Parts 1-7: Disposable Neighborhoods and the Loss of Place
This is a 7-part series about how so much of this country has come to look and feel identical, and what that standardization means to our communities, our well-being, and our ability to generate a dynamic, living culture.
1. Thanks for the neighborhood
In 2005, I moved to a historically Polish neighborhood in north Brooklyn called Greenpoint, where I lived on the third floor of a pre-war walk-up with views of the Manhattan skyline across the East River. Having spent most of my life in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, I was instantly taken with the place. My landlord, a charming Polish émigré in his 60’s who lived with his family on the two floors below mine, was an elevator repairman nearing retirement. As I spoke no Polish and he spoke little English, our conversations typically involved hand gestures and sweeping affirmations about the weather.
I took great joy in lounging in a nearby park, making good use of a family-owned donut shop down the street, and taking long neighborhood walks listening to languages I couldn’t understand or even name. The only real downside for me was the neighborhood’s dependence on the G train, which didn’t travel directly into Manhattan and at the time ran infrequently, especially at night.
The massive upside, however, was that the rent was relatively affordable—or at least it was for me. One couldn’t say the same for the long-time Polish residents who were at that point actively fleeing the area on account of the rent spike triggered by the flood of outsiders.
In other words, the neighborhood served me very well, but the real question here is whether the opposite was true. Sure, my rent was undoubtedly a welcome addition to my landlord’s income. But what else did I bring to the table? And whatever upside that amounted to, did it counteract the rather stark, negative effects of gentrification?
For my part, I took the rather ironic stance of opposing gentrification in the abstract—heaping scorn on new buildings going up and fresh “outsiders” moving into “my” neighborhood—while being an active agent of gentrification in practice. And not just in Greenpoint. I repeatedly moved to “up and coming” neighborhoods throughout north Brooklyn to take advantage of lower rents in distressed areas. Unsurprisingly, this behavior of active gentrification paired with intellectual opposition to abstract gentrification was a common refrain amongst the gentrifiers at the time, who were hard at work remaking North Brooklyn in their own image.
In all honesty, though, I hate to use the term gentrification here—not because it’s inaccurate but simply because it’s weighted, and weighted terms carry with them intense emotional attachments, making them nearly impossible to truly discuss or understand.
Plus, what I’ve been thinking about does relate to gentrification, but is perhaps more concentrated, more contemporary, and in many ways points to an even more disturbing trend—that of the disposable neighborhood, and its corollaries: the obliteration of community, the loss of place, and the end of culture.
2. Where are you going?
If you’ve recently opened Airbnb you’ve probably seen the search bar at the top that says, “Where are you going?” And beneath that a button for “I’m flexible”—the message here being take me somewhere, anywhere, so long as it’s not here.
This feels like more than classic American restlessness or basic wanderlust. While seeing the rest of the country and beyond is a formidable American tradition, there is something going on now that feels more desperate, more like gasping for air, more (if you’ll kindly permit the hyperbole) akin to a starving animal sniffing out its next meal.
It’s surprisingly easy to forget, and worth our time to remember, the fact that we’re living through a crisis and that everything a short time ago was entirely different from how it is today. Once you consider the sweeping, pandemic-induced transformation of our daily lives that has recently occurred, it’s not hard to imagine why we might be searching for something, anything, to distract us.
An incomplete list of changes and challenges from just the last 19 months includes:
Shortages of necessary items like toilet paper combined with spiraling inflation and persistent labor shortages
Mass closures of small businesses, a crisis that is still unfolding: according to the Financial Times nearly 40% of small retailers reported they wouldn’t be able to pay rent in November
Daily isolation of remote work involving endless Zoom calls and Teams messages and the muddying of work/life hours, paired with working parents forced to somehow also watch and/or school their kids
Paranoia and intense fear of others: who might carry the virus, who might be unvaccinated, who might believe things I don’t
Algorithmically jiggered social networks that intentionally provoke intense emotional reactions and which have now largely replaced in-person communities
That’s a lot, and superseding it all, of course, is the very real fear of dying and the grief of those who’ve lost loved ones.
