Pretend It's a City

Dispatches from the City of Yes

Reports of New York’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

Over the course of nine days, I experienced a city that had largely shed the visible vestiges of the pandemic era. New York was busy. The streets were filled with shoppers, tourists, and—shockingly, in this pajama-clad, work-from-home era—office workers wearing business suits. People were out and about all over town, everyday of the week. Times Square was as crowded as it ever was. The “lawless” subways were crammed full during morning and evening rush hour, and still pretty busy during the many other times I rode them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library bustled with weekday visitors. Restaurants and bars teemed with diners and revelers.

The city sang with life in a way I hadn’t quite heard in a while—and I sang along as I strolled about town: according to my Apple Health app, my daily steps increased from an average of 4,372 in the weeks before the trip to 10,533 while in New York. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is—well, you know.

Notably, there were some things I didn’t see. There were a few homeless people, but not as many as I would have expected given the ongoing strain the migrant crisis has placed on New York’s homelessness system. The smell of marijuana did not pervade the city, and pot shops had not metastasized across the retail landscape. Mountains of trash bags on the sidewalks used to announce garbage collection day, but these were rare now that the city has begun rolling out trash containerization. There were occasional pockets dominated by vacant storefronts and underutilized office buildings where the song of the city went silent. I spent time between Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens on this trip, but New York is 300 square miles in size, and it’s impossible to experience the whole of the city in a lifetime, let alone a week. Still, I covered a lot of territory, and most of it did not scream out in despair or wallow in decay.

Meanwhile, it was hard not to notice all the new construction. An entire forest of residential towers has sprouted in Downtown Brooklyn since I last visited a couple years ago. There are now gleaming apartment buildings and a waterfront park along the Harlem River’s shores in the South Bronx, once the poster child for urban poverty and blight. We caught the Long Island Rail Road from the JFK AirTrain to Grand Central Madison, a newish 700,000 square-foot train terminal 140 feet below Park Avenue that took half a century to come to fruition. Meanwhile, the Port Authority is well into a $19 billion redevelopment of JFK’s outdated airport terminals.

The East Village, with Brooklyn’s supertall skyline in the background (Credit: Author)

These projects were just the visible symbols of a city building at scale. Walking around or gazing at the 15th-floor view from our hotel room, I was reminded that, sometimes, the sheer magnitude of New York is astounding. It’s truly an achievement—and not only one of faded glory.

What New York doesn’t do is build quickly or on time, affordably or on budget, efficiently or enough. It often clings to a midcentury modernist mindset that was largely anti-city and auto-centric, one that still seeks an accommodation with non-urban biases in the most urban of places. 

Despite all the gleaming new residential towers, the city has the lowest vacancy rate in 50 years. The demand for housing vastly exceeds supply despite the loss of 500,000 New Yorkers in recent years, and rents remain unaffordably high. It’s not for a shortage of land: Manhattan’s population peaked at 2.3 million in 1910, 45% larger than it is today. Granted, much of that population lived in overcrowded, substandard housing that would not pass muster today, but a long walk through the borough’s many low-rise neighborhoods reveals that even Manhattan is still significantly underbuilt.

Meanwhile, the superblocks of public housing where the street grid and urban form suddenly end were a reminder of the enormous, $78 billion deferred maintenance liability that the New York City Housing Authority has accrued, effectively making it America’s largest slumlord. These buildings dominate whole sections of town: monotonous brick monoliths surrounded by green space that, fenced off, residents can only look at and never touch. Symbols of race and class segregation, they remain apart from the fabric of the city—places where urban life crumbles into dystopian isolation.

The packed subway trains were visual evidence that the city’s transit network is still woefully incomplete, leaving entire neighborhoods disconnected. Yet everywhere the roar of combustion engines drowned out the conversation of outdoor diners, the music of buskers, the cadence of life. It was striking, coming from Austin via Cape Cod, to be reminded how much American life revolves around cars—even in New York, the American city least dependent on them. 

