How New York Killed Culture
And What We Can Do to Save It
The theme of Non Grata’s inaugural edition is New York. The city is on the cover and in the pages; two weeks from now it will host our launch event at 155 Suffolk Street (RSVP here). Because we love New York, we knew we needed a piece that would sufficiently challenge it.
’s compelling polemic does just that, explaining how the city went from the imperfect dreamland that gave us Whitman, Didion, and Dylan to a place that has produced little of lasting artistic value over the last ten years. In 8,000 words, and nearly as many data points, Coby excoriates aspects of New York’s culture and regulatory policy before suggesting pragmatic guidelines on how to build it back to its former glory.The entire essay is posted below. But as the image gallery shows, it looks more beautiful and feels better in print. If you’d like to get a copy, subscribe via Substack or send $20 here. Shipping is included in the price, or you can pick yours up at the launch party.
How New York Killed Culture
And What We Can Do to Save It
by
American culture has stagnated, and New York is to blame. This is at once a provocative statement and an obvious one for those who follow such things closely. Nationally, there seems to be a critical alignment on this belief—at least for the former of these claims.
From the late 1970s to 2000, as the Substack Experimental History reports, around a quarter of the top-grossing movies at the domestic box office were sequels, spin-offs, or adaptations. By the late 2010s, this number had tripled to more than seventy-five percent. The takeover was complete by 2024, when no original films cracked the top twenty. In TV, spin-offs now command more than a third of viewership. The percentage of best-selling books whose authors had previously published a best-seller has gone exponential, rising from near zero in the early ’80s to consistently north of thirty percent.
As the music critic and historian Ted Gioia has continuously noted, old songs are increasingly drowning out new ones. Catalog music (older than eighteen months) enjoys almost seventy-five percent of total consumption, a figure which has sharply increased in the age of streaming.
This is not just a cultural trend. Concentration by the largest actors in myriad markets has become ubiquitous. The ten largest firms own seventy percent of the video game market, ninety percent of the automobile market, forty-two percent of the home-building market, and twenty-five percent of the restaurant market.
If these forces are as pervasive as they seem, we’re forced to ask a thorny question: Is this just what the market wants? Perhaps. Do you really care about the 1,000 body soaps that advertise their varied, yet chemically identical, branding? Does it make sense to spend $2 more for spices at the local South Asian grocery store as opposed to ordering them online? Does it really matter who supplies our water, so long as it’s clean, reliable, and cheap?
These are, of course, all commodities. Is the same utilitarian paradox—where the abundance of, and demand for, a superficially-high-quality product increases while its actual quality decreases—true of culture? Though they may not be as exalted as Fellini’s work, the baseline production quality of a Marvel movie is undoubtedly higher than its equivalent four decades ago, to say nothing (yet) of its artistic merit. Likewise, the quality floor of new homes, restaurants, and ironworking have risen meaningfully, even if the ceiling on their greatest representations has lowered. One is more assured of the standard quality of Shake Shack than a mysterious greasy spoon in some unknown town. If this is true of culture, it spells even more discomfort for many (this writer included) who glamorize novel pluralism while supporting its conquerors.
I don’t think this is the case. There is still genuine, robust demand for new perspectives in art, film, literature, and music. Otherwise, these questions wouldn’t be so pervasively asked. The defining question, then, is why are we seeing a cultural stagnation borne of concentration when there is broad demand for dynamic pluralism?
This essay does not dwell on mediums of production. I don’t blame TikTok for this trend (literacy is another matter), though it is doubtless impacting society in meaningful ways. Culturally, it is an evolution in the same vein of radio, television, and early social media. If anything, TikTok is one of the few places where promotion of new ways of thinking, creating, and doing is most apparent.
Perhaps it’s about distribution then? Sure, there are many voices on TikTok, but what does the algorithm boost? Similarly, there is more art being created today than at any time in the past. Why does nobody care? Is extreme decentralization washing everything away? There’s some truth to this. The greater truth, though, at least in America, is that most means of cultural production are just not very good.
And it’s New York’s fault.
For some who live in the city, or visit, this may seem deranged. How could you possibly believe that? Look! at all of the shows, galleries, pop-up events, content, creators, vibrancy, fashion! Culture. I would agree, there’s much to gaze at. But do not mistake preponderance for meaningfulness. Look a little deeper. There’s nothing under the surface. What new stories have been told in the city that have gripped our collective imagination? What work has not only resonated, but taken permanent residence in our psyches? What’s the last great band to come out of the city? The last great piece of art? I’m not talking about people who have come here after they have seen some success, but those who were grown, nurtured, and then platformed here. I also don’t mean critically acclaimed (as it’s the critics’ job to always acclaim something), nor what some coterie of self-anointed tastemakers believe should receive recognition. But actual, near-universally admired, “capital A” Art. Go on. Try. New York is a potemkin veneer of culture. And as culture spreads from the city, it has gotten the entire country stuck.
