authenticity is a farce

on "the neighborhood", east williamsburg, grit, and capitalism

As a resident of North Brooklyn, I’ve always thought the Morgan L train is one of the strangest stops in the MTA’s system. If you exit on to Bogart Street from the center of the platform, you’re surrounded by an indie movie theater/bar, loft buildings occupied by artists, musicians, and some NYU students, an expensive wine store, a brand new Persian restaurant serving a lamb neck filet, a Beacon’s Closet, and even a shop where you can buy lush, green houseplants. But if you exit at the end of the platform onto Morgan Avenue, just one block over, you’ll see a sprawling parking lot for a Boar’s Head facility to your south, and a brand new, hulking self-storage facility to your north. This corner of Williamsburg is representative of shifts taking place from Greenpoint to Bushwick, where land previously used to provide jobs in manufacturing to working class North Brooklynites is being converted into space designed for the tastes of young, creative, “edgy”, and more affluent residents. The bars, stores, and restaurants that line the commercial corridor on Bogart Street, like Amituofo, a vegan, Pan-Asian café, opened as tastes of local residents changed.

Source: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/4/12/15276978/mta-l-train-morgan-avenue-restoration

And, of course, at the same time, rents skyrocketed. Landlords were able to increase rents by an average of 68% between 2000 and 2014 in Bushwick, directly to the east of the Morgan L, as the African American and Latine population dipped. And this rent increase has led to severe racialized displacement, especially among the area’s long-term Latine population. Between 2000 and 2013, the Latine population in North Brooklyn decreased by 18 percent despite the fact that the city’s Latine population increased by 10 percent over the same time period. The incredible violence of gentrification and displacement, especially in working class communities of color, is important to acknowledge. What is also too often missing in those accounts are the ways in which the people most affected have typically lost the services they have come to rely on, such as local food stores or hair salons they’ve been frequenting for decades, while seemingly overnight, they can barely afford the raised rent in the apartment they’ve lived in for years.

Recently, Curbed published an article written by Clio Chang about two tech workers from San Francisco that started a new project known as  “The Neighborhood,” to bring more creative-class, relatively affluent people to this gentrifying corner of East Williamsburg. The two co-founders, husband and wife duo Priya and Andrew Rose, seek to create a community of ambitious, creative people that will “combine the serendipity of a college campus, the co-creation of Burning Man, the agency of Silicon Valley, the vigor of a Midwestern high school track coach, and the culture of New York City.” Residents of “The Neighborhood” are all over Substack, writing pieces on the joys of co-living or their progress towards getting 100 friends to move to the community. When I read the piece in Curbed, I was instantly struck by the brutal honesty the Roses showed in talking about how they selected East Williamsburg. The two cofounders call the Morgan Avenue L stop “the frontier of culture in New York City”, which Clio Chang, the author of the Curbed piece, correctly identifies as a “creative way to describe gentrification”. This project, especially in a neighborhood where so many working class people of color are struggling to make rent, find an affordable apartment, or keep their shops open, is violent, and an accelerator for gentrification, without a doubt. Currently, 23 people live in  “The Neighborhood,” a number its cofounders seem proud of building towards in such a short period of time. Something about the community is very immediately off-putting, maybe even cultish.

Yet, when I began to parse through cofounder Priya Rose’s Substack, where she outlines the process through which an actual neighborhood was selected for “The Neighborhood”, I quickly became fascinated with the contradictory ideologies of the project. Initially, Rose seemed to be angling for a location further west in Williamsburg, specifically the area between the Bedford Avenue L and McCarren Park, but once a friend gave her a tour, she quickly changed her tune. In a Substack article called “Williamsburg: A Charming Mall”, Rose talks about a walk she took through Williamsburg on a sunny weekend morning, where she seemingly braved the crowds at Smorgasburg to get food and sit by the water. She talks with friends who highlight the good food, the walkability, and the convenient proximity to Manhattan that brought them to Williamsburg, but she doesn’t seem convinced, claiming that she alternates “between feeling charmed by Williamsburg and disgusted by it.” Something about the core of Williamsburg seems plastic, artificial, and not authentic to her – she even notes that the neighborhood has sold out, and that it reminds her of “girls in yoga clothes exclaiming "oh my GOD! it's so cute!!” at dogs”. But, undoubtably, and contradictorily, she is also attracted to the neighborhood and its many amenities, as she acknowledges daydreaming about walks along the shiny new waterfront parkways and daily workouts at a fancy rock climbing gym.

