Reject du jour: where’s the grit?
It’s getting scarcer and scarcer, with all the kids moving into West Harlem and their parents paying their rent. I’ll say this much, though: when they complain about no running water, their $3500 rent makes them sound louder to the landlords! So I guess they’re good for something!
July 28th, 2008 at 7:32 am
$3500 per month? week? year?
I’m glad my neighbourhood still scares people off. So I still pay my 3204 Euros per year, including charges…
And it isn’t all that bad here after all.
July 28th, 2008 at 9:22 am
3500 smackeroos per month, baby! My neighborhood used to scare people off (it used to scare me off!), but now it’s slowly turning into a campus. I can see brand new patios installed on roofs, with fancy gardens just across the way from our building here. If only “gentrification” meant merely that the drug dealers and junkees were replaced by normal, modest, hardworking people or artists (not that artists can’t be hardworking!) instead of people who don’t even shop here (I see those gentrifiers with their fancy gourmet supermarket bags from the Upper West Side instead of our neighborhood Fairway bags), it might be more palatable. But they’re too good for us! Meaning they only invade, rather than support, our neighborhood. That bugs me!
July 28th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Ouch…
“Our” gentrifiers at least shop locally. Except the shops get gentrified as well. There’s practically none of the old shops left in Prenzlauer Berg or Mitte – because they cannot afford the rents any more and also because the population has changed.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Yeah. At least one of the new shops that opened here is run by a neighborhood guy who somehow did well. He employs people from the neighborhood, which is the only reason I frequent the establishment. (I asked, the first time I went in). It’s sort of a combination gentrification-targeting/still-cheap-enough-on-some-levels-for-normal-people-to-afford place. The espresso is only a dollar, for example. That’s rare! A slice of pizza (made fresh to order) is the same price as regular reheated pizza down the block. But other stuff (the stuff the white-people/upwardly-mobile-snots) like is expensive. I like how they know how to price stuff to keep the neighborhood people as clients while attracting the gentrifiers. They’re very clever.
I think this neighborhood resists the gentrifiers pretty well—we had a Starbucks here that closed after a year. I was pretty proud of us. I hope the resistance keeps going.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Our Starbucks had to close as well. ];-)
July 28th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Yeehaaaa!
July 28th, 2008 at 11:17 am
PS - don’t mean to be racist about the “stuff white people like.” It’s just this book Stuff white people like really made me laugh. It’s so true. I suppose one could say it’s just empirical evidence, accumulated ad absurdum. Whatever, it’s funny.