How do we turn this around? As it happens, this is difficult to do. Not because there aren’t many thousands who actually have something interesting to say, and can capably represent that message in their medium of choice, but because they are given neither the opportunity of promotion, nor creation in primis.
A Rock Wall
In the twentieth century cartoon series Looney Tunes, Wile E. Coyote is a brilliant painter. With quick work of the brush, he composes hyper-realistic landscapes in attempts to catch the elusive Road Runner. In one of the more famous scenes, Wile E. paints a road that cuts through a mountain. Road Runner speeds through, defying the laws of physics. When Wile E. tries to follow, however, his dreams are crushed, as his body slams into the rock wall.
For many artists today, New York is that rock wall. From around the world, creatives are seduced by the scenery of the city, visions of enormous success. Magnificent horizons on the other side of the mountain, if only they can get through. Who can blame them? Especially because others, like Road Runner, have taken it so swiftly and successfully before. If she could make it in New York, surely I can! The issue, as in the cartoon, is that this image is illusory. We are but coyotes running into rock. Where some are able to break through the Concrete Ceiling (or never even knew it existed, such is their privilege), it remains closed off to most. Set aside the inconvenient fact that Wile E. paints to eat Road Runner, and that artists approximating the coyote’s talent just want to eat in general, the analogy is apt.
New York is a self-constructed, imagined reality. The city of Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Joan Didion, Martin Scorsese, Madonna, Jerry Seinfeld, Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, Keith Haring, Edith Wharton, Duke Ellington, Mark Rothko, Langston Hughes, Spike Lee, Fran Lebowitz, Toni Morrison, and many hundreds of others. I will come to New York and be the next Lady Gaga. The MOMA will do a retrospective on my career. I will write the defining work of American literature in a basement on West 83rd street.
It is the great magnet that attracts talent not just from all over the country, but the world too. By their thousands, creatives flock to New York in hopes of achieving their dreams. Even just a moment will suffice. An order or two greater than their number are their productions: performances, shows, readings, interpretive dances, thought pieces. We are flooded with exciting culture, are we not? Look deeper. Not big budget Broadway productions, nor readings from best-selling authors; New York has long excelled in these areas, but they’re for people who have already made it. I mean truly novel, thought-provoking work from unknown voices.
How much of the city’s culture is just transposing what has already proven successful elsewhere? Are we living in a Times Square billboard? Absurd, there’s great art all over the place! people will cry. The public just doesn’t know them yet, they sneer. But markets are efficient. If there really was a preponderance of such important culture, surely it would be more deeply felt—most of all by those who shape it. Yet the several dozen interviews I conducted for this piece, with filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians, designers, and more, all converged on the same idea: there isn’t any great art in the city right now, despite all of the bluster from the public-relations-industrial-complex.
Why? Because the rent is too damn high. The sorts of people who take the sorts of risks to produce the sorts of art that form a compelling sort of culture are either forced into a soulless job, where they watch their dream die, or they have to take on several part-time gigs just to make ends meet. They are sacrificing their fullest potential. Do not mistake this for lamenting our lack of Epicurean gardens, or a belief that work is an indignity to the higher realm of creation in abstracto. People must work; culture is a luxury acquired downstream of subsistence needs being met.
Thankfully, New York is as prosperous a place as humanity has ever known. Our subsistence needs having been met many times over, our greatest challenges are largely of our own making. But they are real challenges. The median rent throughout New York City is $3,500 a month. In order to afford this (measured as paying no more than thirty percent of gross income on rent), a household would need to make $140,000 a year—nearly double the city’s median household income. What about the city’s heart? Median rents in Manhattan are north of $4,500, and the average is $5,400. Households would need to earn $180,000 and $216,000 respectively to not be rent burdened. This is simply too much to afford while also having the freedom to experiment with ideas that may not be readily accepted.
That’s because we only build for the rich! Not so. Nearly a third of housing built in the last decade was targeted at low income households. While not sufficient, it’s important to note this wouldn’t be enough for anyone. We’re more than half a million homes short of meeting current demand, across all income levels. The rent is so high because we don’t build enough housing—for anyone. How can you say that? There are cranes everywhere! Similar to perceptions around cultural production, this is a fallacy that feels right but is wrong in practice. Dothan, Alabama builds more housing than New York on a proportionate basis (housing units authorized per existing 1,000 residents). We’re in league with Little Rock, Arkansas and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Despite having a population one third the size of New York’s metropolitan area, Houston builds more units in total.
Why can’t we build housing? Because our zoning is shamefully restrictive. Outside of Manhattan, ninety-two percent of buildings within a kilometer of a subway stop are three stories or less. Sixty-three percent are two stories or less! On fifteen percent of the city’s residentially-zoned land, it’s illegal to build anything other than a single family home. The promises of “New York being a city for all” are categorically untrue. The city refuses to grow to meet the needs of new and old residents alike.
