The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence

by Kevin Baker, James Howard Kunstler (Foreword)

The Fall of a Great American City is the story of what is happening today in New York City and in many other cities across America. It is about how the crisis of affluence is now driving out everything we love most about cities: small shops, decent restaurants, public space, street life, affordable apartments, responsive government, beauty, idiosyncrasy, each other. This is the story of how we came to lose so much—how the places we love most were turned over to land bankers, billionaires, the worst people in the world, and criminal landlords—and how we can - and must - begin to take them back.

Co-published with Harper's Magazine, where an earlier version of this essay was originally published in 2018.

As New York City approaches the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. By unremarkable I don’t just mean periodic, slump-in-the-art-world, all-the-bands-suck, cinema-is-dead boring. I mean flatlining. No longer a significant cultural entity but a blank white screen of mere existence. I mean The-World’s-Largest-Gated-Community-with-a-few-cupcake-shops. For the first-time in our history, creative-youngpeople- will-no-longer want-to-come-here boring. Even, New-York-is-over boring. Or worse, New York is like everywhere else. Unremarkable. This is not some new phenomenon, but a cancer that’s been metastasizing on the city for decades now. Even worse, it’s not something that anyone wants, except the landlords, and not even all of them. What’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core, and what is happening in every American city of means, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Seattle, you name it—is something that almost nobody wants, but everybody gets. As such, the current urban crisis exemplifies our wider crisis: an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.

 

Genres: Urban Planning

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 8, 2019

About the author

Kevin Baker is the author of the New York, City of Fire trilogy: Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Strivers Row. Most recently, he's been writing about politics for Harper's Magazine and the New York Observer.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kevin Baker’s book The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence is both a profoundly insightful and disturbing book. It is more than a cautionary tale of New York. Think of any major city where affluence and corruption walk hand-in-hand and you have another place that will follow New York’s lead.

Baker takes us behind the plague of real estate dealings that would make the word corrupt blush, the politicians’ empty words and bankrupt promises, and the consequences that befall the average person who is drowning without seemingly any hope of survival amid the towering glass condos, business towers and corrupt landlords.

Baker’s tone amid all the carnage that surrounds and engulfs New York is remarkably restrained, albeit a few phrases do tend to make the reader smile in sympathy with his insights.

Reading this book should shake the common person into a more acute awareness of how we are victims of a monolith of money.

[Thomas Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Building on the extraordinary article that Michael Greenberg wrote for the NY Review of Books and the New Yorker piece that introduced the term ‘high rent blight’ and the power of Jeremiah Moss’ Vanishing New York, Kevin Baker ties together their work and further explains the urban crisis of affluence that is resulting in displacement among NY’s working class and creative class. He does a good job while leaving out the fall of urban local news, the impact of new middle class New Yorkers like the southern Chinese (parts of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park have seen 100% displacement), and NY’s historical disregard for the working class: think of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the sand hogs building the tunnel and even the first responders tasked with cleaning up Ground Zero — their welfare was unimportant to the power brokers and their vision of the City as it is again. Baker’s most important insight is the inevitability that cities will need to start building housing for its working class if these issues continue.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can you say? And I think about what is supposed to happen next Tuesday, 11.8.22 and basically, I throw up my hands in despair. The general reader will probably find this dry and may a tad academic, but it does come across as a cautionary tale. And the inimitable Mike Davis, of "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles" fame died several weeks ago. It is Friday, 11.4.2022 when I write this so have a good weekend too. A lovely weekend is in the forecast for Vermont, the mid to upper 60s and it is early November. In years past we have had several frosts and snow by now. In general, things are not going well in AmeriKa.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depressing and all too true.