No matter how many rich people call New York their home, we don't really have enough capital here to build and maintain the infrastructure that a population needs to live. We don't have the federal money, and for-profit investors are just not interested in anything other than making the biggest profit they can.

I 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.

One of the crucial underpinnings of New York as a culture capital is that there are multiple markets. There is not just one art gallery district, there are several art gallery districts. I feel that there should be art galleries and art studios in every neighborhood without exception. They should be integrated into the social and physical fabric of the streets. If we want a lively city, we can't just have high towers and dense constructions, we have to have living organisms of streets and neighborhoods. And the arts are a crucial part of that.

I 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.

Artists 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.

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.

The 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.