3. What strange convenience is this?
While the real economy—by which I mean the one that produces and transports the things that feed, clothe, and care for us—is at a breaking point, the stock valuations and profits of the largest corporations have continued to soar. For the wealthy, this means massive valuation increases to both their stock and real estate assets. For most people, it means only that home ownership has become an impossibility, even as rents continue to climb.
In addition, as the categorically non-essential laptop workers have been unchained from their offices and freed to work from anywhere, neighborhood streaming services like Airbnb are now front and center, offering the convenience of instant residence in cities, towns, and villages around the world.
But should neighborhoods be convenient places to use?
If I show up unannounced in a neighborhood one day and abruptly leave three weeks later never to return, use is certainly the right word.
For this to be a workable reality, it must assume among other things that the neighborhood already exists intact without me—that it is full of people doing the hard work of making it an interesting place to live. In other words, interesting neighborhoods don’t make themselves—they are made by the people who live there, and this drive to improve it necessarily stems from a sense of ownership and connection to a place.
As an outsider momentarily stepping foot in that same place, I am largely a taker. My expectation is that the neighborhood will instantly bend to my needs. It must have the type of coffee shop I like, the restaurants I prefer, the indefinable charm I demand. And if it doesn’t, or if I simply get bored, I’ll leave.
Granted, my dollars may provide some temporary support to locally owned businesses, and if my Airbnb is locally owned, perhaps a local resident as well. Whatever the underlying issues of the area, however, I’m ignorant to them and may even be contributing to them.
My exchange with the place, then, is strictly a financial one.
I bring none of the intangible but nevertheless essential qualities to the table that long-term residents do, who must by necessity care for the quality of the air, the schools, the parks, the bus service, and so on.
This is not to say that all travel is bad, or that no neighborhood should ever welcome travelers. Nor am I saying that these apps shouldn’t exist or should never be used. There is certainly a way to regulate them so that they support rather than detract or transform a neighborhood—though for their part these companies have fought and largely avoided these regulations for years.
A thriving neighborhood can potentially absorb a fair number of itinerant travelers and remain relatively intact. But there is a tipping point after which the neighborhood begins to hollow itself out, becoming not a place that supports the lives of the people living there, but a holograph meant to project that reality.
The more homes and rentals fully devoted to travelers and itinerant laptop workers, the fewer living spaces available to locals, displacing long-time residents with transient ones. The neighborhood risks becoming a dead space, artificially propped up with faux-authentic bars, restaurants, and coffee shops—all of which often leverage the reputation that same neighborhood acquired in its previous iteration, when it was a place people lived in and could rely on to provide them with the necessities of daily life.
Perhaps this isn’t altogether different from classic gentrification of the kind we’ve seen over the last forty years, but it feels different, at least to me: far stranger and more intensely concentrated, as we’ve now begun to consume neighborhoods and cities in the same manner we consume clothing, electronics, cheeseburgers, and content.
4. So long to the creative
I can remember a conversation I had back in 2008 with a musician friend from LA who was visiting me in Brooklyn. We met up for coffee in a neighborhood that many believed to be the cultural epicenter of the city, if not the country, home to the artists and musicians and thinkers said to be making the next big thing. I felt the place was completely unique, that there couldn’t be anywhere else like it in the world.
Something my friend said over coffee, however, stunned me—I felt flustered and confused, even angry and defensive. He said the neighborhood was exactly like the neighborhood he lived in back in LA. Same style of dress, same music piped into the same kinds of coffee shops and restaurants. What’s more, he said that this exact neighborhood exists in every city he visits.
How could that be? I thought this was the place—that it was uniquely creative, one-of-its-kind, impossible to replicate. But no, he was right.
The neighborhood may have been interesting, it may have still housed a small population of artists and musicians, it may have supported independent coffee shops and restaurants, but it was far from unique. It was a classic example of what’s now known as a hipster neighborhood, a designation so rote that you can probably picture what it looks like without stepping foot in its coffee shops, art galleries, or boutiques, and so common that nearly every city has one—the same one.
