culture, and economics interact in ways
that resist statistical analysis.
It would be wrong to use this research to
airbrush out all the injustices and calami-
ties that the poor have to deal with, such as
landlords making their tenants’ lives so mis-
erable that they are forced to decamp. For
nycha residents, the right to stay put comes
with the need to put up with mold, lead
paint, and extreme temperatures. Far from
waving an intellectual wand over neighbor-
hood change and declaring it all fine, the
studies point out that low-income urbanites
suffer chronic instability, whether their
neighborhoods are metamorphosing
around them or remain locked in poverty.
At any given time, some would prefer to
stay but find they have to move; others want
to move and can’t. Pressure cuts both ways.
Even with all those qualifiers, though, the
studies make it clear that the simple narra-
tives of the evils of gentrification don’t hold
up. A neighborhood is not a filled and stop-
pered bathtub, where for every drop that
flows in, another must slosh out. It’s more
like a wet sponge, with residents draining
away and evaporating all the time, newcom-
ers passing through or settling in, finding
whatever crannies seem hospitable at any
given moment. The Philadelphia Fed paper
concludes explicitly that changes in a neigh-
borhood’s demographics are driven far more
by who moves in than who moves out.
Shifting the emphasis away from dis-
placement matters because it suggests that
efforts to protect a neighborhood’s charac-
ter are largely beside the point. Those who
live there will move or stay, get used to the
newcomers or not. They are not being
evicted en masse, and they cannot be shel-
tered as a group. More people leave New
York for the suburbs or other states than
arrive from other places around the
country—and that’s almost always been the
case. Today, the city’s population is grow-
ing (slowly) partly because of the inf lux of
recent college grads, but mostly because of
births and arrivals from abroad. If you feel
that the city is crowded enough, thank you
very much, and can’t absorb another new
New Yorker, then your problem is with
immigrants and babies born within the
five boroughs, not with an avalanche of
tech bros.
The flow of population in and out gives
New York much of its strength and some of
its problems; sometimes the two are indis-
tinguishable. A dysfunctional school system
pushes many families to the suburbs; if it
got stellar overnight, the city would become
unmanageably clogged just as quickly. The
odds of being murdered by a stranger on the
street remain vanishingly low; if they
soared, rents would suddenly become more
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