borhood level: safer streets, fresher food,
more welcoming public spaces, better tran-
sit, and greener parks improve the lives of
old residents and attract new ones.
This complicated, unpredictable
dynamic often gets boiled down to serve an
agenda. Different prongs of the anti-
gentrification movement offer mutually
exclusive solutions. One extreme urges the
construction of affordable housing: Build it
dense, soon, and everywhere. Any objection
is inhumane. To fuss over open space, his-
torical fabric, or the need for sun on parks is
to care about the wrong things and the
wrong people. The counter-faction sees
new construction as the cause of displace-
ment rather than the cure. Affordability is
just a word to sugarcoat developer boon-
doggles. The first group would like to see
New York grow ever-more towers; the sec-
ond wants all the building to stop and for
affluent newcomers to just go away.
In practice, most policies that combat
gentrification protect the status quo. They
encourage people to stay where they are and
they slow the rate of demographic change.
We have a constellation of good and worthy
programs that protect vulnerable residents
from being bullied or buffeted and allow
them to stay in their homes if that’s what
they want. The state’s newly reinforced rent
regulations will be a boon to many (thoughall the unintended consequences have yet to
make themselves fully known). Broadening
the base of jobs, shoring up a beleaguered
transit system, caring for parks and public
space, shedding car traffic on city streets—
these efforts can all mitigate against the
economy’s persistent inequities.
But policies specifically aimed at keeping
communities intact can be counterproduc-
tive. In many subsidized new buildings, for
example, the city sets aside half of all afford-
able apartments for applicants who already
live in the neighborhood. That’s a troubling
practice because trying to keep communities
intact through quotas often winds up per-
petuating segregation. A report by a Queens
College sociologist, Andrew Beveridge,
which the city hoped to suppress and a judge
recently made public, found that, thanks to
such set-asides, affordable-housing lotteries
in predominantly white neighborhoods
exclude African-Americans; lotteries in
majority-black neighborhoods reinforce the
area’s racial makeup, with the result that
racial borders remain artificially frozen.
Let’s say you and your spouse have two
kids, two full-time jobs, two hourlong com-
mutes, a household income of $64,000
(equal to 60 percent of New York’s area
median income, or AMI), and a too-small
apartment in Mott Haven. You keep tabs on
affordable-housing lotteries around the cityand, knowing how ridiculously small your
chances of winning any one are, enter half
a dozen at once. Neighborhood set-asides
boost the odds that you’ll score an apart-
ment in a new affordable-housing develop-
ment nearby, which means keeping your
children in a failing school and letting your
life leach away on the long subway ride to
work. But those same set-asides also sub-
stantially decrease your chances of getting
out and moving to, say, the affordable apart-
ments in a deluxe waterfront tower in Long
Island City or Hudson Yards. It’s a policy
that exhorts you to know your place.
Government should be making it easier,
not harder, for people to change addresses
if and when they want to. As newcomers
roll in, with or without college educations,
nobody has the right to tell them they
shouldn’t or can’t. In the short term, gentri-
fication makes neighborhoods more, not
less, economically diverse and more racially
integrated. The problem is that over time,
those advantages dissipate, though not uni-
formly, and temporarily mixed neighbor-
hoods become homogeneous again, and
each new population in turn defends the
turf it colonized. Diversity, not preservation,
should be the goal. Instead of expending
vast amounts of energy trying to shield frag-
ile communities from change, we should
make sure they reap its benefits. ■PROMOTIONS. EVENTS.
FOOD.SHOPPING.
ENTERTAINMENT. ART.EVENTSLIVE VICTORIOUSLY
As the offi cial vodka of the US Open for over a decade,
GREY GOOSE has been encouraging spectators to
Live Victoriously by celebrating both big and small
momentsaslifelongmemoriesatoneoftheworld’smost
exciting tournaments. This year GREY GOOSE® vodka is
excited to launch its fi rst-ever US Open bottle, designed in
partnership with the USTA, available for purchase in New
York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, South Carolina
and Washington D.C. The 1L bottle captures the infectious
energy of the US Open, featuring a playful design of tennis
balls bouncing on a racquet.
The recipe to create the GREY GOOSE Honey Deuce—
the offi cial cocktail of the US Open — is included with
purchase of the bottle so tennis enthusiasts can easily
recreate the signature drink at home. Comprised of
GREY GOOSE vodka, fresh lemonade, raspberry
liqueur, and topped with tennis-inspired honeydew
melon balls, the refreshing cocktail showcases the
versatility of the super-premium vodka, which
enhances any cocktail.
GreyGoose.com