Excelsior, indeed (Credit: Author)

Coincidentally, as I was getting ready to publish last week’s article from a cafe in Astor Place, I happened to notice a mural that showed a historic depiction of nearby Cooper Square, where the Bowery splits into Third and Fourth Avenues. The artist painted the Third Avenue Elevated, a train line that used to run aboveground from the tip of Manhattan to the middle of the Bronx. On the Fourth Avenue side, the artist painted a line of streetcar trolleys rolling down the middle of the road, flanked by horse-drawn carriages and elegantly dressed people strolling the sidewalks next to Cooper Union. 

The mural was a small memorial to a time when Manhattan was not overrun with automobiles. Aside from the noise, the evidence of auto-centricity was abundant.

It’s impossible not to notice all the cars parked along the curbs in the city’s three million “free” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) parking spaces—taking up 44% of non-sidewalk street space. On some of the world’s most expensive real estate, that’s nonproductive, non-revenue generating space that can’t be used for outdoor dining, for parklets, for dropoff and loading zones, for expanded sidewalks, for bike lanes, or anything else. Where the city has built bike lanes, we saw occasional evidence that drivers do not care: on an East Village side street, one whole lane of “protective” flex posts had been shorn at the base so that cars could drive over them without having to ding their bumpers. Meanwhile, in Hell’s Kitchen, several police cars were parked perpendicular to the curb and over the bike lane in an apparently irony- and gun-free zone with a sign exhorting drivers to “Share the Road.”

Can’t they at least pretend it’s a city?

The high cost of irony-free parking (Credit: Author)

The title of Pretend It’s a City, consummate New Yorker Fran Lebowitz’s Netflix special, comes from her exhortation to people standing in the middle of the sidewalk to $!@&ing move. The implication is that these tourist loiterers, these sidewalk dawdlers—they don’t appreciate that the city is more than something to gawk at: it’s a place where real people live, and, dammit, New Yorkers have places to get to. If you can’t actually appreciate that, would you at least act as if you do?

“How’m I doin’?” Mayor Ed Koch used to beseech New Yorkers from the subway and street corners. My anecdotic takeaway from nine days in New York is that, despite its major challenges, the city is doin’ fine. It’s going somewhere. But the meta-level challenge is that it could be doing better, if not doing great—if New Yorkers and their leaders acted as if they were living in America’s largest, most productive, most transit-enabled city and not, say, some parking lot or suburban subdivision. Like the mayor, I, too, beseech them:

Pretend it’s a city—and not a thruway for suburban drivers to consume at taxpayer expense. Implement congestion pricing to improve the experience of those who must drive while funding capital investments that will make it possible for more people to access transit. (And prosecute fare-evading freeriders, too.)

Pretend it’s a city—and rebuild the city for people, not cars and car storage, prioritizing parking spaces for more productive uses like outdoor dining or parklets, or multimodal mobility improvements.

Pretend it’s a city—and redevelop the massively underfunded, underdeveloped, car-centric superblocks of public housing, replacing subsidized units, building a lot more taxable market-rate apartments and mixed-use spaces, creating accessible green spaces, restoring the street grid, and reconnecting communities long segregated from the city by midcentury urban renewal.

Pretend it’s a city—and pass the mayor’s modest “City of Yes” zoning reforms to add “a little more housing in every neighborhood,” even if it means that four-story apartment buildings might be built near transit in Queens and Staten Island. Then do more.

Pretend it’s a city, if only, for a moment. If New Yorkers could imagine that New York is a metropolis of eight million people and America’s oldest and most expansive urban environment, if they could conceive of their streets for people not cars, if they could see it as a real place to live in and not some symbol to pass through—well, imagine what the city could become then.

Fran Lebowitz wanted people to get out of her way; I’m beseeching New Yorkers to get out of their own.

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In other news

The good folks at the Metropolitan Abundance Project published an article of mine on their blog. If you’re interested in what’s driving Austin’s rents and reform agenda, read more here.

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