Any time of day is a good time to go running (or walking) through Fort Tryon Park, but lately I’ve been going in the mornings, when the park is relatively empty and you can best appreciate the rooftop views of the Bronx, just across the East River.
The Bronx — like its close cousin, Washington Heights — is changing these days. Money for new development is pouring in, property values are on the rise, and residents are either embracing or resisting this change, depending on many factors, with property ownership — i.e., do you own or do you rent? — often (but not always) being the most important.
While people may have opposing views on gentrification, these skirmishes are largely irrelevant in the bigger battle playing out, which can loosely be defined as the city versus the non-city.
The city has already won the battle, which is perhaps surprising given that many observers predicted that events such as 9/11 would derail the urban resurgence. I remember skimming through an op-ed to this effect in the Wall Street Journal not long after 9/11 in which the writer predicted a new exodus from cities around the country and a corresponding boom in suburban development, similar to what happened in the wake of WWII, when soldiers came home from overseas and were enticed to move into the suburbs by misguided government programs emphasizing single-family home ownership and highway development.
Implicit in this dream of renewed suburban growth is nostalgia for a more conventional or “traditional” past, when the United States — and especially the suburbs — were whiter, straighter, and more religious in the organized sense of the word. The suburbs fostered “community” among people who looked and acted — at least on the surface — the same. The cities, home to deviants and outcasts, fostered loneliness, anonymity, and random crime. Except it hasn’t turned out that way. The suburbs — as a big percentage of those of us who grew up there know firsthand — are an expensive wasteland. You have to drive everywhere and taxes are brutal, because there aren’t enough businesses to support a sufficient tax base to provide basic services. Houses fall apart and are expensive to maintain in comparison to apartment buildings. It seems like every other podcast I listen to these days has a story on drug addiction in the suburbs. Recently I heard a report on Trump supporters in Suffolk County (on suburban Long Island) and the guy was like “Can you believe we have more heroin addicts here than in the Bronx?” I could totally believe it. Meanwhile, an 85 y.o. woman was in tears as she described using her Social Security check to pay the property taxes on her small house where she had lived for forty years. It was heartbreaking.
What’s unfortunate is that cities do not yet have the political clout to transform national politics; both candidates argue as if the suburban dream can be brought back from the dead (one candidate is obviously much worse than the other, even though he grew up in NYC), when such a dream is unsustainable on so many levels. What they should be talking about is how to make our cities — the key to a sustainable future — more egalitarian; unconstrained, cities — like the capitalist system from which they arise — tend to aggregate too much money in the hands of too few, which leads to political instability at every level. (The solution to this problem is not complicated, but the political will power is not yet there.)
As I ran through Fort Tryon Park, the election felt very far away.
It didn’t feel unimportant, but it also didn’t seem as critical as so much of the media would have us think. “I was going to vote for Trump until I learned what he said about ‘grabbing pussy.’ ” — nobody except the insane Republican politicians who have yet to acknowledge how their policies for the last fifty years (against women, gays, ethnic minorities, the environment, cities, and so much more) created DT.
The flowers leaned toward the rising sun.
The horizon began to glow through the mists.
The path was clear; the only question was when we would take it.
