Tag
Gentrification
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Raquel Gutiérrez on “Brown Neon: Essays”
“Arts, writing, journalism—these things are born from our passions … this thing that is our weak spot.”
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How to House America
Fixing the American housing crisis will require constructing more houses, but also increasing subsidies and protections for existing tenants.
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Cities Run by Real Estate
After decades confined to the desk drawer of important but boring things, the minutiae of urban planning policy are now attracting some popular attention. Transit-oriented development might come up at a dinner party. Important changes to one city’s codes—say, zoning reform in Minneapolis—can make national headlines. Community benefits agreements, property tax overhauls, and the problematic…
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Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home provides. It is appropriate, then, that The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a film about gentrification, centers not on physical dislocation but on…
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When Did Nature Become Moral?
When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations …
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The Pasajlar of Tunalı Hilmi Çaddesi, Ankara
Bookended by Koçatepe Mosque and Kuğulu Park, Tunalı Hilmi Çaddesi is a leafy anomaly in a city that worships concrete …
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Living on the Edge: Outer Richmond, San Francisco
Ascend the stairs of an apartment building called Bay View, a misnomer, since the view of the northern waters is blockaded by Seacliff, where faux-historic mega-mansions loom over Baker Beach …
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The Street and the World: Rua do Benformoso, Lisbon
A short walk from Lisbon’s central Baixa district—where tourists flock …
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The Gowanus Overpass: Brooklyn, New York
In 2012, I moved into a Sunset Park apartment with a kitchen window nearly perpendicular to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway …
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The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor for contemporary television viewing? Where the representative of televisual excess was previously the couch potato, a human-turned-tuber upon cathode-ray immersion, today’s TV-watching…
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The “New York Values” of “City on Fire”
Some readers will come to Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire with chips on their shoulders. Hallberg’s youth; the seeming ease with which he parlayed his manuscript into an enormous advance …
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How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the restaurant—with a menu that includes frog legs and a bottle of Bordeaux that sells for $2,000—is an incongruous new addition to an area of Brooklyn where…
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Safe Space
The geography of gay life has shifted dramatically over the past decades. In 1949, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal described homosexuality as located almost exclusively in spaces of moral depredation—in …
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Mexico City Chronicles
According to the latest version of the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, a crónica is both “a history that obeys the order of the times” and “a journalistic piece … about current events.” But it is more. Starting in the 19th century, crónica and urban life became inseparable; to the mere…
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Up from the Willamette
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. If you tell people you live in St. John’s, everyone says, “Oh, that’s a really interesting neighborhood,” or “I’ve been there!” as if it were a destination. To get there, you take the highway along the Willamette River…
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All Eyes On Brazil
With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now well under way, and the Olympics coming in 2016, Brazil is assuming its place on the world stage. The current tournament has generated more coverage of the country—and its far-flung corners—than ever before. Be it David Beckham’s trip into the Amazon for BBC television, or writers “slumming” it…
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How to Buy a Guitar in Chicago
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In its still relatively new location on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s Northcenter neighborhood, the Chicago Music Exchange immediately dazzles visitors with row upon row of guitars mounted on the walls. Chandeliers drip from the high ceilings, lending a tone of…
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That Silver Building on Powers
East Williamsburg is fast becoming one of the most dramatically gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with glass-fronted condo buildings shooting up in their narrow lots like beanstalks in a developer’s fairy tale. It also continues to be one of the ugliest. The problem with the area’s housing stock may be vivid to anyone who has read…
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On Christopher Street Pier
This is the inaugural installment of Public Streets, a series of observations on urban life curated by the novelist Ellis Avery. I’ve seen that child before, a boy of 10 or 12 in suspenders and a newsboy cap. He plays the cello. He rides a unicycle. Once I saw him in a sycamore in Abingdon…
