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Suburbanization of New York
In 1982, Mayor Koch proclaimed his desire to scrub Manhattan of its huddled masses saying: “We’re not catering to the poor anymore... there are four other boroughs they can live in. They don’t have to live in Manhattan.” What you’re seeing today are the results of that strategy. Mom and Pop corner stores are replaced with chain stores, gourmet shops, expensive bars, restaurants, and boutiques. Gradually over the course of the last quarter century, developers of retail malls have built “an economic base that, as in the suburbs, that excludes gritty industries, supports blandness, and promotes automobile dependence and retail homogeneity.”
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Is New York City becoming a massive, overpriced suburbia—a sanitized urban Disneyland for tourists and the wealthy elite? The Suburbanization of New York is a confrontational collection of essays by scholars, writers and activists who ask whether the gentrification that has overtaken the city is a blight or a blessing.