To me, this points us toward the end of place in America, where even the most earnestly creative and self-consciously independent neighborhoods are marked by mass cultural standardization—a force that deadens by bulldozing outliers and idiosyncrasies, and reduces complexity by discouraging innovation and rewarding sameness. Obviously, this is a very bad thing, a perfect example of the “unknown unknowns,” as there’s simply no way to know what we’re missing out on if it never comes into existence.
According to Jane Jacobs, brilliant author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities and Dark Age Ahead, “a living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change.” In other words, for a culture to stay living and vibrant and useful to the people who live within it, it must undergo continual changes that more closely bring the culture in line with the present, ever-changing reality, but these changes must build on what’s come before, not erase them.
The last time I remember this type of cultural revolution happening, to use an example from music (but we shouldn’t limit ourselves to thinking only about music), was when grunge displaced hair metal in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s. Far from being just a change in fashion, though it was that as well, grunge was a change in worldview. It was angry, dark, troubled, and introspective—in stark contrast to the high-flying, nonstop-party theatrics of hair metal bands.
Fundamentally, however, it was still “rock” music, featuring guitars, drums, and a singer. Even more fundamentally than that, it was still music that relied on the classic scales and chords that have been in use since…basically forever. And, of course, its commodification by big players in the corporate music scene would quickly destroy its relevance, undermining its authentic core by introducing hordes of musical imitators looking to cash in on the scene.
But what I’m most interested in here is simply that grunge was a cultural movement that began in a city, Seattle, that was at the time unlike any other place. Rather, it was a place, one capable of generating and incubating a regional culture so unique and powerful it exploded onto the national stage, transforming the very notion of what popular music could be. But I’m not saying here that grunge was so incredible, or that Seattle was so remarkable—what I’m most interested in here is simply that American cities at the time were all different, at least within the greater context of American culture itself.
If one were to travel back in time 30 years, the cultural differences between cities would be impossible to ignore. Based on the style of dress alone you’d know immediately whether you were in Seattle, say, versus New York, Austin, Chicago, or San Francisco. And when you turned on the local radio, you’d hear locally based DJs presiding over a playlist they created themselves, with a particular emphasis on local musicians. When you read the local newspaper, you’d be reading a newspaper with local ownership, staffed by a well-paid army of locally based journalists covering local affairs.
5. Consumers consume
For decades now the American people have defined themselves, or been defined as, consumers. As consumers, we consume. It makes no difference whether it’s clothing, automobiles, fast food chains, media, content, or anything else—what we consume defines who we are and what we believe, with our preferred brands upholding our values and expressing our unique personality.
Or so we’re told.
We’re also told this ability to reflect our values in what we buy and consume gives us power; that when we buy things we like, more of those things will appear in the world; that when we avoid or even boycott other things, those things will lessen or vanish from the world.
We’ve all heard of “voting with your wallet.” And while there is a kernel of truth to market feedback, the power it’s said to wield for the average consumer is wildly overstated, dwarfed as it is by just about everything else, but especially availability, price, and proximity.
People may prefer to buy American made clothing, to use just one example, but if Walmart, Target, GAP, H&M, etc, don’t carry even a single American-made garment, the added challenge and cost inherent in adhering to that preference make it all but inevitable we’ll simply take what’s affordable, nearby, and available.
The idea, then, that the consumer writ large can dictate terms to multi-national conglomerates and serve as a check on their power—a sort of tyranny of the consumer, if you’ll allow me that license here—is a libertarian/neoliberal fantasy of the worst kind, as it directly feeds into the propaganda for deregulation. The underlying belief being that there’s no need for government to restrain power in private markets if the consumer can do it more efficiently.
Unfortunately, as should be obvious, the consumer lacks the time or energy to thoroughly investigate corporate behavior, and anyway has very little leverage over market dynamics. In addition, many conglomerates intentionally obscure ownership and business practices using subsidiaries, creating a facade of competitive markets and consumer choice where none exists.