Rent is not high because of “late-stage capitalism” (anyone who invokes this phrase should be regarded with deep suspicion), or the avarice of landlords. In Austin, rents have dropped for nearly two years straight (or more than twenty percent from their highs) to about $1,200 a month for a one bedroom, and less than $1,500 for a two bedroom. Are maverick Texan landlords simply more beneficent than their New York counterparts? Risible. Rents dropped because the city produced four times as much housing as New York on a proportionate basis. The academic literature is definitive on this point, as are the meta-analyses. Austin’s vacancy rate, the closest approximation for satisfaction of demand in a market, stands at ten percent, while New York’s is less than two.. This is not an issue of political economy. It’s about regulations, NIMBYism, and a misalignment of theory and practice. If our politicians truly cared and understood the nature of the issue, they would simply change our land use regulatory environment to accept more growth. But they don’t. This is how our crisis is artificially imposed.
New York’s rent stabilization laws are another salient example of the city’s regulatory failures. In 2019, under the aegis of the de Blasio administration, New York passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which stabilized rents for all residential buildings constructed before 1974 with more than six units. The upshot was capping rents for about a million apartments. Sounds like a great idea! What could go wrong? In practice, it cut apartment supply in half, while demand stayed constant (or increased a bit), without marrying it with any new housing. Rents then accelerated the next six years, rising nearly twenty percent since the passage of HSTPA.
Worse still, based on Rent Guidelines Board data, operating expenses have outpaced rent by more than three times. This is a dire situation. According to NYU’s Furman Center, hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized units are now facing severe distress (read: risk of falling apart). These conditions are concentrated in the most marginalized neighborhoods. Freezing rent will only accelerate this process. Prior to 2019, around four percent of multifamily buildings in New York had a Class C Violation (the worst category of violations). Now, that number is nearly twenty percent. When half of the city’s rental stock is no longer able to be maintained because operating expenses dramatically outpace income, the inevitable result is a further deterioration of the housing supply. Contrary to the present flow of popular imaginations, buildings need rent to be maintained. Net operating margins, in the best of times, are somewhere in the three to five percent range in expensive coastal markets. Housing costs are expensive. Ignoring this reality not only denies the potential for the city to function as a creative hub, but more importantly, to function in general.
High rent has distorted New York’s magnetism into a black hole, sucking in talent, squandering it, and then spitting it back to the provincial realm from where it came. Unable to deal with the (unnecessarily) exorbitant costs, people leave, fragmenting the creative industries they might otherwise have formed. Arts need agglomeration effects, or people clustering together to create more positive advantages than if they were isolated. In order for new ideas to form, different sorts of creative, risk-inclined people must be able to live close together, along with patrons that can support, nurture, and broadcast their work. Under this telling, a key reason why Hollywood has run out of ideas is because the same people are talking to one another, insulated from the gritty realities and serendipity that lives outside of their production lots. Without offering the conditions for new entrants to proffer their ideas, new ones cannot form.
On the other end of the spectrum, rents may be cheaper in Philadelphia, Tulsa, or St. Louis, but none of these cities have the critical nexus of talented creators (as most go to New York), nor associated supporters, to usher in a meaningful cultural movement. Reconstituting creative scenes in Chicago or Portland could, theoretically, raise us out from this stasis. But that would require New York to lose its hold over the imaginations of creatives worldwide. Though I am disillusioned with the city, asking the same of the country is unrealistic. And so, until New York either loses its cultural crown to enormous competitive forces, or opens its gates more fully, culture will continue to stagnate nationally. There is nowhere for it to emerge at the local level.
But the city has always been this way, right? It’s always been difficult to break through, to afford to even try. If you can make it here, they say, you can make it anywhere. Again, I’m unconvinced. To borrow from Ross Barkan: “Elite, mainstream culture has stagnated. There are still quality movies and books released by the large conglomerates and good music that comes from the major record labels, but, like [the] sheer number of cheaper neighborhoods, a lot less of it.” Things have changed. While the Rock Wall may have always existed, the Concrete Ceiling has never been so readily apparent, or crushingly low.
A Concrete Ceiling
Let’s say, miraculously, one is able to afford to live in New York and they have space enough to work on their craft. Though we may have lost many thousands who might have contributed much to the city (and ultimately the country) at the first phase of the funnel, at least we can still promote the few who have managed to make it. Were this only true!
In a meritocratic world, only the worthy would be promoted on the value of their efforts. But art is neither meritocratic nor objective. It is a game. One has to contort oneself to explain why, for example, mannequins tied up in string and strewn about concrete floors is something deserving of deep thought. Nothing worthy of emotion actually steals our words today. The general public knows this well; contemporary art is broadly reviled. That’s not borne of ignorance. It’s because the anointed in these circles are playing a very different and, to outward perceptions, confusing game.
