It’s Not About Yuppies Anymore: Gentrification Has Changed and So Has New York

architecture critic Justin Davidson attempts to lob a grenade, arguing in favor of gentrification in the provocatively titled, “Is gentrification all bad?“
Read more at @newyorkobserver

But rather than a Bloombergian manifesto in support of ever more billionaires moving to New York, Davidson offers a well-argued, thoroughly-reported and exceedingly reasonable case for the beneficent impact of middle-class newcomers on lower-income neighborhoods. Examining two gentrifying neighborhoods—Inwood and Bed-Stuy—he concludes that both neighborhoods are benefitting from the influx of more upwardly-mobile professionals and the changes that follow in their wake.

The kind of gentrification that Davidson is talking about, the sort perpetuated by yuppies who decades ago bought brownstones in Park Slope and on the Upper West  Side, joined local PTAs and convinced bodegas to start carrying organic milk and fresh-squeezed orange juice are no longer the dominant forces of neighborhood change. Just as the city’s middle class is disappearing, so, too, are the benefits they conferred when they moved to lower-income neighborhoods, the edenic “sweet spot” that gentrification is, at least briefly, capable of achieving: turning marginal neighborhoods into middle-class enclaves where affordable housing co-exists with good schools, decent grocery stores, low crime rates and a plethora of local retailers and restaurateurs.

“It’s more important than ever to reclaim a form of urban improvement from its malignant offshoots. A nice neighborhood should be not a luxury but an urban right,” writes Davidson. Which is true, but we no longer live in an era when that model is particularly relevant. New York and the nature of gentrification has changed substantially in the last three decades, from 1980, when New York magazine defined gentrification as “the conversion of poor, working class areas into middle-class refuges,” to the present day, when the idea of a middle-class refuge seems both impossible and impossibly quaint.

yuppies have been priced out of vast swaths of Manhattan, alongside the working poor. As New York has become more and more a magnet for global capital, the speed and the severity of gentrification has accelerated to the point where families making upwards of $120,000 a year qualify for affordable housing.

upscale restaurant that cannot afford the rents

unpretentious restaurants like Big Nicks
population who buy sprawling duplex penthouses as investment pied-a-terres

Unrenovated brownstones now sell for over a million dollars in the blocks that border Clinton Hill, and that’s if you can even manage to buy one without an all-cash offer. Even two-bedrooms are selling for upwards of $800,000.