To the Roses, the western side of Williamsburg is no longer “the frontier of culture in New York City”. But to many people, it used to be. In the 1980s, hundreds of artists who had once called Lower Manhattan home began to look for a new neighborhood to live and make art in. Since the subway lines on the East Side of Manhattan, the L and the J/M/Z, passed through Williamsburg, the neighborhood quickly became an obvious alternative, as it, too, had a substantial amount of abandoned factory space that could be converted into lofts or performance spaces. By 1990, around two thousand artists had moved into converted lofts in Williamsburg, and another several thousand were moving into the neighborhood’s low rise housing stock. As Sharon Zukin notes, many of the early Williamsburg transplants were attracted to the neighborhood for its post-industrial “grittiness”, a word that became a largely positive signifier for authenticity in the early 1990s, after being largely used to describe unpleasant urban environments for decades.  New Williamsburg residents experienced authentic, “gritty” urban life by creating cultural spaces in abandoned warehouses and moving into illegal lofts.

As Sharon Zukin has argued in her book, Naked City, after LedisFlam, the community’s first art gallery, opened in 1987, other galleries and DIY and experimental performance spaces sprung in abandoned factories across the neighborhood. As artists and creatives continued to take the L train over the East River, Williamsburg began to function like an industrial “arts district”, much like SoHo in the 1970s, and the East Village in the 1980s. And much like SoHo and the East Village in the decades before, the new residents of Williamsburg began to change the neighborhood. As Zukin notes, the consumer tastes of these newer, comparatively wealthier residents led to the establishment of new types of businesses in the area, like a Middle Eastern restaurant and a coffee shop by the Bedford Avenue L. And, at the same time, Williamsburg was attracting serious attention from the media as a new, “hot” neighborhood, as several major outlets in New York and beyond began to report on art shows and performances in the community. This media attention helped to accelerate gentrification in Williamsburg, a process that had been started by the rapid influx of the so-called creative-class into the community.

As David Harvey correctly notes in his article, “The Urbanization of Capital,” the economic structure of capitalism offers postindustrial cities like New York two options to revitalize their economies. They can try to become more competitive within the spatial division of labor by producing an extremely business friendly climate to draw private investment and a more efficient workforce, or they can become more competitive in the realm of consumption by marketing themselves as sites of culture, entertainment, and innovation. As Williamsburg became a media darling, with glowing headlines like “Williamsburg: Quirky but Reasonable”, and “East Williamsburg, Brooklyn: A Gritty Industrial Vibe”, the neighborhood became a key site in New York’s battle to compete within the spatial division of labor and the realm of consumption.

During the late 20^th century, New York City became very concerned with competing in the spatial division of labor, as the municipal government sought to economically revitalize the city by growing the finance, insurance, and real estate industries (known as the FIRE industries). As a result of these policies, NYC gained nearly 100,000 jobs in the FIRE sectors between 1970 and 1990 while losing most of its industrial jobs at around the same time. With the expansion of the city’s professional class, the real estate industry continued to boom. Real estate values rose drastically across the city, with sales prices in Brooklyn skyrocketing by 180% between 1980 and 1989.  Real estate and finance professionals came together to form development corporations and to lobby for the revitalization of and investment in downtown business districts or “hot” neighborhoods like Williamsburg, courting city investment for these projects. The real estate industry wanted more than piecemeal zoning variances in Williamsburg and Greenpoint; they also won a massive neighborhood rezoning also supported by Michael Bloomberg that funneled real estate (and public) capital into transforming the East River Waterfront from a hotbed of industry to a hotbed of capitalism, unaffordability, luxury condos and gourmet grocery stores.

