We’re masochists. We doll ourselves up every night for a city that’s just going to end up giving us a black eye anyway.1
I landed in New York City in 2006, with a J-1 visa in my hand, an overpacked suitcase, an all-too-tight grant from my university in Berlin, and the prospect of an unpaid research position in one of the most expensive cities in the planet. I must have been crazy.
My first pad in New York was a one-bedroom roach-infested short-term rental near Hudson Street in the West Village, with a shower in the kitchen, which I rented for $700 a month. It took a while to clean it up, but that shabby dump, which belonged to an elderly actor who in the 1970s used to perform in the gritty theaters of the Village, really had some charm to it, and after a few weeks I felt home. I was a young visiting scholar at Columbia University, and I really didn’t mind commuting uptown every day, as long as I could enjoy some taste of the life downtown. I loved it there, but it didn’t last long. After a few months the lease was over and I had to move, this time to an $800-per-month, 90-square-foot room in a five-story walk-up in Chinatown. The room was no larger than a prison cell, and the stench from the Chinese deli downstairs invaded the apartment. But I was in heaven: I loved to sit on the rusty fire escape and smoke my early-morning cigarette while watching the bustling streets below. It was a dilapidated apartment I shared with two roommates whose jobs I never understood, who had moved to the city from somewhere in the Midwest. The place looked like it was straight out of one of those Chelsea Hotel gritty photographs of the 1970s—half artist atelier and half the perfect spot for a heroin addict to be found dead. Our landlord was Chinese, as were all the other tenants in the house—extremely populous families crowding in tiny apartments—so we were technically the only “white pioneers” in this working-class tenement. But we soon realized we were not the gentrifiers of the desired kind: after a few months, our landlord almost doubled our rent, forcing all of us to move almost literally overnight. In the meantime, most of my friends and colleagues—students, artists, musicians, photographers, models, actors, writers, bartenders—who once had stayed in Manhattan had already moved to Brooklyn, most of them to the now very trendy areas of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Fort Greene.
By 2007, rentals in Manhattan had become so tight for my pockets that I had no other choice but to follow the fleeing wave. Thanks to a friend who was shooting a short film about the Chelsea Hotel’s shady past, I got a chance to meet legendary hotel manager Stanley Bard, and spent two weeks inside the Chelsea’s infamous walls—it was my romantic way of saying goodbye to Manhattan. I then reluctantly moved out of the island, to what everyone considered one of the least appealing neighborhoods of Brooklyn—Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the flat I rented together with my African American roommate, a chef in a trendy fusion restaurant in Manhattan, was really the most decent I had seen in a long time. The neighborhood was mostly black, and most people there were poor. It had a liquor store with thick metal grates, a few bodegas, some 99-cent stores, and a huge Super Clean Laundromat by the Kosciuszko Street J train station. Two teenage boys were killed down the street in a drive-by shooting just a few weeks after I moved in. May their souls rest in peace. But on Sundays, dressed-up children and families crowded the church of Pastor Taylor down the street and sang gospel songs. Sometimes at night I used to go to the roof and watch the towers of Manhattan shine from a distance. I felt very isolated. I hated the enervating, hour-long commute I had to make each day to get Uptown and back. But others in the neighborhood had it way harder. Almost every early morning I used to meet this lady at the Kosciuszko Street station. She lived in the homeless shelter near our block and took the J train every morning to work as a janitor in a Manhattan hotel.
These were the times where single rooms in the more trendy areas of Brooklyn were already priced at over $1,200. By comparison, the rent for our whole two-bedroom apartment in Bed-Stuy was $1,400. But even this accommodation was short-lived. Our landlord announced he would increase the rent 80% to $2,400. Even Bed-Stuy was getting its share of gentrification, and the landlord assumed he could make more money by planting a tree on the sidewalk and finding better tenants. We had a few weeks to move out. During subsequent craigslist housing hunts, I saw it all: a couch space in the kitchen of an Upper East Side studio for $1,000, a 10×10-square-foot room in the Lower East Side for $1,500, a basement with no windows in Harlem for $900. I’ve seen elderly people in their 60s subletting portions of their living rooms to students or even to grown-up professionals to make ends meet, and a family of six in the housing projects of the Lower East Side subletting their kids’ rooms to NYU students. Finally, in 2008, I was able to move back to Manhattan. I first moved briefly to 125th Street in Harlem, then returned to my beloved Chinatown, where I found a room in a tiny apartment I shared with the noisiest Mexican roommate for a thick $1,400.
