A lot of us New Yorkers have bought apartments or bought lofts or are struggling to do it because at least that gives you some respite from the inexorable tightening of the screw every year - rent. But that puts you on this treadmill where you are constantly thinking, "Should I sell this place and move somewhere cheaper?" Artists have migrated across the East River and eastward in Brooklyn - as have non-artist populations, apparently going back to the Lenape Indians. There's been a migration to New Jersey, to Philadelphia, and farther afield.
Sharon ZukinThe existing American laws we use in a pinch just do not adequately protect artists or any other group of rental tenants. For example, artist certification. You can always get around that. Every society that does not want to really protect tenants' rights tries historic preservation. But that says nothing about the right of people to stay in their homes. It says that the building cannot be demolished. But it does not say who is allowed to live in the building.
Sharon ZukinI think people like difference. When you walk out the door in New York City, in a mixed-use neighborhood like the Village, you see exciting things! "Oh, this store is closing, that store is opening." And especially if it's not a chain store, then it is interesting because it is unique in some way. The small-scale familiar is also very comforting. Especially in the twenty-first century, when the world is rapidly changing and there are many risky situations, I think we need to build on and protect the comfort that we have in our neighborhoods in a way that does not exclude others.
Sharon ZukinEvery New Yorker spends a certain amount of nervous energy thinking, "How can I afford to stay here? What do I have to sell in order to stay here, where I have an economic life and where I like my life?" At least back to the beginning of the twentieth century, New Yorkers have always complained that it's hard to find a decent apartment at a rent you can afford.
Sharon ZukinI think the entrepreneurial activities that make art visible and attractive are what lure people into the amusement park that SoHo has become or that Bushwick or Williamsburg has become. It's not that outsiders come to an area because they hear artists are living there. A lot of people came who were not that interested in living with artists, but they were interested in living like artists and socializing the way that they thought artists socialized.
Sharon ZukinArtists have been used over and over again since the early 1980s as the legitimizers of a neighborhood in New York. And entrepreneurial artists, meaning people who themselves start out as painters, musicians, dancers, and who open a café, a bar, a restaurant, or even a co-op art gallery - they unintentionally develop the kinds of attractions that bring the middle class with some kind of cultural ambition.
Sharon ZukinI think that there is a middle-class desire, and maybe an almost universal desire, among many human beings to live in clean neighborhoods, among people like themselves, around people with whom they feel comfortable. That can be exclusive, it could be exclusionary. It could be racist, classist, genocidal, and so on. Most people like comfort. Now what provides a sense of comfort varies. I do think that people who like living in cities like small-scale human interaction and they like the social dimensions of aesthetic diversity that Jane Jacobs wrote about.
Sharon Zukin