But there is a more disturbing wrinkle to this as well—the fact that we self-identify as a consumer first and foremost, as opposed to citizen, maker, laborer, small business owner, or community member, all roles that demand active participation. Instead, as mere consumers, we exist as passive recipients in a system that will sort itself out just fine, somehow, provided we buy the right brands of laundry detergent and breakfast cereals and sodas, the ones made by the conglomerates that pay lip service to the abstractions we hold dearest to our hearts.
This perhaps partly explains why we see no contradiction inherent in the idea of transiently residing in a location whose granular history we’re ignorant of and incurious about, with the expectation that it be ready to cater to our whims. The support we’re used to providing, perhaps the only support we’re now even capable of providing, is that of the consumer. Within this framework, the neighborhoods and businesses and culture all appear from thin air as though by some mysterious force—our job as a consumer is simply to put our hard-earned dollars in the machine, indicating which of the things we prefer.
Far from merely a cultural shortcoming, it stems from forty years of official economic policy centered narrowly around “price,” “efficiency”, and “consumer welfare” above all else. The creation of jobs is closely watched as well, though it seems to matter very little what the created jobs require one to do or whether the work pays enough to provide a dignified life.
Whatever the intentions of policymakers were in creating this system, the upshot was the mass takeover of our economy by ungovernably large, globe-spanning corporate behemoths that act as sprawling, bureaucratic private governments whose actions touch every corner of our lives and which we now rely on to provide us with every requirement of daily life—our food, water, clothes, transportation, and medicine.
The overriding goal of these corporate titans, however, is not to provide us with these things, but rather to deliver returns to shareholders. And that means juicy profit margins and high stock prices, above all else.
While that might sometimes overlap with our goal of acquiring the food and medicine necessary to sustain life, it’s not their top priority, which they can accomplish through means far simpler and more predictable than making us the stuff we need: through stock buybacks to prop up their market valuation, for example; or by saturating a city with retail outlets, pricing items below cost to drive out independently owned competitors, then recouping their losses by rising prices above where the independents had initially set them; or by purchasing the patents of an emerging medication that could potentially provide competition to the one they make, ensuring it never comes to market.
6. Liberty from all masters
The forcible displacement of independents by corporate titans has been an ongoing tragedy in this country since the 1970’s, when both Republican and Democratic administrations stopped using anti-monopoly laws to enforce economic and political equality. The resulting explosion of mergers and chain store expansions has resulted in intense market concentration, with ramifications that go far beyond the simple replacement of one interchangeable business with another.
As independent businesses are typically run by individuals who live in the communities they serve, they prove far more responsive and accountable to those communities’ needs. In addition to providing more economic benefit to the community compared to chains, they also pay higher wages and provide more benefits to their workers. (For a jaw-dropping, data-driven breakdown of this issue, please read Big Box Swindle, by Stacy Mitchell.)
But the benefits go far beyond just economic gains, touching on everything from our ability to lead an independent, self-directed life, to the very health of our democracy. For an example of this, we need only look at how the enforcement of fair trade legislation in the 1960’s allowed minority-owned businesses to flourish, which in turn allowed these business owners to take an active role in the civil rights movement. On account of their financial independence, they had no fear of retaliation from a white employer, and were able to fund activists and provide storefronts for use in organizing. In fact, civil rights leaders of that era—including Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and Thurgood Marshall—explicitly made a direct connection between antitrust laws and civil rights.
To put it simply, starting a small business was once a way to be uniquely beneficial to one’s neighborhood and local economic ecosystem, while also providing a reliable middle-class income and autonomy. The current predatory business environment, structured into existence by federal law and trade policy, has ended that. It has also destroyed the indefinable but essential role the individuals behind these local businesses once held as anchors in their neighborhoods and cities.
