Left for Dead

This article, read aloud:

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Tonight I watched John Wilson's The History of Concrete at home, a feature-length movie about the most consumed material on Earth, made by a man whose politics are the standard-issue Brooklyn artist left, and I kept waiting for the part where we disagreed. It never really arrived. Wilson loves concrete because it lasts, because it belongs to everybody, because a sidewalk is the most democratic square footage in America. I love the cities concrete built when those cities were cheap, loose, half-abandoned, and faintly dangerous. He wants the city held in common. I want the city left alone. Underneath the slogans we are standing on the same pour, admiring the same slab, and the city we both hate is the one neither of us can afford and nobody is allowed to change: the frozen museum with a gate.

The man and his material

Wilson spent years on this. He filmed a concrete trade show in Queens, gum scrapers working the sidewalks of Manhattan one black dot at a time, frost heave buckling the streets of upstate New York, sinkholes, spills, the men and women who pour and finish. Richard Brody in The New Yorker called the movie pointedly, urgently political, and he meant it as praise, and he was right about the politics being there. Wilson's concrete is a commons. His worry is permanence and tenancy: who gets to stay, who owns the ground under the slab, whether anything built today is built for the people already standing on it.

My worry runs the other way. I worry about the people who arrive after the city is saved and immediately start passing laws against everything that saved it. So Wilson films the pour from the left bank and I watch it from the right, and we meet in the middle of the slab, because the slab is the thing. A city still pouring is a city still admitting new people. A city that has stopped pouring has made its decision about who gets in, and the decision is: nobody who is not already rich, already related, or already grandfathered.

Disneyland and the wolves

Here is the history the movie leaves out, the half of the film I supplied from memory while I watched. In 1975 New York went effectively broke. The Daily News gave the era its headline: Ford to City: Drop Dead. Roughly 800,000 people left across the decade. The subways were a rolling crime scene, murders climbed toward their 1990 peak of more than two thousand a year, and the city was, by the standards of everyone with options, left for dead.

My family was part of the exodus, and we were not revolutionaries. We were normies. I was born in Jersey City on March 8, 1970, a Sunday. My parents, Barbara and Bob, lived in Weehawken and then at 240 East 35th Street in Murray Hill, and they endured until 1976, until just after my sixth birthday, and then they got out, all the way out, to Honolulu. Consider what a normal family was enduring. The year before we left, the police unions had printed the Welcome to Fear City pamphlets, advising visitors to stay off the streets after six. The city had laid off teachers, cops, and firefighters by the thousand to stave off default. CUNY charged tuition in 1976 for the first time in its history, ending a century of free college for working people's kids the same year my parents were deciding whether a six-year-old had a future in Manhattan. The Son of Sam summer began that July, in Queens and the Bronx, months after we landed in Hawaii. My parents did not leave because they had read Marx or lost an argument about capitalism. They left because the city had stopped working for ordinary people with a small child, and they were right, and 800,000 other families ran the same arithmetic and got the same answer.

And it was cheap. SoHo lofts went to artists for nothing because the factories had died and nobody else wanted cast iron and freight elevators. The East Village was dangerous and affordable in the same breath, which is the only way that neighborhood has ever produced anything the world remembers. Punk came out of those rents. So did the downtown art world. So did hip-hop, out of a Bronx its own borough president's era had written off. Abandonment is a terrible landlord and a magnificent patron.

Then the city got rescued, and the rescue had a politics: order first. Giuliani and then Bloomberg ran Manhattan like a theme park with a police force, and it worked on its own terms. The murders fell off a cliff. The tourists came, the shoppers came, the tax base came back wearing lanyards. Disneyland Manhattan, I call it, and I mean the compliment and the insult in the same breath: safe, clean, lit, monetized, and sealed. Ingrates and entitled residents who disrespect the laws, the rules, and the rich who fund and run cities tend historically to get thrown to the wolves. The 2000s were the long season when the wolves were kept on the other side of the river, and the people who enjoyed that safety most are the ones who now describe the men who arranged it as fascists.

The Friends of the ABC

Which brings me to my favorite cast of characters in all of literature, because they have been reincarnated in Brooklyn and the resemblance is not flattering. Hugo's Friends of the ABC: Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Marius Pontmercy, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bahorel, Lesgle, Joly, Grantaire, Gavroche, Éponine. Read the novel again with a rent roll in mind. Enjolras is a rich man's only son. Marius is the grandson of a wealthy royalist who keeps the money coming even through the estrangement. Courfeyrac lives on family funds. The barricade of 1832 was a student project financed by the class it aimed to overthrow, and the two who actually came from the street, Gavroche and Éponine, are the ones who died in it for real.

The trustafarian Enjolrases of the modern city run the identical play. The family money holds the brownstone or pays the rent; the politics denounce the family money's entire species; the barricade they build is a zoning hearing. And here is the part Hugo would have appreciated: if their politics ever won completely and the city emptied out, they are the one class with the cushion to ride out the cheap years and emerge owning the lofts at the bottom. The barista they marched beside gets a bus ticket. They get a deed.