The mist clears, however, if we reframe who the art they’re producing is for, and what its ultimate purpose is. Not for the public. Not even for the artist. No, it’s about the patrons and their aspirants, how they feel while consuming the art. The canvas, sculpture, film, etc. is secondary to the status one gains from being in these rooms. From the perception that one has been allowed, while others are excluded, to witness some profound statement reserved for only the most profound people.
With pursed lips, strained eyes, and a vigorous head nod, you are experiencing the culture viscerally, while others are not. They can only watch as they pass your fortress of glass, dressed up in the latest styles, standing next to good-looking people wearing cowboy hats and blazers with no shirts beneath, and others wearing sunglasses inside. You are one of these interesting people, in an interesting place, and that’s very interesting. The product the artist is selling is not on the walls. It is a story that uninteresting people can tell at their next dinner, across from someone who is not wearing a shoulderless blazer but instead a golf polo, crumpled slacks, and démodé top-siders.
Why does this sham continue? If the veil of exclusivity drops, those three lines dashed across a canvas are no longer an urgent commentary on post-colonial femininity in the global south. They’re just lines. The Emperor has never been wearing any clothes—and certainly no sunglasses. And so the music keeps playing; contemplating the vagaries of life in the quiet walls of one’s own mind is an unpermissible existence.
None of this is new. To some extent it has always existed in the vaunted realms of the Culturati. The difference is that aesthetics formerly played a salutary role. Beauty, virtue, meaning, and truth were attempted as noble offerings. But modernism eschewed them as frivolous, and post-modernism cemented them as having no meaning whatsoever. Still, as beings driven by the search for meaning, we’ve been forced to map these urges onto canvases where they don’t exist.
Who has stepped in as the new cartographic existentialists? Established forces, nepotees, beneficiaries of in-relations. Dilettantes and charlatans. Shiftily changing perceptions of what constitutes quality has elevated and instantiated those without much to say. They simply have access to the right people, or were lucky enough to come to prominence when conditions were much different.
Discomfort is a precondition for intriguing cultural production. Not struggle per se, but friction. The tension of one’s efforts crashing against countervailing forces requires reconciliation, going back to the drawing board. The temporarily-stymied are instilled with a determination that is deprived of those who never receive the discomfort of not having their work immediately accepted. Without feedback, systems become distorted. Uncritically praising a kindergartener’s sketch on the fridge is fine. Doing the same for a forty-five year-old is not. Especially when they never received a reality-check in their twenties, because they were free to create without consequence of their ideas not working, as “struggling artists” must.
This is clear in the work of those who have already made it. A musician’s ninth studio album is rarely as good as their second, but because they have a devoted following with far higher thresholds of criticism, they can continue reaping rewards far long after they, or more often, their writers, have run out of things to say.
More insidiously, but far more pervasively, is the impact by those who have not made it but are subsidized by kin and fidelity. These “creatives” don’t have to worry about not paying rent. Their needs will be met. That’s fine, as patronage has always existed. But they rarely have the burning flame of those who come from without. This inevitably brings down the quality of art. Instead of a relentless drive to give form to that which forms you, silver-spoon-Cezannes absently muse about “getting into water-colors” as casually as a normal person might suggest going somewhere for lunch. On its own, this is little more than insufferable. Harmless, if it can be avoided.
But it can’t be. Because space is scarce—especially in Manhattan. Their artistic dalliances are not as carefree as their ambitions would have you believe. This is a zero-sum game. They have crowded out the space for those who might have something interesting to say, but are silenced by the established players. And so we get only the sophomoric, at best, sporadic deepities in concrete galleries from people who’ve never faced any friction in life, and can only guess at what its shape might be.
These thespian philistines (cosplayers, for short) are manipulated by the art dealer who tells them what’s hot now (but doesn’t disclose she advises the seller, too), the latest post from some emerging media darling, or the vacuous think-piece that the right press outlets prominently feature. The seduction to fall prey to groupthink is too great for them to overcome. Moralization has usurped artistic merit in this condition (not dissimilar to the rise of Modernism) because cultural significance is lusted after as the end goal—full stop. Cosplayers, like water, will fill whatever fashionable form the Culturati milieu deems acceptable in a given moment. It is about the brand, not what’s inside the can. If you can sell the right dream, that’s all that matters.
The quality of cultural production is secondary to the value the dominant players, and their courts of sinecures, want to impose. Oh, I must not understand it. No one can understand it because the work is incomprehensible. This is the game in action. Those who validate it are also cosplaying; thus repelling the true shapers of culture with their performative graspings. Technology has scaled this charade up to unprecedented levels by dissolving regional perspectives and birthing a monoculture in its wake. We must reject the notion that Identity or Belief, by themselves, are more important than the quality of a work. It is not powerful to talk exclusively of race, or sexuality, or any of a hundred other immutable characteristics without any attendant story behind them. Moreover, many of these issues were adjudicated half a century, a century, or many and more ago, by people far more brave and elegant than the geist-shapers of today. Refusing to be even a cursory student of history is to deny James Baldwin, the Stonewall activists, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton of their monumental achievements. It is a disgrace to their memories, and those of the shoulders they stood on.
