Vanishing New York

May 29, 2017
In the spirit of Jane Jacobs, Moss, author of the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, makes a passionate case against “the luxury vision of New York that characterized the Bloomberg years.” The “hyper-gentrification,” as Moss terms it, of the last decade plus has radically transformed New York City. The city is no longer “the unbridled engine of the nation’s progressive culture and creativity, sustaining a diversity of people.” Instead, Moss sees a soulless realm of “luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization.” This argument is not a new one, but the book provides an accessible overview of recent efforts to make the Big Apple more appealing to the affluent. Moss is particularly attuned to gentrification’s effects on individual neighborhoods and merchants and argues that the changes are not merely the results of the free market but a deliberate class makeover of the city. He illustrates this point through the example of the 2008 rezoning of Harlem led by Bloomberg’s city-planning director Amanda Burden, who justified the plans to the New York Times with an anecdote about when she attended a concert at the Apollo Theater and couldn’t find a nearby restaurant that appealed to her. Moss also credits pedestrians’ addiction to screens as a factor in their indifference to the changing landscape. Whether or not readers share Moss’s heartfelt belief that New York City has lost its soul, this polemic is likely to stir a lot of emotions.

June 1, 2017
The Big Apple is morphing into a class-war amusement park for the very rich. Thus this irate argument for remaking it into a city for the rest of us.Like climate change, writes pseudonymous New York Daily News editorialist and blogger Moss, hypergentrification is both a fact and a human-caused artifact and, therefore, can be halted. The hypergentrification of New York, in particular, "gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism," is producing a safe, arid, sterile, uniform city, a place in which the old bohemian mecca has been overwhelmed by "luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization." If that seems a touch hyperbolic, then the author is happy to own up to the adjective, noting, derisively, that New York may not be altogether dead, if "dying" is a substitute word that will make his critics happier. Moss traces this process to the urban renewal programs of the New Deal, when tenements were scraped away in the apparent hope that poverty would disappear with them. Robert Moses "flattened neighborhoods where the vast majority of people were working class and nonwhite," while Ed Koch ushered in the "me decade" of the 1980s, Rudy Giuliani swept the streets by force in the '90s, and Michael Bloomberg oversaw the post-9/11 transformation of the city into the province of the very rich in a program that Moss calls "the apotheosis of neoliberal ideology." Happily, the jargon mostly gives way to plainspoken language of anger at the disappearance of places like the old Times Square, where visitors are now "anesthetized in the greasy glow" of fast food and big-screen TVs. The sitting president figures in the tale, too, as a public-funds moocher of the first water. Moss closes with notes on remaking New York so that less moneyed, less well-connected residents enjoy the same "right to the city" as his greedy villains. Maddening if you're not mega-wealthy, and a vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud.

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July 1, 2017

In his first book, blogger Moss (vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com) explicitly states his bias toward the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan. He says at the outset that he doesn't consider the other parts of New York to be real, setting up his own classism and making readers perceive the inclusion of Harlem (and the South Bronx) to be tokenism at worst. Gentrification cannot easily be covered in its entirety, even within the borders of the five boroughs (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) and focusing on his favorite neighborhoods could have worked if Moss had better contextualized them. The author effectively distills the histories of neighborhoods he knows well, particularly those of lower Manhattan, and he explains some of the more recent shifting class conflicts. Yet, he does not include people impacted by hypergentrification, who live in "not New York," places such as the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. His research is lightweight and, unfortunately, he quotes from other news stories instead of speaking directly to residents of the neighborhoods covered. VERDICT Point patrons to WNYC's eight-part radio series about gentrification in Brooklyn instead.--Candice Kail, Columbia Univ. Libs., New York

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