In the past, a city was said to have “Manhattanized” when it bulldozed old storefronts to make room for dense clusters of commercial skyscrapers: think San Francisco in the nineteen-sixties or Miami in the early aughts. Recently, however, city dwellers have adopted the colloquialism to refer to a different New York City phenomenon.
“How do you Manhattanize a townhouse?” Christabel Gough, a New York resident and the secretary for the Society for the Architecture of the City, asked last year in a speech about Brooklyn’s brownstones. “First, you pay a seven- or eight-figure price to buy it. Then you destroy it—except, of course, for the street front, if it is in an historic district. You expand underneath with new underground levels, which may include a swimming pool, a dog-grooming room, and other such essentials….” The list went on.
This is the new meaning of “Manhattanization”: turning a city into a playground for the wealthiest inhabitants, even as it forgets about the poorest. After twelve years of a billionaire mayor with a soft spot for Wall Street, it seems that Manhattan is better known for its “one-percenters” than for its gruff deli owners. In 2012, the wealthiest one per cent of Manhattan residents earned nearly thirty-nine per cent of all city income, up from twelve per cent in 1980, according to a report by the Fiscal Policy Institute. (“America’s most iconic city now has the same inequality index as Swaziland,” the report said.) As cities on both coasts become more expensive, and less affordable for middle- and lower-class inhabitants, Manhattan is increasingly the reference point for what not to be.
In Boston, where residents are preparing to elect a new mayor for the first time in twenty years, voters are talking about the proliferation of luxury condos and the absence of affordable housing. During a primary debate in August, multiple aspirants said that Boston is increasingly a city “for the very rich and the very poor,” which prompted one local paper to headline its debate coverage, “Candidates vow to keep Boston from becoming another Manhattan.”
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, two of the most controversial measures on this November’s ballot are Propositions B and C, in which voters will weigh in on a developer’s plan to raze a waterfront parking lot and private tennis club and replace them with more than a hundred luxury condos priced at five million dollars apiece. Mayor Edwin M. Lee supports the project because he says it will increase tax revenue for the city, but many residents are fighting the development because they say it will obstruct public views of the water and create more high-end residential properties in a city that needs affordable housing instead.
In the midst of debates about the project this summer, Chris Tacy penned an evocative blog post attacking San Francisco’s gentrification and legions of striving, app-creating entrepreneurs, who he described as “rich and privileged and entitled or hustling as hard as they can to become rich and privileged and entitled.” He went on, “There is a cultural norm in NYC that supports this kind of douchebaggery. But this is San Francisco. And San Francisco is a special place.”
Manhattanites are jumping on the anti-Manhattan bandwagon, too. Like Bostonians, New Yorkers are about to elect a new mayor for the first time in over a decade; in the Democratic primary, they rallied behind Bill de Blasio and his campaign theme of “A Tale of Two Cities.” In a speech earlier this month, sponsored by the Association for a Better New York, de Blasio said that New York is “a city that has worked very well for our city’s elite, but one that’s left millions of everyday New Yorkers behind.” He continued, “When so many New Yorkers are being priced out of their own city, it’s not merely another problem for us to consider. It’s a crisis of affordability.”
The city’s growing inequality was predicted long ago. Urban sociologists coined the term “the dual city” back in the early nineties to refer to a growing wealth gap between many cities’ richest and poorest residents. In an interview this week, the Columbia University sociologist Saskia Sassen called it “an emptying out of the middle. Sassen published her seminal work “The Global City” in the early nineties, followed by “Cities in a World Economy.” These texts, based on data from the eighties, showed that in financial hubs like New York, in which the economy was moving away from manufacturing, residents’ wealth had been polarized. It was a global trend, unfolding to various degrees in London, Tokyo, and Chicago, among other cities. Financiers and consultants required low-wage workers, like cleaners and security guards, to service their office buildings, while jobs for middle-class workers disappeared.
I spoke to Sassen to see what she thought of the popularity of ideas she had published over twenty years ago. She responded that she thinks mayoral candidates and voters are talking about this polarization now partly because housing prices in New York, San Francisco, and other cities are rising again after they dropped in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. She also believes that the financial crisis has “created a space” for young people, in particular, to voice their concerns over long-term economic hardships. “Before, they would have sounded like they were whining,” she said. “People would have said, ‘What are you talking about? The economy is great; look at all of these luxury shops.’ ” Today, few among us mistake thriving boutiques for an indicator of a healthy, equitable economy.
Elizabeth Greenspan is the author of “Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade Center.”
Photograph by Teun Voeten/Reporters/Redux.
