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I've been both gentrifier and gentrified. As a white man from a relatively privileged background, I lived in Harlem long before it was deemed "safe". I remember apartment hunting north of Central Park around 2003 and getting a lot of dirty looks from the black Americans who had been there for generations. Who could blame them? To them I was another invader from Columbia U. And while I was there as a "pioneer" and not a "settler", as one paying about as much as they did, and while I resented the charm-bracelet girls as much as they did, I was changing the tone of the place, like it or not. New York is now in the midst of a battle over absentee landlords. You might call it ground zero in the battle over the future of the US. You walk through Central Park and the Plaza Hotel, now mostly condos, sits dark. No one home. And behind there's a string of supertowers twice as high as the average skyscraper. The New York Times last year had an expose [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign...] about the buyers: many foreign, many dirty, most masking their identities with shell companies. Since the owners often do not reside in New York, they're contribution to the city's coffers is mixed. More importantly, it seems pretty clear that a majority of New Yorkers resent the shadows being cast over their parks. We may have "air rights", but unlike San Francisco, we have no law guaranteeing sun rights. No wonder many of us are deficient in D. Meanwhile, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, is happy to let the builders have their way, so long as they support his "affordable housing" agenda, ie, contribute. Until recently he refused to acknowledge what has been plain: that the homeless population has ballooned -- to 60,000, almost half of them children. Many of these people got priced out. We can debate the fairness of all this as well as the wisdom of price controls, etc. What we should acknowledge, though, is the fact that policies have consequences, that sometimes change outpaces people's ability to adapt, and that we as a city / society will pay the costs, directly or indirectly. For a very moving but also nonjudgmental look at these dynamics, check out the documentary Homme Less: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less |