After my research period came to an end, I left the United States, and returned to New York only in the spring of 2010. This time I was lucky enough to stay in one of the few remaining flophouses near the Bowery—a gritty pension populated by artists, actors, and other New York City outcasts, where I finally found a tiny room for myself, the tiniest I’ve ever seen: 8×6 square feet, with shared toilets down the hall, for around $250 a week. No joke, but this turned out to be one of the best deals I’ve ever found in my troubled New York years: it was great being back in Manhattan, having my early-morning cup of coffee in the streets of the East Village, sitting on the stoops with perfect strangers at night, enjoying my regular El Paso burger at Paul’s Da Burger Joint, and feeling again part of the energy of the city. The last time I returned to New York, the building had been boarded up. Nearby, a swish 72-room boutique hotel would rise, according to the banners at the construction site.
In my New York years I experienced first-hand how hard it is to survive in the city when your budget nears the poverty line, and it was not a pretty picture. I also witnessed what the inexorable rise in rental prices did to the networks of friends and colleagues I had in the city. Based in the island at the beginning, all of us were forced to move out of Manhattan, first to Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Long Island City, Astoria, or Jackson Heights, and then farther out, to the eastern ends of Brooklyn (Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant) or to Harlem. The increasing distances between us and the exhausting workdays made it very hard to keep our network alive. It also made many of us feel pretty disempowered, as we started to fear that as much as we went on in our careers, the quality of our lives (location, connection, networks) was not improving.
Don’t get me wrong: living in New York is absolutely fantastic. That thrilling spectacle of life is the closest to heaven I have ever experienced. Also, I was young. New York’s loud, restless streets gave me an adrenaline rush that made me immune to all bad things and transformed my adventures and even my hardships into some wonderful movie script. But now that I’m slightly older, I must tell the truth: New York is really fantastic as long as you have the money. If you don’t, you can bet on a restless existence made of constant moving, constant threats, and a continuous process of starting all over again. I wrote this book as a testimony to the strains I endured to survive here, and those of all the people who each day wake up dreaming of making a life in this magnificent city but are finding that dream to be more and more out of reach.
It wasn’t only my personal experience of living in New York City, both as a precarious visiting researcher and an irredeemable big city lover, that persuaded me to write this book. It was also the realization that what I endured wasn’t that scary when compared with some of the horror stories I heard in the streets of New York: a single mother of four from the Rockaways who commutes over two hours each day to work as a clerk at a Gap downtown, a young guy living with his elderly family in a dark basement in Astoria, or the kind African American lady that was stuck in the homeless shelter in Bed-Stuy. It was also the realization that this tough life is becoming the daily reality for innumerable friends and acquaintances of mine, who are striving to keep themselves afloat in big cities around the world, from London to San Francisco, from Paris to Milan, from Singapore to Dublin. Ironically enough, most of them could be called members of the fabled “creative class” celebrated by urban theorist and new-economy guru Richard Florida, yet very few of them seem to enjoy the fabulous lives of some of Florida’s “creatives” who earn their living in the world of finance, banking, or real estate. They are the broke adjunct professors on short-term contracts at CUNY, the hipster writers at VICE magazine, the penniless students living on a pack of future loans, the freelance software designers, the fashion photographers, the eternal trainees at architecture studios, the apprentice editors, and the self-employed journalists and graphic designers. Many of them are trapped in low-paying jobs with no benefits or security, some have dropped health insurance altogether, and many need a second or even a third job to carry on. And this is happening in cities where the housing market has become scandalously unaffordable, and where finding a decent rental—not to mention buying a home—has become a pipe dream for most. The biggest irony of it all is that, from New York to London, from Sidney to Amsterdam, local politicians keep repeating that they are working hard on solutions to fix these problems: they all seem to have some plan up their sleeve that will provide affordable housing for those on low incomes, yet what we witness are more luxury condos piercing the skyline, and a housing market that keeps getting tighter and tighter. As naive as our elected officials may think we are, we have all become disenchanted enough to discern, as a Metropolis Magazine reporter puts it, that “solving a housing crisis by building penthouses would be like trying to solve an automobile shortage by manufacturing Bentleys.”2
We live in citadels of unimaginable wealth, surrounded by crumbling outskirts where a growing class of under-laborers (the minimum-wage clerks, runners, janitors—the so-called service economy that makes the other half of the city function) endures its daily struggle just to hang on. Meanwhile, once-working-class districts are revolutionized by studio galleries and vegan bistros, coffee shops and music clubs, farmers’ markets and gluten-free beer gardens, bike lanes and river walks—safe environments for a brand-new class of consumers, without the pesky vestiges of actual working-class people, who in the meantime have long been kicked to the curb. And this is a global phenomenon.
