On Gentrification and the West Village Girls

When big topics get flattened

Dina Litovsky’s photography killed it per usual.

There are several pieces of writing I return to every once in a while, partially because they’re by writers I love but also because they’re on topics I’m enthralled by. One of them is the Mark Singer’s 1993 profile of the magician and actor Ricky Jay, which is both a piece of narrative expertise they teach in journalism school and a portrait of a sort of commercialized mystic. Plus, some sick magic tricks which I am a sucker for. I also read Stuart Stevens 2003 story “Drug Test” in Outside Magazine, because it’s about coming to grips with age and also how insanely effective performance-enhancing drugs are.

Kelefa Sanneh’s 2016 piece “Is Gentrification Really a Problem?” is also on that list. The title is slightly provocative, but Kelefa is of such mild manner that the question is asked with no sense of irony or sarcasm. The answer, also, isn’t no but isn’t yes, which is why I return to this piece every time the topic comes back around.

Gentrification is a minefield, as everyone on the internet discovered with Brock Colyar’s NYMag cover story about the West Village girls. It is probably Brock’s best work to date, and their background as a party reporter is so valuable in disarming young people into spilling truths, no matter how embarrassing¹. But the story is really two stories. The first is about the homogeneity of an extremely expensive neighborhood, which is interesting only in that it seems to be mostly a social media-driven phenomenon. Everyone looking the same is, to me, something every generation has complained about. We have decades of advertising and counter-cultural documents and, like, photographs that point to that. There are even single artifacts — the Members Only jacket, skinny jeans — that have such heavy epochal associations that they become a sartorial shorthand. That’s why I’m like, ok all these 24 year old wealth white women are wearing straight jeans and white tees? This is not news.

But the metabolization of the trend is much more interesting to me. Almost immediately you had TikToks featuring people in the same generation of these West Village girls talking about gentrification in the West Village. I do not use italics unless I need to. Those two things together have morphed into a full-blown discourse that is going to drive me insane. Why are Gen Z TikTokkers concerned that the West Village, a neighborhood that hasn’t been bohemian for 50 years, is somehow just now losing its artistic integrity? The people making these videos are talking about moving to New York in 2014, as if that was some affordable paradise of expression and multiculturalism. One person who cannot be older than 20 commented that the “LES used to be so edgy and punk.” These are people who are nostalgic for a time that both didn’t exist and also predates them by multiple generations.

Ironically, I think some of this actually has to do with a real problem that Gen Z — and other people to be clear — are facing in that there is a desperate need to be a part of something and that the easiest access point for community is [drum roll] in the comment sections of social media posts. The ability to pile into an argument whether you know anything about it or not is sort of a fun internet pastime, but now we’re at the point where those collective, potentially dumb opinions aren’t limited to message boards and chat spaces but rather they reinforce the very same dumb opinions of the video they’re commenting on. I cannot overstate how much this video irritates me, and it’s not because someone was shitty and homophobic to him outside of a bar in the West Village. The comments are making me go cross eyed.

@evanmarasWhat has happened to NYC? #thecut #nyc #nyclife #nycapartment #transplant #thewestvillage @the cut

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Admittedly, this is an extremely online thing to think about but I wanted to bring it into the discussion of gentrification because it’s such a difficult to explore and discuss because the stakes are so high. Everyone needs to live somewhere. I find Kelefa’s analysis detached and sobering (both good things on a topic like this), but it was also frustrating to see the piece being gleefully quoted by the ghouls at the Manhattan Institute to support the idea of a ravenous urban development machine. I think that’s indicative of how this conversation goes, though. Nuance or ambiguity is not something anyone wants to hear about. If you say anything less than gentrification is a scourge that needs to be scrubbed from the earth, the assumption is that you must work at the behest of a real estate developer.

The TikTok reaction to Brock’s writing has reinforced that divide in its own way. One of the more interesting things about the app is that its allowed people to become overnight experts on a lot of topics and allowed both content and creators to use context collapse to their advantage. There is no way to know if the person you’re watching explain a complex topic is an actual expert or something who is just noticing a phenomenon and offering their perspective. It’s a useful veil that can embolden people to share their opinions as facts and everyone else can say, “Yes, so true bestie.” Gentrification is no different. The videos I see from young people discussing the topic are solely focused on the immediately available, the things happening in front of them. They are in a constant state of shock and discovery, a horrifying, permanent state of now. I wonder what it’s like to feel like everything is happening to you, even when it’s happened to everyone else too.

1. It’s so funny how deeply self-conscious people are about what they say ending up in print which I guess has to do with the decontextualization and memorialization of words you might not have wanted out there. But that’s for another time.