August 9, 2013

Is New York Only for the Successful?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

New York is certainly a special city. But does it risk becoming a city for the special?

It is hard to squeeze the juice of substance from a mayoral campaign that has been, to a great extent, about former Representative Anthony D. Weiner tweeting pictures of his groin.

But an important theme of the race is the question of whom New York City will be for. Will it remain an incubator of greatness, or become a catchment basin for the already great and their regressing-to-the-mean descendants? Will it continue to be the city to which people think to flee when they’ve boxed up their things in Kansas or Chengdu, tired of their narrow reality? Will it be a place where people can bend their fate?

Candidates on the right, like Joseph J. Lhota, argue that such mobility is threatened by teachers unions, excessive taxes and gnarled regulations that complicate starting a business. Candidates on the left, like Bill de Blasio, contend that new taxes and wider access to education are necessary to restore, in Mr. de Blasio’s words, “the very foundation of what New York City has always been and can be once again: a city of opportunity for everyone.”

But underpinning these different diagnoses and prescriptions is a common sense that New York’s role as a city — and the idea it embodies — is changing.

That role, and that idea, had something to do with the words inscribed on a plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” The lines were about foreignimmigration, but they spoke equally to migrants from other American places, who arrived simply with the longing to become some unexpressed incarnation of themselves.

As E.B. White memorably wrote, “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.” That settler might be “a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart.”

But is New York still a good place for the settler whose achievements remain ahead of her?

A few years ago, Patti Smith, the musician and author, who came to New York in 1967 with some of the fervor that Mr. White wrote of, advised aspiring Patti Smiths to try somewhere cheaper and easier. “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling,” she told an interviewer. “But there are other cities: Detroit, Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

And, indeed, many prominent people who want to fix Detroit — and New Orleans and Pittsburgh, among other places — see in a changing New York their great opportunity. What those cities may lack in security and public services, they make up for with the opportunity to crash with a bunch of friends in a $500-a-month house and pursue creative work of the sort that takes time to be recognized and financed.

In Patti Smith’s day, New York offered that, too. No longer. A fair indication of where things stand may be the New York television show of the moment, HBO’s “Girls.” A show about flailing, post-collegiate millennials, it has a cast that in real life reflects the coming of a New York whose function is to help successful people transmit their advantages down the genetic line rather than discover new successes from obscurity or even Queens.

The writer, director and star of the show, Lena Dunham, is the daughter of two successful New York artists. So it is with her co-stars: Allison Williams is the daughter of a leading newscaster, Brian Williams. Zosia Mamet is the daughter of David Mamet, the eminent director and playwright. Jemima Kirke is the daughter of a rock-band drummer and the proprietor of a fashionable West Village boutique.

What is remarkable about New York today is that an entire city is becoming as safe, and therefore accessible, as only portions of Manhattan once were. To put the transformation in perspective: The most dangerous precincts of the Bronx today report fewer violent crimes than the regal Upper East Side did in 1993.

What this means in practical, rather than statistical, terms is this: For an urban walker like me, New York has become that rarity among American cities, where you can pick two points on a map and walk between them, without researching what areas lie in between. It is a remarkable, freeing thing.

This freeing makes for a better city. But it also multiplies the area of the city in which real-estate speculators and the uber-talented compete for space with the average, the struggling, the people still fishing out their greatness. Because of these pressures, the average home rental in New York has risen to more than $3,000 a month. That means an average American contemplating a move to New York would have to spend 84 percent of her current pay to live in an average New York apartment.

And so New York is becoming a magnet for settlers looking to consolidate success rather than to find it. And the kind of success that takes a few patient, unglamorous generations in the Lower East Side and the gritty parts of Brooklyn to breed a Manhattan wunderkind like Woody Allen may be a kind that New York cedes to easier places.

In time, this will change the city’s character. Its newcomers and new successes will surely love New York as the old ones did. But they may never be able to love it in the way of E.B. White’s settler, who owes to it her very start — her improbable flowering.

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