Why Did the YIMBY Cross the Bridge?

Holding my nose to support the future

Per the above, apparently I was in the New York Post this past weekend. Some enterprising photographer snapped a picture of me crossing the Gowanus with a friend on a day when the canal was particularly odiferous, and the paper used it to illustrate a story covering residential concerns about toxic fumes. Shortly after the story was posted on the newspaper’s website, I started hearing from friends and family about my 15 minutes of fame (distaste seems to be a common theme between such moments of mine). It was certainly an amusing moment, but it sent me reminiscing about the Gowanus Canal area and the dramatic changes it has undergone over the past twenty years.

I must have crossed the Union Street bridge over a thousand times since I moved to Brooklyn, because it’s on the route walking from my home to my synagogue. I remember musing on one such walk in the mid-oughts about how the area could be developed if the canal were over properly cleaned up. I imagined a garden-bordered walkway along the canal dotted with little shops and restaurants with large outdoor terraces, with mid-rise or even high-rise residential looming just behind. At the time, the most prominent features of the area were a large parking facility for Verizon trucks and an ancient sign advertising a long-defunct asbestos flooring company, and my musings met a lot of skepticism from my walking companions—in part because of the canal’s gruesome summertime stink.

Nonetheless, much of what I imagined has come to pass, though not in precisely the order I imagined. First came the hip bars, grownup playgrounds and event spaces, some with large outdoor terraces. The first major residential development did indeed come with a modest amount of greenery-lined walkway. And now, the Gowanus Canal is experiencing a massive surge of development, with multiple large residential projects going up simultaneously, radically transforming the neighborhood in one fell swoop.

It’s not hard to articulate the benefits of this change. New York has long been a notably expensive city in which to live, but vacancy rates have hit astonishingly low numbers of late, and rents have consequently skyrocketed. The need for more housing is glaringly obvious, and the vast majority of that housing needs to be market-rate because it is people who are able to pay market rate who are bidding rents up to such high levels. Moreover, at a time when the city has already experienced significant cuts to services to plug a growing budget gap, we can’t ignore the value to the tax base of such developments. Building that market-rate housing on a superfund site could even be described as a rare win for environmental equity.

Yet nobody I know is happy about it. People fret about the stress on transportation infrastructure (primarily the F train), and about the inevitable evolution of the retail landscape to service the neighborhood’s new inhabitants who, the fretters presume, will clamor for homogenized upper-middle-class corporate goo. And they mourn the death of the Brooklyn they moved to. That’s why there were laments when the South Brooklyn Casket Company closed, and grassroots protests when the Kentile Floor sign was set to be demolished—not because these things were actually so precious, but because they were indices of place and of continuity with that place’s past. They made people feel that they were living somewhere “real,” where the Gowanus aborning feels, to them, fake.

And you know, I get it. There’s a reason I pay an unreasonable amount to live in an old building. But there’s also something ridiculous about first-, second- or later-wave gentrifiers living in expensive homes that they own complaining that the next wave won’t appreciate the precious relics of a past the preservationists themselves never experienced. I’ve watched multiple New York neighborhoods go through the same cycle, starting out grim, then becoming edgy, then exciting and hip, then burgeoning into self-parody, and finally being crushed by monied mediocrity. That’s just the circle of urban life, and the desire to prevent it and enforce stasis is, deep down, a kind of refusal to accept that life is change, a fear and loathing of the future we are building that can only actually be answered by building a better one and not by fetishizing the past. It’s also a refusal to recognize that the past you’re trying to hold onto was also dominated by pervasive mediocrity, and some of that mediocrity has wound up aging pretty well. People at the time decried what Haussmann was doing to Paris and the cast-iron architecture of Soho that Jane Jacobs saved was a cheap and cheesy imitation of “real” detailing when it was built, appropriate only to industrial spaces.

New York has the incredible luxury of getting stuff wrong all the time because so many people around the world want to live here. But that cushion isn’t infinitely thick. In the end, we face the same three choices as any other locality. We can let demand consistently outrun supply and drive the middle class out, turning the city into an increasingly unaffordable ornament for rich residents and tourists. We can crush demand through mismanagement and watch the most-enterprising depart for greener pastures, leaving behind a city in a doom spiral, affordable because few people want to live there. Or we can serve demand with adequate supply and watch the new and often unappealing displace the old and cherished, leaving some spiritually homeless. New York does have the luxury to mix and match to some degree; we can preserve some neighborhoods as pricey baubles, and can even carve out space for some poorer residents in areas where they otherwise couldn’t possibly afford to live. But only some. At the scale of the city itself, we face the same three choices. If we’re not happy with either the first or second fates, then build we must.

That being the case, if not in Gowanus then for goodness sake where?