When what the work is trying to say is prized more than what it actually says, is it any wonder we’re in a stagnation? Proceduralism triumphing outcomes is not just an issue sequestered to the world of politics. It allows obvious falsehoods to become truths, represented by artists like Alec Monopoly. On the surface, there has to be something more than his gratuitous idolatry of wealth. Surely this is all some cultural commentary? He’s even said as much in early interviews, noting that he uses art to confront capitalism. Huh. That’s strange. $600,000 collaborations with Jacob & Co, work with Hermes, and posts showing off several Richard Milles sure doesn’t seem like a confrontation of capital to me. And yet the Culturati have run with it, because they have no strong beliefs or ideas themselves.
This is the natural result of what happens when everyone is lying to themselves, and do not have to live with the consequences of their indiscretions. When questions about how they can afford their apartment, who got them the role, or why their debut is the focus of a major solo exhibition go unanswered, anything is fair game. This is a satisfying answer. Ah! It’s the nepo-babies and the rich. Of course! If we just get rid of them, culture will revive!! I’m afraid, friends, it’s not so simple. For in the void high rents and exclusive gatherings have created, another group has washed over the entirety of cultural consumption and forced the market to respond to its demands via new means of production.
The Great (Middling) Void
Of all the possible forms New York could take, its present shape hews closest to the worlds that Sex and the City, Friends, Girls, and, to a lesser extent, Seinfeld depict. Not Bohemia, not the coterie of the mega-rich. No, it’s the upwardly-mobile, recently-urbanized masses that have emerged victorious. Digital marketing staffers, project managers, business development(ers?), and consultants. People whose jobs most don’t understand, even after careful recitation over multiple brunches. Returning to Barkan: “Cities today are wealthier but more sterile, hubs of global finance that, if they haven’t snuffed out art entirely, make it so those conditions for production become far more daunting and only those with access to enough capital can dedicate years of their lives to creative pursuits.”
This is only partly true. While New York is the global hub of finance, only eight percent of people in the region work in the industry. Citywide, it takes only a marginally higher share of employment, at ten percent, or 500,000 workers. It is simply untrue that a tenth of the city’s workforce can come close to exerting a majority influence on housing or culture, even if we assumed all of those people lived in the city—which they don’t! Many commute from their expensive enclaves in Connecticut, North Jersey, Westchester, and on Long Island, and thus have little influence on many of these conversations.
Stereotypes against the all-too-easy-villains of capitalism are the half-informed prejudices of people who don’t want to call out the true culprit (often because this would indict themselves as they are the beneficiaries of the systems they vociferously oppose). We’ve become a more sedate society as life has gotten significantly better for everyone. Yes, many still struggle, but nothing compared to the “interesting” ’90s or “wild” ’70s. Satisfaction of Maslowian needs is correlated with prosperity, yes, but it’s also correlated with dull domestication. The Great Middling of email jobs has swallowed everything into a comfortable Void.
The inconvenient truth is that the vast majority of New Yorkers—the very people who are the genesis of New York’s (and by extension, America’s) cultural black hole—work perfectly normal jobs. Jobs that make a decent amount of money, but cause no righteous outrage. Education and Health Services is the largest sector in the city, employing three times more people than Finance. 800,000 work in Professional and Business Services, which includes administrative associates, bookkeepers, account executives, lawyers, architects, salespeople, etc.. Even the Government employs 100,000 more people than Financial Services. I could keep going (e.g. nearly as many work in Leisure and Hospitality as Financial Services), but you get the point.
The issue is not the oft-derided yuppie bankers or tech workers marauding into town with their millions and pushing out the impoverished. They live in glass towers on the water, and in the downtowns of Long Island and Brooklyn that rose on parking lots and abandoned warehouses, displacing hardly anyone. (Many of these towers, in fact, give opportunity for lower-income earners to move into wealthy neighborhoods, and reduce rents meaningfully as older apartment units open up.)
While the median city-wide rent is indeed high, thirty percent of households in stabilized apartments make more than $100,000 per year. That’s about 300,000 units with a median rent of $1,500 a month. Infuriatingly, many of these tenants are inheritors or members of the Great Middling, who secured these prized homes through connections if not chance. In the process, they ended up destroying the (well-intentioned, poorly-executed, unworkable-without-new-supply) intent of the program.
These are national elites by any name other than the one they’ve chosen for themselves. Like the Culturati, they play Halloween all year round. But in this game they cosplay as the working class, “community organizing” in neighborhoods they gentrified and whose operations their parents pay for. These people have actually displaced a disadvantaged family in Bushwick, Harlem, or the East Village. They project onto others the internalized guilt they feel. I have no issue with my comrades in Flatbush who are living The Cause. But please do not patronize us from your Upper East Side or Crown Heights apartment. You are not fighting The Fight as a tech project manager that pays $3,900 for a studio and drinks $7 iced lattes after four $45 pilates sessions a week.
