neighborhoods are scarce and people need somewhere to live that reflects their sense of who they are.
New York, New York
New York City operates at a scale and intensity that makes every story a larger story. The subway delay is a story about infrastructure investment and political will. The rent increase is a story about housing policy and urban economics. The bagel dispute is a story about cultural identity and immigration history. The rat is a story about urbanization and ecological adaptation. The tourist is a story about how cities present themselves to the world and how the world receives what cities offer. Even the pizza disagreement is, underneath the comedy, a story about regional identity and the human need to have things that are ours, specifically ours, that we defend with disproportionate vigor precisely because they are ours and because the world is large and we need to stake our territory somewhere. New York is where many of these stories happen simultaneously, in a density that produces the particular creative friction that has made the city a cultural generator for a century and a half. The people who live here tolerate the cost and the noise and the subway delays and the rent and the rats because the city gives back something that cannot be fully quantified: the experience of being in a place where things are happening, where ideas collide, where the next conversation might change how you think about something, where the scale of human activity is so concentrated that you are reminded constantly that you are part of something enormous and ongoing. This is the deal. Most people who make it find it sufficient. Some find it extraordinary. None of them are moving to the suburbs.
New York remains, above all, a city of stories — stories told by its residents about themselves, about each other, about the city they chose and the city that chose them back. Every borough has its version. Every neighborhood has its variation. Every block has someone who remembers when it was different and someone who cannot imagine it any other way, and between these two perspectives the city lives, in the space between what it was and what it is becoming, which is the only space any living city can occupy.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com