Today, any still-surviving local grocery stores and retailers, once key to market access for local farmers and other makers, must now compete with the unrestrained expansion of deep-pocketed corporations like Walmart, Target, Albertsons, and Dollar General. Our local bookstores, if they made it through the war of attrition with the bookstore chains, must now contend with immense pressure from the Prime juggernaut. Our medicines, our clothing, our electronics, nearly all of it now shipped in from overseas, drop into our hands from impersonal delivery staff or undermanned chain stores. Even our radio DJs, once key culture-builders in cities around the country, no longer get to choose which songs they broadcast over publicly owned airwaves. Instead, we’re left with whatever’s handed down from a shockingly small number of corporate offices.
This top-down standardization on such a huge scale represents the loss of local control, and with it the loss of local opportunities, the loss of complexity and nuance, and the loss of sensitivity to subtle but critical signals buried in the noise—all abilities that keep a lively culture active and growing, and able to respond with rapid correction to negative feedback, thereby preventing stagnation, internal rot, and wholesale collapse.
Ultimately, what this standardization points to is the end of our autonomy as we know it—meaning the end of our ability to determine the direction of our communities, our culture, and even our lives. This, more than anything, is the capstone of forty years of ‘consumer-first’ law and an obsessive focus on efficiency above all else.
7. Meet me at the corner of Arby’s and Chipotle
“Standardization is the parent of stagnation.” - Jane Jacobs, from Dark Age Ahead
What pride or sense of ownership can one really feel, honestly, for the cinderblock buildings and nauseating parking lots that house the nation’s fast food restaurants, big box retailers, and gas stations, and which now blight every road in this country? And how can we feel any distinction between the templated tract homes or sprawling apartment complexes dropped in a monolithic mass from spreadsheet to field by corporate developers?
How can we feel attached to a place when everywhere we go looks and feels basically the same?
According to the researchers behind a study mapping the proliferation of chain stores, “theories of place attachment assert that we form special memories and self-actualize more in places with a unique identity, and that the opposite concept of ‘placelessness’ can be linked to feelings of dullness, loss and sadness.”
The implications of this are both profound and predictable. Not only have we lost the small business owners who used to anchor our neighborhood pharmacies, grocery stores, pizza places, bowling alleys, theaters, radio stations, and restaurants, but we’ve lost ourselves as well—because the unfortunate flip side to standardized homes, stores, and products is, of course, standardized people.
Perhaps this is the reason why we now latch onto identity with such stubborn, tribalistic firmness. Because what’s left and who would we be without our fine-grained political affiliations, our maddeningly specific dietary preferences, our social media churn that provides a daily bouquet of outrage by folding every bit of news and content into a singular, exhausting narrative?
Whether we’re stuck at a desk, or behind the counter, or on a jobsite, we can always turn to our phone—both the source and outlet for our now-cosmic levels of dyspepsia, and which provides an effective hologram of personal significance within an online clique that reinforces our better than belief systems.
Like it or not, we now depend on this exact mechanism to generate meaning and purpose for our days, not because it’s up to that task, but because we have little else to go on.
Our frantic need to identify as—or more importantly identify against—has us trapped in a fortress mentality, a fundamentally conservative “with-us-or-against-us” framework that now engulfs all sides, with each camp believing their views are unquestionably the correct ones, and that they, therefore, have a mandate to impose those beliefs on others.
Cooperation, constructive dialogue, common purpose, and the ability to learn from, or even identify, mistakes—all gone, or nearly so. Independent thinkers and even sympathetic dissenters are expelled from the tribe rather than engaged, thus pushing the tribes ever further from reality.
Because the more we point to the ‘other’ as the cause of our problems, the more isolated we become, the angrier and more rage-filled, the less we’re able to look inward and question our own beliefs or see anything or anyone with an open, curious mind. Instead, whatever and whomever gets marked as bad becomes merely an object without value, something irredeemable, fit only for destruction and scorn.
This is the end of our vibrant, progressive, and innovative culture, displaced as it has been by a deteriorating, increasingly desperate anti-culture marked by myopia, hysteria, and hate. For shame. As a people, we once resisted standardization, uniformity, censorship, and top-down control—now what?