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Public Action Gentrification and the Lower East Side In the course of NewYork's late-twentieth-century economic ascent, nothing was more dramatic than the changes experienced by so many of its neighborhoods. From the 1970s revival of Manhattan's faded middle-class areas to the more recent upscaling ofworking-classdistricts in Brooklynand Queens, neighborhood gentrification was no longer seen as anomalous or uncertain but as a core dynamic of urban life, practically inevitable. Manhattan's LowerEast Side stands as an especially striking example of gentrification, both in the startling character of its onset and in the dramatic transformation that ensued. For most of the century, this once storied immigrant ghetto had been an area in decline. In 1973, urban planners Harry Schwartz and Peter Abeles proclaimed (in their generally insightful community study Planning for the Lower East Side) that the "Lower East Side is the only Manhattan neighborhood below East Harlem that is committed to housing the poor. It has played this role for the last century, and strong trends indicate that it will continue to do so."1 Within a decade of the study's publication, the sales prices of many crumbling Lower East Side tenement buildings had jumped from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by the end of the 1990s transactions in the millions were becoming commonplace. Asland values and rents climbed upward , the area's working-class and lower-income residents—PuertoRicans, Chinese-Americans, aging European immigrants, and African-Americans— seemed to be increasingly replaced by young singles and professionals. Neighborhood ways of life based on immigrant social ties gave way,first, to an edgy alternative-community scene and then, increasingly, to a trendy extension of the Manhattan entertainment economy geared toward consumption activities for the young and affluent. Bythe year 2000, much of 69 3 70 • Public Action the Lower East Side was clearly no longer the same community as that of a generation earlier, even though surprising numbers oflower-income people continued to live there.2 Indeed, with rental apartments priced at two to three thousand dollars per month and condominiums in old Orchard Street tenements selling for well over half a million dollars, available housing was no longer affordable to the middle class. Perhaps because this kind ofneighborhood transformation ceases to amaze, public discussion overwhether gentrification is good or bad has progressed little over the years.3 Supporters continue to point out, with considerable justification, that declining areas need reinvestment and new residents . Drawing on the insights of urban-ecology perspectives in sociology, these supporters also observe that consumer housing choices and urban land markets influence how neighborhoods change.4 Gentrification, in this view, is caused primarily by the recent preferences of middle-class people to live in cities, and this "reurbanization," in turn, has benefited cities in many ways, from strengthened tax bases to enhanced amenities. Yetsupporters also tend to invoke a renewal stereotype—one in which the arrival of new residents is expected to "lift up" the area, including its longtime lower-income residents. This optimistic scenario, even when it is not condescending to the poor, fails to confront the realities of neighborhood change in a rapidly escalating urban real-estate market. Such a stereotype ignores, as well, the fact that gentrification is not so much breaking down the economic and racial segregation of the U.S. metropolis as remapping it.5 Bycontrast, critics of gentrification assert that the economic pressures accompanying neighborhood reinvestment and in-migration inevitably drive out, or price out, current occupants. Often relying on criticalpoliticaleconomy approaches to urban change, this perspective tends to seethe case of the Lower East Side as an especially striking example: even here, where community groups mobilized to resist residential displacement, the economic forces at work proved to be too strong.6 In this way, gentrificationin the Lower East Side, as elsewhere, can be seen to enact a spatial restructuring of urban land linked to changes in the global capitalist economy.7 As corporate downtowns continue to expand, the displaced populations of the old inner city are therefore inevitably pushed farther and farther to the margins of the city. Political-economy approaches, more convincingly than urban ecology , situate neighborhood revitalization within structural economic changes that have far-reaching implications for the spatial dynamics of the city. In the process, these critical perspectives become significantlymore attentive to the social costs incurred bymarket-oriented urban revival. Despite these [3.142.195.24] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 01:35 GMT...

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