These people are more interested in not saying something wrong, prostrating and contorting to be accepted by those whom they believe to be the arbiters of societal morality, than saying something right but controversial. They attempt to get at it through contrivance, but inevitably fail, because the market sizes them up immediately as frauds. No snaps for you at the poetry reading.
They must hide who they are in order to make themselves seem interesting—I live in East Williamsburg!—while their real lives are spent summering in the Hamptons and skiing in Aspen or Gstaad or, more often, Stowe, when it gets a bit colder.Carefully, they conceal the designer bags they received at Christmas , externally verboten but internally worshiped. They can’t talk about their private school education, which costs tens of thousands of dollars per term, and must nod with forced exertion and identification when one of the other members of “the community” talks about some experience they never got close to in childhood. No, totally, we did the same thing growing up. This is a sting operation where everyone is a Fed but no one knows it yet. This is why the magic that made a neighborhood compelling in the past to actual creatives, among other reasons, can rarely sustain its identity. It gets interesting, the Middling moves in; then it gets less interesting.
There is nothing wrong with the West Village Girls (or their lesser invoked, but no less invasive, East Village counterpart) nor the Murray Hill frat stars. I’m not arguing that the hypocrisy of Brooklyn Tovarisch’s is even a problem per se, as we all partake in our own favored form of it. (Though the world is in much need of epistemic humility.) Good cities make room for all, and the Middlers offer many worthy contributions. Homogenization, however, no matter what form it takes, is not a good thing. Cosplaying is the overwhelming cultural force in New York right now, and it is imperiling the health of the city. We have ceded complete control to this broad middle of cultureless-aspirants, and in so doing we’ve fundamentally reshaped the city.
Walk downtown today, and all one sees are row after row of the same type of person (though they all regard themselves as perfectly idiosyncratic). There is no longer diversity in Manhattan. Sure, there are different hair dyes and tones of skin, but everyone is more or less the same age (or attempting to be), makes the same amount of money, goes to the same restaurants, and thinks the same thoughts. Diversity is not a color swatch. Real pluralism is a rich tapestry alternatively woven by thick strands of divergence and convergence. Manhattan is only a simulacra of one. Thin, unsatisfactory.
Notice people who say they love the diversity of New York never go to Mott Haven. Or Brighton Beach. And only rarely to Flushing as some sort of fetishistic pilgrimage (if even they make it past the US Open on the 7 train, the True annual hajj). When was the last time a Republican was spotted in broad daylight south of 23rd street? How many children can be seen in Tompkins Square Park after school gets out? When they’re not busy working or taking their family members to doctor’s appointments, is there anywhere for truly working class people to feel comfortable in Lower Manhattan?
No. There’s no space for them. It has been cannibalized by trend-chasers that pick up a coffee at Blank Street (not even understanding the irony) before powerwalking towards ever more insipid hedonic transactionalism. Get in, have your fun, and get back to the suburbs of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey. There are few things that irk me more than those who wistfully recall how much “fun” they had in New York during their twenties. How is this any different than reneging on the covenant of bringing What Happens In Vegas outside of Sin City? It is a startling confession of extracting all one can out of a place where people actually live, without so much as considering the consequences of their actions, to say nothing of giving anything back.
While it has always been challenging here, the prospects of raising a family in the city have dramatically worsened in the last few years. Post-pandemic, the population of children younger than five has declined by thirteen percent. Kids under eighteen dropped by seven and a half percent. Children are the aquifers of tomorrow, and they are drying up. The groups that have seen the largest inflows are empty nesters and people in their early twenties: those who can afford high rent on one side of the spectrum, and those without financial responsibilities (and are happy to spend thousands on an overpopulated shoe-box apartment) on the other. These youthful packs have overtaken the market for large apartments, as four friends paying a quarter of the rent each is easier to stomach than one family paying $8,000. Downtown, you’re more likely to see someone you went to high school with in Colorado than a local kid going to school. We have severed connection with the older generations as well, whose wisdom goes unreceived to impressionable green souls. We don’t see kids, and so have replaced them with romanticized visions of ourselves as perpetual children.
As ever, it all comes down to math. The median household income of New York is about $80,000. Adjusted for family size across the entire metropolitan area, the median income for an individual is $113,400. Despite this being a HUD reported number, I understand that it may be a touch galling. While there isn’t quite an analogous metric for median household income for individuals, fifty-two percent of the city makes $75,000 or more. This is a reasonable assumption for an individual earner. At this income level, after taxes, our hedonic transactionalist would have around $57,000 to play with. Paying $2,000 a month for a rent stabilized studio ($24,000 per year), or splitting an apartment with friends, they would have more than $33,000 in discretionary income, or $2,750 per month, leftover to spend on groceries, going out, travel, and superficially-profound exhibitions. That’s a lot of consumption power. If we factored in a ten percent savings rate (more than double the national average), they would still be able to spend more than $80 per day. It may not be the millions a Connecticut banker is making, but, in aggregate, it is significantly more distorting (forty percent of households make more than six figures). Consumption has become the end in itself, a lifestyle divorced from subsequent meaning.
