“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when they are created by everybody.” -Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian journalist and activist known for her influence on urban studies and planning, often considered the city a place where everyone should be able to, as a community, grow and flourish. She fought head to head with Robert Moses, who is responsible for a great deal of the roadwork and infrastructure advances that took place in the five boroughs during the early to mid-20th century. He is also responsible for the mass removal of immigrants and low-income New York residents, which is considerably less praise worthy. Jacobs retaliated against his efforts to try and “renew” urban neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, a tiny woman with thick-rimmed glasses of Pennsylvanian descent, was and will forever be, a badass.
Jane Jacobs’s efforts to keep alive the cultural diversity and the neighborhood feeling of the city is often taken for granted. New York’s villages are often praised and admired for their long-standing tenement building that are reminiscent of a long history of mass immigration. But it’s often unknown why they still stand despite the ever-heightening and ever-growing skyline of midtown Manhattan. The answer lies somewhere between zoning codes and historical landmarking, both of which fall under the greater heading: Urban Studies, Planning and Development.
This past semester I took, without any sense of what I was getting into, Urban Studies 101. It was a course thrown at me by my college to fill some sort of prerequisite. I didn’t pay much mind to it. I was in the city for school and so I imagined it was one Hunter College was trying to assimilate me to a metropolitan lifestyle. Flash forward three months and I can often be found pacing outside on my work break ranting on the phone about income inequality and its effects on public housing. I can also be found giving my parents a long-winded lecture on the importance of public parks. Needless to say, (at least, to my parents and close friends) this class has changed me.
I’ve never once considered myself to be part of a community. It was always me, myself and the government's rules. I am aware of “the issues” and I’ve studied enough politics in my years of education to understand the issues of income inequality, the big banks, who-gets-taxed-for-what-and-why, etc. But I don’ think I’ve ever been able to put them into real world context or see the consequences of government actions on those around me.
Certainly, I’ve heard my mother yelling about taxes and her “lame-ass paycheck,” my father complaining about Wall Street and weak regulations, and my boyfriend ranting about the right to work law. But I’ve never been able to see the effects of these things. I’ve grown up stable, contently liberal and passively involved in politics. I kept myself informed but I also kept quiet, because who am I in this sea of people, all with their own individual problems, to object to my situation?
It was not until I entered my Urban Studies class that I felt somehow part of a grid, as if everyone and everything, every Halal bodega and every French-speaking tourist, were interconnected, and part of a global city. The importance of every business I walked by and every dollar that got taken out of my paycheck suddenly seemed heightened as I learned about what effect my own existence had on my neighborhood.
My Urban Studies teacher played on my political heartstrings as she talked about loss of jobs, loss of parks, loss of funding. These were places I never considered to be in the loss. Even the neighborhood I lived in suddenly showed more and more signs of imperfections and unthoughtful “improvements.” I had actually once noted as signs of structural improvement, but could now see as gentrification. It was a removal of the middle-class to make way for high-rent apartments and wealthy prospects.
The people who once cherished their little village, who built a sense of community from swarms of disenfranchised immigrants and artists alike, were being pushed out to make room for who, me? I literally cried (read: sitting beneath a blanket, drinking tea and sobbing onto my keyboard) having read a statement published by my local community board that public housing was being rapidly bought-out and renovated. People's old, dilapidated structures were being renovated into a mirage of “new beginnings.”
There was old brown stone replaced with panels of reflective glass. And yet, the study showed that close to half a million people in my neighborhood alone were waitlisted for public housing. Many of these people are close to homelessness. Rent is rising, accessibility is becoming more and more narrowed, and what was once a close-knit community of people from all walks of life, a safe haven of sorts, has become a Disney World for the upper-class. And while on the surface, from an outsider’s perspective, it looks as though the neighborhood is improving, from the inside, the neighborhood is falling apart.
This isn’t just happening to my neighborhood, or even my city either, but instead to many neighborhoods across the country, and across the world, that are further disenfranchising the disenfranchised, and making room for the top percentage of excessively wealthy. This is something I was aware of. I heard Bernie Sanders preach on the problems in our country with income inequality countless times. And yet, to have the mechanics of neighborhoods, its people and its businesses broken down for me, was painfully eye-opening.
It made the election results all the more real, especially considering how unconcerned the Republican party can be with its country’s lower-class and how heavily concerned they are with building a capitalistic country. That fact alone left me ranting on the phone during my work-break, sipping coffee and pacing up and down St. Mark’s place, ineloquently screaming, “They don’t even care, like, at all! Like, I’ve jogged through those housing projects I’ve seen that infrastructure and the fact that they have the money to build that big, shiny town-home plaza downtown, and not enough money to put proper windows in the subsidized housing. That’s-that’s--- well that’s nuts!”
On the last day of class, my Urban Studies teacher handed us a packet on how to take what we’ve learned in her class and present it to our community representatives. Had she given me that packet in the second week of school, I may have demurred from an immediate embrace of the idea of going into a Community Board meeting and stating my grievances with the number of recycling bins in my neighborhood or the lack of new trees planted in the area. But on that last day of class, feeling, admittedly, more emotional than I may have previously anticipated, I felt not only obligated, but honored to be granted such an opportunity to speak out loud.
Suddenly I was hit with this sense of universal community, like I had a purpose planted in me by the Ms. Frizzled-hair, bell-bottom wearing woman standing in front of me. She had introduced me to not only an unfamiliar concept, but a concept that was new and exciting. It made me look forward to reading and learning. I want to be like Jane Jacobs and stand up the Robert Moses’ of the world. I want to make the city what so many before me have made it for me: a community.
