Abstract
‘A tale of two cities’ is the slogan people remember from Bill de Blasio’s successful 2013 New York City mayoral campaign. Under mayors Giuliani (1994–2001) and Bloomberg (2002–2013), New York became perhaps the country’s greatest urban revival success story. The city emerged from the depths of a fiscal crisis and high crime in the 1970s and 1980s – a glittering, safe destination for wealthy residents and tourists in the new millennium. Rundown neighborhoods and avoided areas gentrified, new luxury housing sprang up, and rents, especially in Manhattan, skyrocketed. But in doing so, de Blasio and others have contended, New York had really become two places: one that catered to the rich and one that neglected and made life difficult for the poor. Indeed, much urban scholarship on this transformation has focused on the political economy of gentrification and urban growth and on conditions of urban poverty. What about the people in the middle? How are they dealing with these profound changes?
These questions sit at the heart of Rachael Woldoff, Lisa Morrison, and Michael Glass’ important new book, Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods. Their aim is to analyze what happens at the ‘intersection of changing community demographics and neoliberal housing policies’ (p. 6), and they have chosen a truly iconic place as their case. With 91 uniform buildings, 11,250 apartments, and more than 25,000 tenants, Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village (usually called Stuyvesant Town) is the largest housing development in Manhattan. Built in 1947, it was once known for its affordable, rent-controlled apartments for the middle class. But as Woldoff et al. show, since the early 2000s, its affordability has come increasingly under threat as a series of landlord decisions, and real estate transactions have created conflict in what was once a stable community. In this case, the authors contend that it is a story of the trajectory of urban middle-class neighborhoods in the ‘luxury city’.
‘Aside from the extremely rich’, the authors write, ‘virtually every New Yorker has struggled to find adequate, affordable housing, and the middle class is no exception’ (p. 94). It was not always the case for everyone in the middle, for people who are not desperately poor but not rich either. After the Depression and Second World War, New York City faced a housing crisis. Needing space for returning veterans and modern housing to compete with suburban developments, Robert Moses, the city’s famous housing coordinator and ‘master builder’, bought and cleared a large swath of tenements on the Lower East Side to make way for a ‘city within a city’: scores of tall residential buildings on large superblocks. Moses secured MetLife, an insurance company, to develop the project, under the conditions of creating park space on the site and placing rent controls on the units, keeping them below market rate, for the duration of development’s tax exemption. The goal was to create a development so ‘that families of moderate means might live in health, comfort, and dignity in park-like communities’ (p. 90). As the authors point out, Stuyvesant Town was planned at a time when ‘larger societal ideals [were] grounded in justice and pragmatism, in which housing was viewed as a right’ (p. 101). There are limits to how socially just Stuyvesant Town was, however. As Woldoff et al. show, Blacks were banned from the development, low-income people displaced from the existing tenements could not afford to return, family and friends of MetLife employees got preferential treatment, and the rent control had a life span of only 25 years, after which the landlord could charge market-rate rents (it was later extended, due to tenant pressure).
Still, for those who qualified Stuyvesant Town was enormously popular from the outset, reaching capacity shortly after its completion. With affordable, larger-than-average apartments, green spaces, no through traffic, and close proximity to jobs, early tenants, who were mostly young couples, saw Stuyvesant Town as an ideal place in the city to live and raise a family. With rent regulations in place, the residential population remained relatively unchanged for several decades, until New York began its post-fiscal crisis rebirth. Legislation in the 1990s rolled back protections for rent-regulated tenants and placed a rent ceiling of USD2000 per month for rent-stabilized apartments. If a unit’s rent exceeded this amount, it ceased to be rent stabilized and became market rate. During this time, MetLife made a number of renovations in Stuyvesant Town, shifting the costs onto tenants through small rent increases, substantially raising rents in cases of major capital improvements, and marketing the development as ‘luxury living’. Many units became destabilized as wealthier newcomers moved in. Then, in 2006, MetLife sold the entire development to Tishman Speyer, a massive real estate company, for USD5.4 billion, making it the largest sale of a single property in American history. With the high price tag, the writing was on the wall: ‘The only way for Tishman Speyer to feasibly make a profit on the deal would be to fully convert the once middle-income housing development into a luxury apartment complex’ (p. 36). Predictably, Tishman continued many of MetLife’s strategies to convert rent-stabilized apartments to market-rate units as quickly as possible. These neoliberal housing policies of deregulation and tax abatements (which Tishman also received), and the influx of new, young residents to Stuyvesant Town, led to great conflict in a community that had been fairly stable for several decades.
While Woldoff et al. deftly tell this history and reveal just how neoliberal housing policies work, the strength of the book is the focus on the actual tenants of Stuyvesant Town. Through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, they seek to answer, ‘What kinds of communities do neoliberal policies create?’ (p. 9). They identify three types of resident living there today: long-timers, or people whose residency predates MetLife’s initial attempts at deregulation and market conversion; young professionals, or people with college degrees and high incomes; and college students. Long-time residents fondly recall a time when Stuyvesant Town felt like a close community. After raising their families, many of them are now aging in place. And with elevator buildings, amenities like shopping and health-care facilities nearby, and familiar neighbors, Stuyvesant Town is a great option for them. But while
longtime residents felt certain that living there would ensure a lifetime of housing stability as they moved through their lives and into their retirement years[, t]heir sense of security would leave them unprepared for the real estate drama that would unfold in their golden years. (p. 52)
The neoliberal agenda of the 21st century shattered the sense of security and attachment to place they felt in the 20th century.
Woldoff et al. show how long-time residents feel that the renovations and new amenities in Stuyvesant Town, such as a video intercom system and sports facilities, have clearly not been for them, but to attract younger residents with higher incomes in search of luxury housing. They also sense management is watching, investigating, and intimidating them, such as by finding out if they are subletting their apartments or if they also reside elsewhere – conditions which could lead to their eviction and an increase in their apartment’s rent. Some gripes are petty, and some tenants may be paranoid that they are being spied on. But it is clear that a change has occurred. The drive to get units up to market rates has created a highly transient population of young professionals and students, whose lifestyles differ markedly from long-timers. For the former, Stuyvesant Town is most likely a stepping-stone as they advance in their careers and eventually move to a more desirable neighborhood for them. It is well-located and reasonably affordable, if not as luxurious as the advertisements suggest. While some appreciate the existing community and are even creating their own sense of community, others are not sentimental about its way of life or involved in any tenant activism to keep units in Stuyvesant Town stabilized. Students, mostly from nearby New York University, for the most part treat the development as they would a dorm (which it resembles architecturally). They stay for a year, maybe two, pack several people into an apartment to bring down the rent, and live a common college student’s life (late nights, impromptu parties, etc.). Meanwhile, with greater unit turnover, the landlord is able to increase rents more rapidly.
In many ways, newcomers resemble long-timers when the latter first moved to Stuyvesant Town: young and looking to start their lives, careers, and families in the city. They earn more than the original tenants, but they also face a much more expensive housing market. While the story of aging long-time residents feeling under threat in their own homes after decades of residency and community-building is the book’s emotional heart, the greater victim here is the urban middle class in general. The market-based housing policies like those Stuyvesant Town has been experiencing for the last 15 years are becoming more widespread in growing postindustrial cities like New York, making neighborhoods unaffordable for people with moderate means, while raising conflicts between multiple generations of residents as they undergo this transition. Although it is in many ways an exceptional case, Woldoff, Morrison, and Glass have convincingly shown how Stuyvesant Town is by no means an isolated one.