The paradoxes, which are the whole platform

The modern urban creed, as recited at every community board meeting in America, is a list of wants that cancel each other on contact.

They want affordable housing, and they fight every building that would house anyone. They want diversity, and they defend zoning that admits only people who can buy a house. They hate gentrification and oppose new construction, so the newcomers with money bid up the old tenements and push the tenants out, displacement delivered by the anti-displacement movement. They want transit everywhere and density nowhere, although transit is arithmetic and riders have to live somewhere near the station. They want a green city and sue the wind farm, the solar array, the transmission line, and the apartment building, each of which cuts more carbon than a yard sign. They want the encampment gone and the shelter that would replace it located in somebody else's neighborhood, a policy that scales to a city full of encampments and no shelters. They defend historic character in buildings that were themselves the cheap, dense, speculative answer to a housing shortage, thrown up by developers their great-grandparents denounced.

Every one of these positions is available separately. Together they describe a city whose only remaining function is to appreciate. A home treated as a retirement fund cannot also be a door. A neighborhood treated as a museum cannot also be a place where a twenty-five-year-old starts a life. The wants are sincere. That is what makes them fatal. Nobody at the hearing is lying; the arithmetic is simply not invited.

My exhibit: Washington, left for dead

I am not theorizing about the cheap, dangerous city. I chose it, and I would choose it again. I lived at 1101 East Capitol Street SE from 1996 to 1998, and then at 101 14th Street SE from 1998 to 2007, on Capitol Hill, in the long shadow of Washington's murder-capital years, when the city was still the place the rest of America pointed to as a warning. I threw what I called Grotto Parties, and here is the beautiful part: none of my Renaissance Weekend friends would ever come to them. Dangerous Southeast Capitol Hill, they said. I will be mugged, raped, killed. And that was good. That fear was my rent control. As long as it held, as long as the respectable people stayed frightened of my block, the rent would stay $900 a month forever. They never came, nobody got mugged, and the arithmetic held for a decade. The risks and dangers and crime and murders, to me, were totally worth it, and I do not mean that as a provocation. I mean it as a price I paid gladly and would pay again: a city nobody with options wanted, priced accordingly, with room in it for a life that was not yet funded.

I live in Arlington now, across the river, in the county that won. It is safe, rich, orderly, landscaped, and expensive in a way that quietly excludes almost everybody I used to be. I do not hate it. I simply refuse to pretend it is the only acceptable form a city can take, or that the people who flourished in the abandoned version were victims of it. Some of us were its beneficiaries, and we knew the price, and we paid it with our eyes open, and the exchange was honest in a way a $5,300 median Manhattan rent never will be.

The Alirajpur equilibrium

So here is the law underneath the movie and underneath my politics and underneath Wilson's, whether either of us likes it. The only cheap New York is a New York nobody wants. Push the logic all the way down and the punchline writes itself: the affordable city, in the limit, is the city that has gotten as close as it can to Alirajpur in Madhya Pradesh, a place the market has fully and finally declined. If no one wants to live there, everyone can afford to. Rent is a vote counted in dollars, and it totals up every desire in the city, including the desire of the people at the zoning hearing to keep all of it for themselves.

I have a saying about how the cheap years end, and I have never seen it fail. If you want to keep your cool neighborhood, artists should never host a dinner party for their art patrons in their affordable neighborhoods, because that dinner party will immediately result in all those friends very quickly buying there, and investing there, and developing there. The scene's own hospitality is the sales tour. The painter cooks one good meal in a railroad flat with fourteen-foot ceilings, the collector looks around at the light and the space and the rent, and does the arithmetic before dessert. Nobody betrays anybody. The artist wanted witnesses, the patron wanted in, and the neighborhood wanted neither of them to ever find it. Every gentrification I have ever watched began as a dinner party somebody should never have thrown.

There are two roads down to cheap. One is supply: build until the scarcity breaks, which every incumbent interest in America is organized to prevent. The other is abandonment: let the city become a place people flee, and watch the rents follow them out. My whole political life I have preferred the first road and expected the second. Wilson, I suspect, wants a third road, a city held in common on purpose, and I do not believe it exists, and he would say my two roads are the same road photographed at different speeds. Maybe. What I know is that the cycle has never once consulted either of us. Decline makes the cheap years. The cheap years make the art and the scenes and the sounds. The scenes make the city desirable again. Desire makes it Disneyland. Disneyland makes the barricades, staffed by the grandchildren of the people who paid for the rescue. And underneath every stage of it, indifferent, curing at its own pace, is the concrete Wilson spent a movie loving. It does not care who holds the trowel. It just asks to be poured. A city that is still pouring is still open. Everything else I have said tonight is commentary on that single fact, and on that fact, the leftist with the camera and I are in perfect agreement.

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