But it’s worse than that. Ask around and it becomes clear there’s a whole lot of subsidizing going on. It’s impossible to know just how much, but many of our ephemeral residents have their consumption power boosted by BoMaD (Bank of Mom and Dad), or FALG (Fund of Aunts Long Gone). So it’s not $80 a day, but potentially a multiple of that. The city has contorted itself to meet the needs of girls in their twenties because that’s where the spending power is. Again, this is no issue prima facie, but it becomes one when they leave just a few years on. The ship of commerce is too large to swiftly turn around to meet the next trend. When the brunch-stars vacate their spaces before the first year lease is up, they leave century-old institutions bobbing lifelessly in the water.
In this self-created void, shops have begun selling “community” because the need is so obvious. Yet the consumers of the very brands that advertise “community” on their sandwich boards are oblivious to the irony that they’re the ones fueling the destruction of the real thing. Community cannot be consumed. It must be experienced. It is pluralistic, not monopolistic. And yet.
I don’t want to seem embittered. This is not a Mossian lament for a New York of yore. Cities change, and that’s okay. When my grandfather’s family came to the United States and settled in Williamsburg, it was not the neighborhood it has since become. That’s a good thing. New York’s early 20th century Jewish ghettos (nor any ghetto) should not have been entrenched for all of time. The issue is when a city converges on catering towards one thing with nothing to replace it. The pillagers will soon move, bloodlessly, onto their next phase of life. Just like cars and Detroit, New York may soon be left a shell of its former self. This is not simply the end of Bohemia. This may be the epochal dusk of a once-great metropolis that wraps its arms around its own torso instead of holding them open for all, as it once did. That is, unless we do something about it.
To Cure The Country, Fix The Disease
The good news is that all of these problems are fixable. I am an urban planner by training so, naturally, I have a plan. Caveat emptor, no proposal is a panacea, but I think the simplicity (and lack of dogma) with this one gives it a good chance at getting close. Simply stated, it starts with building housing. A lot of it.
New York is in the middle of a housing emergency. This is not an opinion but a fact derived from the State of New York’s definition. If a Housing Vacancy Rate Analysis (for residential properties built before 1974 with six or more units) finds that a city has a vacancy rate below five percent, a public emergency may be declared. New York City’s vacancy rate, as mentioned earlier in this essay and repeated now for emphasis, is currently around one and a half percent, the lowest since 1968. In plain English, this means there is extreme competition over housing, which leads to equally extreme prices. The only way to get out of this emergency, and ease housing pressures, is to push rates back above five percent. While we could accomplish this by reducing demand by making the city so unpleasant that people leave and no one moves into their former homes, this strikes me as a bad idea. And as we’re around 500,000 units short of meeting current housing demand, it seems unlikely we can accomplish that much value destruction without inflicting iniquitous harm on those who remain and are unable to leave. So, we must build.
Just how to build is beyond the scope of this piece, but here are a few guiding principals:
Liberalize zoning and land use codes city wide. No neighborhood should be exempt from housing production. Every lot in New York City should have a minimum Floor Area Ratio of 11 ( ideally more), and be allowed to build up to four units by right ( ideally more).
Everything within a mile of a subway line should allow for five stories with low minimum unit size requirements (i.e. allow for smaller apartments).
The permitting process must be streamlined to quickly authorize the necessary construction to avoid adding years to an already cumbersome process (as is all too often the case).
This new housing must not be stricken by the plague of everythingism2, where competing interests secondary to the need of providing roofs over heads weigh down projects with increased costs and longer entitlement periods.
Build public transportation to access this new housing and spur investment. The Interborough Express is just one of many expansions we should be pursuing.
Subsidize family-sized homes with generous tax credits as the economics of developing larger units can’t compete with studios and one bedrooms (and thus forces families out of the city).3
SROs must be relegalized to reduce homelessness and provide cheap housing for those who want to minimize their expenses but still retain some autonomy.
With these policies, and a few others that are too long to explain here, New York can become more affordable and allow people the freedom to create, experiment, and live without subsidy or prohibitive compromise. But this only goes halfway to potentially reviving our stagnant culture. How do we break through the Concrete Ceiling? Partially, it’s a supply answer.
Jane Jacobs famously observed that new ideas require old space. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” Part of the explanation for our cultural stagnation is we don’t have affordable old space, and the few new buildings that are constructed are delivered at an institutional scale ill-suited for new ideas. These retail spaces privilege established, high-credit tenants. Their storefronts offer no mystery, no sense of intrigue that might beckon the curious passerby in. Instead they reveal themselves completely through the large plate glass windows one associates with an Apple store. This does not inspire the passions of creatives.
