A New Normal

Journalist Daniel Brook writes in the SF Chronicle about the economic forces squeezing people out of many of the largest and most vibrant American cities:

In the past, the City by the Bay was always considered a writer's metropolis. A hundred years ago, it was Jack London territory. Mid-century brought Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Today, Amy Tan and Dave Eggers call the Bay Area home. These established celebrity authors can afford to live in San Francisco, but an undiscovered Kerouac or a budding Ginsberg never could. While San Francisco's dot-com boom may be over, the high cost of living reflects a "new normal." Post-bust rents remain 76 percent higher than the pre-boom rents. Teacher-headed households have now been priced out of 99.7 percent of the census tracts in the San Francisco metropolitan area. Writer-, musician-, and artist-headed households fare even worse. And housing costs are only half the story; high rents make everything else cost more, too....

Generations of flawed planning and transportation policy have extinguished vibrant urban life from all but a handful of American cities. And for writers, who merely need an affordable room of their own, the hyper-gentrification of places like New York and San Francisco is less disastrous than it is for musicians and artists who need exposure in high-profile cities to get noticed. In 2000, Downtown Rehearsal, a converted industrial building used by San Francisco musicians in lieu of the living rooms and garages they could no longer afford, was sold to a real estate developer, who promptly evicted the musicians to convert the building into a telecommunications complex....

I found a publisher for my own book, about the social, cultural, and political impact of the upward redistribution of wealth, almost as a fluke. I took a bus from Philadelphia, where I now live, to my native New York for lunch with a magazine editor who told me that, with my publication credits, I shouldn't have any trouble getting book agents to meet with me. The problem was I didn't know any agents. I chalked this up to not living in New York and figured I was missing the right parties -- where the hobnobbing literati congregate. Months later, after I'd found an agent and an editor, the editor told me: "Those parties don't happen anymore." As younger writers have moved out of New York (or more likely, never moved in) and editors have been squeezed by rising rents, New York's literary scene has been snuffed out. It survives in period pieces, like the recent film Capote, more than in real life. There are no cheap bars anymore, and any apartment big enough for entertaining is owned by a Wall Street banker. The same is true in San Francisco. Sky-high housing prices empty cities of all but "fauxhemians": a mix of trust-fund hipsters and those who fund their bohemian lifestyles through corporate jobs they can't stand....

What happens when the culture creators get geographically separated from the culture financiers and purveyors? Will more and more cities resemble Washington, D.C., a place where great art is displayed but never created, and Philadelphia, where it is created but rarely displayed? Will the artists and writers, who live in small creative centers like Eugene, Ore., ever be discovered? Will we even know what we're missing?

Where can one find professional opportunity and a reasonable cost of living? What's the price of proximity these days?

What about creative inspiration? Brook notes that in other cities where hypergentrification is particularly acute, such as Boston, public authorities have stepped in to essentially draw lines that delineate space reserved for artists. The alternative appears to be moving to Cleveland:

The Boston Redevelopment Authority, under Mayor Thomas Menino, is working with other city agencies to permanently dedicate space to artists through deed restrictions, and to carve out more live/work spaces for artists in industrial zones. A Minneapolis nonprofit real estate developer, Artspace, claims it gets 30 phone calls a week from cities around the country looking for creative ways to finance affordable housing for artists. As a generation of creative citizens heads for the Clevelands of the country, it is in the best interest of cities like San Francisco and New York to start catching on -- and in the best interests of all of us to realize what is at stake.