Take Berlin, for instance. The city has been branding itself to the world as the European capital of creativity and “coolness,” in an age where EU austerity measures have obliterated much of the economic vitality of spectacular cities like Madrid, Paris, and Milan. Berlin’s “poor but sexy” appeal has sold well for years, as the German capital managed to attract young professionals and broke bohemians in record numbers, while innumerable international headlines and TV reports kept celebrating it as the “European Capital of Cool.”3 But behind the hype, there is a less jubilant reality of rampant unemployment (the highest rate in Germany, with 30% of social scientists and 40% of artists being out of work in 20124) and welfare dependency. And if Berlin is poor, that doesn’t make it necessarily cheap, courtesy of an unprecedented influx of foreign buyers who, attracted by the sirens of real estate bargains, have been buying massive chunks of property all across the city, inflating a speculative housing bubble in a city where holiday rentals in certain areas have been outpacing legitimate leases.5 Finding a home in Berlin today has become a hopeless task for the hundreds of thousands of young self-employed and freelance workers who can’t show any evidence of a steady income, let alone a decent salary. At a typical open-house viewing you can find lines of potential renters coming from all over Europe, queuing all the way out the door till the end of the block. And it’s not uncommon to meet people in their 40s and 50s who are still living in shared flats.
Yet Berlin is a relative bargain compared to Paris. In the City of Love, common listings for rooms and apartments include barely legal (and definitely stretched) definitions of “habitable space,” so that if your budget is tight, you may go for a 60-square-foot “studio” whose toilet is in a cupboard that can be pulled out from under the kitchen sink. If you don’t mind sharing toilets with your neighbors, for around 500 euros you will find a chambre de bonne, a single room in the former maid’s quarter in the garret of some apartment building. Or, if you are lucky, you may find yourself a more charming 180-square-foot “loft” studio with a bunk bed for 900 euros plus utilities. In Paris, where rich Middle Eastern and Chinese buyers are now ousting the French from the housing market, even the upper middle classes are being priced out.
And don’t get me started on London. In the city where a 188-square-foot apartment (not much larger than a prison cell) can sell for £275,000, a car box in Highgate for £250,000, and a Knightsbridge apartment for £65 million, real estate insanity has become the norm. Even once-unfashionable outer neighborhoods have become unaffordable to the point that “families and young workers … looking to buy their first home, are leaving the capital in their droves to get on to the property ladder, forced out by high house prices.”6 The rental market here is so tight that apartment seekers are aware that any open-house viewing will turn into a bloody bidding war between applicants. In London, the urban legend of the man living in a broom cupboard is no urban legend at all. I found an actual such listing, in the Paddington area, for just £40 a week, the ad calling it a “loft conversion,” but noting that “you cannot stand upright in the room. … Ideally it would suit someone less than 5’4 tall and with no history of claustrophobia.”7
Not to mention San Francisco, the new US capital of insane housing prices, and home to the highest concentration of the global super-rich (those making over $30 million) of any city in the United States.8 Here, venture capitalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and tech-sector employees have been buying up the most desirable areas in a bidding frenzy for years, driving average rents near $3,500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, and creating a housing market where most new construction consists of super-upscale condos, and where the median home price today is above $1.2 million.9 The deranged San Francisco housing market has unleashed viral BuzzFeed stories like “9 Private Islands That Cost Less Than an Apartment in San Francisco”10 or “5 Castles That Are Cheaper Than an Apartment in San Francisco”—if you are smart, you’ll sell that dull $985,000 one-bedroom condo in Nob Hill and buy yourself a 13-bedroom 20th-century palace with a pool in Spain for the same price.11 But if you are not a billionaire and really can’t stay away from the City by the Bay, you may be lucky enough to find a “contractor special” decrepit shack in the Outer Mission District selling for just $350,000.12 And if San Francisco prices are crazy, then prices in cities like Tokyo or Melbourne have long been in the asylum. And the list could go on.
Space is getting tight, courtesy of a new global population of super-rich consumers “whose real estate spending power has changed the game entirely,”13 and of local governments that are all too eager to oblige.
This is what urban life is becoming for many of us, in a world where big cities are slowly becoming citadels of overpriced offshore properties where the absurdly rich love to park their cash, leaving very little space at hand for anyone else. And in this book I will show how this is not some unexplainable god-given plague like a heat wave or a locust invasion to punish us for our sins, but a man-made disaster—the result of very concrete urban policies that for years have been favoring the influx of a new, extra-national, super-wealthy class of citizens, for which governments and developers have devised brand-new glittering cities that are pushing the lower-, middle-, and even upper-middle-income classes out. “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” argued former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg in an interview with New York Magazine.14 He sure isn’t the only one who thinks this way: the rapid, ruthless, corporate-style creative destruction I will describe in New York is happening in similar ways in all major cities around the globe, from London to Tokyo, from Hong Kong to Melbourne. The end game of this era of rampant hypergentrification is a segregated, dysfunctional city that bears very little resemblance to the cities of opportunities to which our fathers and grandfathers migrated. Is the elite city to become the final destination of booming cities around the world? And are our neighborhoods destined to be trampled by multimillion-dollar safe-deposit boxes in the sky for the wealthiest global players?