I’d amend Jacobs’ observation to note that new ideas need cheap spaces (they don’t necessarily need to be old), which these Apple-esque shops are not. Yet new buildings can provide this as long as the development paradigm shifts. Narrower buildings, with many smaller apartments on the upper floors, is a great place to start. (This is currently illegal in practically all of America, and a surprising amount of New York as well.) In this way, residences can subsidize a smaller shop front. Ideally, a store wouldn’t be more than 1,000 square feet, but a couple hundred is more than sufficient.4
When spaces get small, not only will rent become cheap (how much can one even charge for fifty or three hundred square feet anyway?), but the spaces themselves will become ripe for experimentation. The cost of fashioning, refashioning, and rerefashioning a small space is far more palatable than another twice, or ten times, the size. Line many of these sorts of buildings next to each other, or scatter them throughout a neighborhood, and not only will there be an abundance of small spaces where creators can work on potentially risky ideas, but they will be close enough to rub shoulders with one another. Culture requires low cost density. A city so structured will be woven deeply with connections, charm, and serendipity.
This is the magic that the best cities in the world have figured out. Istanbul, Seoul, and Ho Chi Minh City are inundated with people doing compelling things in smaller spaces. Paris and Tokyo are near universally beloved because of their dizzying array of small businesses. While they exist in these cities, one doesn’t need to be accepted into one of five mega galleries to ensure career success. You can just form your own. When rent is only a few hundred dollars, owners can close on odd days and reserve the space for friends to write or paint. Pivoting concepts is not only feasible, but adds to the dynamic narrative of a place. At their core, these are unfussy spaces. Precisely what is needed to nurture a cultural revival.
The other part of breaking through the Concrete Ceiling, and thus making it as an artist in New York, is trickier to solve as it requires cultural changes outside of policy reform. This is admittedly an unsatisfying answer, but let’s see if we can draw it out a bit. What is needed is a group of patrons who care deeply about funding a ragtag group of screenwriters, sculptors, chefs, or novelists. The last thing we need is a Bill Gates wing at the Met, or another named building at Columbia. It isn’t for me to tell others what to do with their money, but just think how much more good might be achieved by investing $100m in talented New Yorkers than purchasing a few more Picasso’s for one’s private collection. (Or, more likely, stowing them in a Freeport.) If we must play into vanity, then name a street after one of these heroes of patronage.
This shift will require a move away from prizing in-group prestige as the ultimate currency (everything else can be bought), towards one that embraces the strange beauty of expansive pluralism. A world that eschews the latest trend for deep engagement, and agitating for better societal outcomes. A rejection of the Great Middling Void’s homogenization, reducing its reach to include hundreds of distinct subcultures. Quixotic though it might seem, a world where more idiosyncrasies exist and are highly visible can lead to this cultural shift. As the internet has shown us, optionality reigns supreme.
Despite an ever increasing share of our lives being hosted online, the real world still deeply matters. In many ways, more than ever. For culture, it doesn’t get more real than New York. This is where it all flows from. Though we’ve been sick and contagious for decades, we know what treatments to take to get better. As we convalesce, so too will the rest of the country. In salubrity, many unknown wonders await us, if only we have the courage to take the first step. New York killed culture. Now, it’s on us to come together to spark its renaissance.
This means the amount of space you’re allowed to construct for every square foot of a lot. So, for example, if a lot is 10,000 sf, and your FAR is 1, you can build 10,000 sf on the site. If the FAR is .5, that number is 5,000. At 10, it’s 100k.
Everythingism means requiring the building to be 100% electric / sustainable, have top of the line amenities, use expensive union labor, have 50% of contractors be minority or women owned businesses (even if the construction force has a far smaller proportion of these contractors), hold 4 years of community meetings, etc.
A 1,200 square foot three bedroom apartment worth $6,000 cannot compete against three 400 square foot one bedrooms costing $2,500. Over the course of a year, the one bedrooms provide $250,000 more in value to a building than the family sized unit. $2,500 x 3 = $7,500. $7,500 - $6,000 = $1,500. $1,500 * 12 = $18,000 in gross rent. $18,000 x 70% = $12,600 (the net operating income after taxes). $12,600 x 5% capitalization rate (the valuation of an apartment building) = $252,200. Now imagine this math across an entire complex. Building for families can cost a developer millions of dollars. This delta must be acknowledged and addressed.
Across a twenty-foot wide facade, perhaps two spaces could be constructed, where the leftmost five feet is dedicated to a stairwell leading to the residential units, the middle five for a small enclosed stall no more than ten feet deep (fifty sf in total), and the rightmost another ten feet, extending thirty feet deep to wrap around the stall. Shared storage can be carved out in the back of the building.
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I'll wait for my print copy, but I'm in for anything excoriating NYC.
- a Bostonian.
Looking forward to the arrival of my print edition!!