But, as Harvey notes, the city’s investment in the Williamsburg real estate sector, like public-private partnerships and development deals, amount “...to a subsidy for affluent consumers, corporations, and powerful command functions to stay in town at the expense of local collective consumption for the working-class and poor.” As a result, the wealthy and powerful began to transform Williamsburg. Wealthy real estate developers bought out many of the more alternative, less mainstream spaces used for art and performances, such as warehouses, and turned them into condos, despite the fact that these industrial spaces attracted many people to the neighborhood in the first place. Landlords were able to drastically raise rents, displacing people from their homes while making massive profits. Financiers made major profits in loaning money to developers involved in new construction projects across the neighborhood. The profits generated through the Williamsburg rezoning weren’t allocated to everyday Brooklynites – they were made by real estate executives, landlords, and finance CEOs.

Ironically, however, the city’s decision to rezone Williamsburg drastically changed the neighborhood’s role within the realm of consumption, as many music, art, and performance venues that initially attracted people to the neighborhood, had to shut down due to high costs. But, at the same time, new coffee shops, gourmet restaurants, wine bars, and other, more upscale amenities were being introduced to the neighborhood, as more affluent New Yorkers began to move across the East River throughout the 2000s. This transition away from the arts and towards small, “quirky” businesses is well explained by Zukin, who argues that consumer tastes do have a substantial role in shaping neighborhood change across the five boroughs. And, as Zukin notes, many people, major news outlets like the New York Times, and academics see “authenticity” in the places that they like to shop at, eat at, live in, or visit. As more and more powerful, wealthy, white folks move to places like Williamsburg, their tastes, and what they see to be authentic, have come to restructure the area surrounding the Bedford Avenue L station.

As Zukin notes, residents of Williamsburg who see authenticity in “artfully painted graffiti on a shop window, sawdust on the floor of a music bar, or an address in a gritty but not too thoroughly crime-ridden part of town” initially had power to control the commercial scene of the neighborhood, taking this power away from the longer term Latine residents who had called the neighborhood home for decades. This process was violent – Latine residents lost their homes, were priced out of their neighborhoods, and had their businesses displaced by white hipster entrepreneurs. Yet this first round of displacement was given little attention by many of Williamsburg’s new white residents, who were maybe even excited to see a coffee store replace a Latine owned hardware store down the block. Nobody called Williamsburg “plastic”, “sold out”, or “an open air mall” (all things Ms. Rose calls the neighborhood in her Substack piece) when Latine folks who had called Williamsburg home had to leave the area due to skyrocketing rents and greedy landlords. However, as arts spaces have begun to close, and the area’s industrial character began to go away, we did start to comment on the changes we saw in Williamsburg. Some people even pushed further east into Williamsburg and Bushwick, searching for a place that had the same industrial grit as Williamsburg initially did. By the early 2000s, young, largely white people searching for authenticity had pushed all the way to the Morgan L, moving into the McKibbin Lofts, an illegally converted loft space that featured many of the elements of “authentic” co-living that the Neighborhood seeks to re-create.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKibbin_Street_Lofts

As Sharon Zukin notes, in today’s capitalist society, we are primarily interacting with cities as consumers, and that our experience as consumers plays a substantial role in shaping whether we see spaces as “authentic” or not. And, in reality, authenticity functions as a form of capital in a city like New York. So maybe Priya and Andrew Rose truly see Bogart Street as the “the frontier of culture in New York City”, and maybe some of us do too. But this perpetuation of a largely white, elite aesthetic of authenticity has only accelerated and intensified processes of violent gentrification and displacement. And maybe we all just need to reconsider what we think of as an “authentic” urban environment, especially before we create an extremely cringey gentrification co-op.