Filed Under: Housing
I passed by one of the several storefront real estate brokers in my neighborhood - the Inwood section of Quisqueya Heights (I accept the title Quisqueya Heights because it’s an amalgam of both Washington Heights and Inwood, for which there is no real border nor any significant demographic divide) - just as its proprietor, a slightly balding slightly portly Latino man, was closing shop. This particular shop had the sort of faded wood paneling that says “Television Repair Shop” and tended to divide its holdings in apartment well to the east of Broadway - so far east, indeed, that they were under the 1 Train El - and well to the west of Broadway up near the park. Of course, the rents are widely divergent between the two, despite the fact that the buildings were all almost exactly the same: Pre-war new law walk-up between 600 and 1000 sq ft, no doorman, no laundry.
He eyed me eying him and looked to be on the cusp of saying something in the form of a greeting but the moment passed and so did I. But the rest of the way home I couldn’ t help but wonder what sort of dialogs this man has to go through when farming out his parcels to prospective renters. Both he and his charges must have some idea of the particular circumstances that bring them together as such, and thus the topic must either come up or be consciously suppressed.
I say this because I know there is some ire in the neighborhood itself. This is Quisqueya Heights but Dominicans west of Broadway are few and far between compared to the avenues eastwards - Audobon, St. Nicholas, Vermilyea, Sherman, etc. Excluding the co-ops, for which there are practically no Dominicans except those who held out when the building flipped, the rental units clearly price them out in that planning term I rarely hear apart from the lips of politicians, Gentrification.
The conscious tenseness of the reality is illustrated in my mind, viscerally, by a lone townhouse down the block from me. It’s owned by a white man through sweat equity who tends to his motorcycle and tiny rear lawn facing an empty lot. The building’s unique in that it’s surrounded on all sides for blocks in every direction by nothing but 5-6 story pre-war new law tenements ubiquitous to uptown Manhattan. It’s [i]alone[/i], as physically as the man is mentally.
Which is to say, this man doesn’t like ‘hoods’ and ‘hoods’ are defined as Dominicans - as compared to Cubans or the occasional white boys who hail from a few blocks further north - and makes it well known. Nobody classified as dark is to hang out near his stoop. Now, as he is surrounded by Dominicans in all the rental buildings next door that haven’t yet been “renovated” (which is to say, the stove and the fridge are replaced and the rent shoots up another $600) everybody knows this and while they all hang out well clear of his stoop, all spring and summer long fireworks are set off every day of the week nowhere but directly in front of his building. At 4am. Nobody’s outside partying - indeed, nobody’s on the street at all - just a fireworks package making its poomPAHpoomPAHpoomPAH for about ten minutes.
This neighborhood is defined as a bargain for conscientious urban homesteaders and for the most part that rings true. It’s also a real drain on affordable housing stock for an entire demographic of people. But the planner’s plumage or the politician’s lament over what Gentrification is is somewhat lacking. I’ve a grounding in planning, as that was my major in college, but while they extolled ideas like new urbanism and talked about how to “revitalize” flagging neighborhoods (either studiously ignoring demographics to depict a general increase in housing quality or giving token lip service to how the original residents cope) it took a bit to realize that both gentrifyer and hood are victims in this.
Now, hear me out. These are tenements. Okay, they have higher ceilings and better floorspace than most new construction, but they’re tenements - working class housing on the outskirts fueled mostly by a working public transit service. Why would upwardly mobile highly educated people want ‘em? [i]Because there’s nothing else[/i]. The housing boom has since busted, but even when it was at its peak the construction was largely [i]not[/i] affordable to the great middle class. Indeed, couldn’t be made to [i]be[/i] affordable, except by virtue of city-borne regulations that, even when met, meant years-long waiting lists for potential ‘middle-income’ residents who qualified.
It’s nice that people are moving back to the city. Nobody can fault that new businesses are opening up and stores are open longer (the number of places open after 10pm in walking distance from my apartment went from 2 to 8 in two years) but either development companies are all collectively lying about the cost of construction (and have lobbyists to make the politicians agree) or there is something fundamentally wrong with why we can’t afford to house ourselves.
I heard a story from people in a co-op nearby about how one of their building’s residents had yelled at some revelers returning from a party at 10:30pm on a weekend to “Be quiet, it’s late,” to which they retorted even stronger that it was “their neighborhood that they’ve been in 30 years,” and that some “rich fuck” who bought his way in during the last five couldn’t tell ‘em what to do. Being of basically liberal stock they couldn’t help but take the side of the revelers when witnessing this exchange, yet they themselves were also “rich fuck” newcomers. That divide between the poor and the middle class was caused by a very strong pressure on the housing market.
Does this topic come out when they’re scoping out the places? What little experience I’ve had in settling myself has lent wildly different answers to that, both on the part of the realtors’ expectations and that of the buyers and renters. I’ve talked to one such man who owned two buildings a block or so from me and worked out of the “Hudson Heights” section of my neighborhood, which is to say the top of the hill as compared to the bottom, who quite cynically expressed something of a
screening policy that, while not explicitly racial, usually ended up with the sort of divide seen down here in Inwood. Of course, he’s white. This realtor I passed by was most definitely not. The question still looms.
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