99% Invisible - 204- The SoHo Effect

Episode Date: March 16, 2016

In San Francisco, the area South of Market Street is called SoMa. The part of town North of the Panhandle is known as NoPa. Around the intersection of North Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville, real estate brokers are pitching properties as part … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In San Francisco, the area south of Market Street is called Soma. The part of town north of the Panhandle is known as Nopa. Just north of our office is a part of town that Oakland is trying to brand as Kono, short for Koreatown Northgate. But no one actually calls it that. I live in a part of town at the intersection of North Oakland, Berkeley, and Emoryville. A neighborhood real estate brokers are calling No-B. That's producer Avery Trollflam.

The home No-B thing makes me feel pretty icky. These abbreviated neighborhood names are such clichés. Like, there's that episode of South Park where part of town gets rebranded as South of downtown South Park, or Sodo Sopa. There's a certain quality to vibe and energy that is Sodo Sopa, from the independent merchants and unique cafes to the rustic charm

of a mixed-income crowd. In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, two characters by an apartment in Doe, Satripla. of a rustic charm of a mixed-income crowd. Soho, try back on Noleita. Oh, right. Doe is a tree plough. No, I'm from New York. I know this neighborhood. Doe is a tree plough turns out to be short for Downwind of the sewage treatment plant. There are brokers who will be naming parts of Harlem as so-ha parts of little Italy, as Noleita,

marketing the Bronx, as so-bro. This is Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. He represents New York's eighth congressional district, which is Brooklyn and parts of Queens. These are names that are created out of thin air, their fantasy, their fiction, their made up, solely in my view, to artificially inflate prices. Before Congressman Jeffries was elected to the House of Representatives, he was a member of the New York State Legislature,

and he saw these neighborhood abbreviations creep into his own country. prices. Before Congressman Jeffries was elected to the House of Representatives, he was a member of the New York State Legislature, and he saw these neighborhood abbreviations creep into his jurisdiction. Real estate brokers were renaming parts of Crown Heights as Pro-Crow. That's Pro-Crow, PRO-CRO, which is a combination, apparently, of the prospect heights neighborhood and crown heights to its east. Properties and prospect heights have generally sold for more than those in crown heights. By making this new neighborhood, Pro Crow, brokers could sell crown heights properties at prospect heights prices.

Congressman Jeffries did not like anything about this. He didn't like the sound of Pro Crow, and he didn't like what the name was trying to do. So he tried to stop it. When we researched the issue, it turned out that there was no sort of governmental entity involved in the designation of neighborhoods. In 2011, Jeffries proposed the Neighborhood Integrity Act, which set out to create guidelines and regulations

for new neighborhood names and boundaries. But it turned out that it's hard to pass a law against names. The Neighborhood Integrity Act didn't gain traction, but neither did the name Pro Crow. Why don't you point out some names don't stick. Pro Crow was just silly, thankfully. It was abandoned. You never really know which of these names will stick around. Like there's this part of Midtown Manhattan that was recently renamed Nomad for North of

Madison Avenue. And people are starting to use it. You can see it on Google Maps. And it's weird, there's not really a name for this naming convention. Like Noho, Sobro, Nomah. They're not quite acronyms, they're not quite portmanteaux, they're not just abbreviations. Around the office, we've been calling them acronyms, or if you want to get in the spirit of the thing, Akinas. Akinas is too much, that's not going to be a thing.

Fine, they're acronyms, and they trace their lineage back to Soho, short for South of Houston Street in New York. It's really interesting how Soho developed first as a local neighborhood brand and then became globalized. Sharon Zoukin is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. You have neighborhoods of Boston and Washington DC and Seattle and Denver abbreviated as Lodo, Sodo, Soma, Sowa, trading on the brand name of Soho. Now there already was a Soho district in London, but as the illusionists Helen Zaltzman will tell you that is not an acronym.

Most of the evidence points to it having been a hunting cry, soho, like tallyho, because soho stands on what used to be hunting land. Other people will tell you that soho is a shortening of south of Hobern, but those people are willfully ignoring the fact that soho is actually west of the area of Hobern, which would make soho weho, which it isn't. London Soho may have been first, but the American abbreviation of Soho and the birth of the acronym can be traced back to 1962

and a fellow by the name of Chester Rapkin. He was an urban planner and eventually a member of the New York City Planning Commission from the late 60s to the late 1970s. And he was asked to investigate the conditions in what he called or what the City Planning Commission called the South-Houston industrial area. A lot of people think that the resulting paper, known as the Rappkin Report, invented the term Soho.

Now, I have recently read that report, and I do not believe that Rappkin used the term Soho in that report. It's also been said that Rappkin coined the term Soho in conversation. However, it happened around this time. People seized upon the term Soho as an abbreviation, which was certainly better than the South House in industrial area, but not nearly as bad as its previous name, Hell's Hundred Acres.

In the 1950s and early 60s, Soho was zoned for industrial manufacturing, but a lot of the buildings were empty. At the time, Rappkin was riding the report, it was not the most pleasant part of town. He mentioned in passing the grim caverns of factory buildings in Soho, and that's absolutely true. The South-Houston industrial area was threatened with demolition. The brick buildings with cast iron facades were seen as ugly, outdated,

eyesores. I mean, they were factories. Smack in the middle of downtown Manhattan. There had been a major pressure on the part of city government, as well as probably the real estate industry, to demolish these worthless buildings and replace them with one of the new residential projects. This was in the early 60s when New York City under the influence of Robert Moses was trying to tear down and rebuild. They were wrecking ball happy. But the Rappkin report made a plea to preserve the factory

buildings and the city held off on their plan. RAPKIN said the manufacturers in those buildings were viable and it would be interesting, maybe even great if the manufacturing buildings were renovated for manufacturing use. Nobody foresaw that the area would become colonized by artists. Artists rented the manufacturing spaces for studios and to save money they live there too. Soho in the 1970s quickly gained the identity of an artist's district. But the lofts weren't supposed to be residential. They weren't up to city housing standards, state standards, fire codes, anything. For a while, the city skirted around this problem

by classifying artists as machines who manufactured art and could thus stay in the factories overnight. performers and painters and musicians hosted happenings and art openings out of their lofts and these attracted attention from arts publications and newspapers. Soho was, if not the very first industrial district, to be transformed into live work and living space, it was certainly the most prominent in the media.

After the success of Soho, the urban planning department wanted to do on purpose what had happened by accident in Soho. They set their sights on a nearby area, the Triangle Below Canal Street, or as they called it, Tribeca. Tribeca was also a former manufacturing district, but it was intentionally re-zoned for mixed use. So now factories and residences and galleries could exist side by side legally.

You know the story from here. Artists moved into the old lofts, made them seem hip and desirable, and higher income residences and businesses slowly took over. And now of course, Soho and Tribeca are fancy, fancy places. Full of boutiques and high-end residences all housed in the architectural skeletons of old industry. Soho was able to incubate and disseminate all of these trends that became

so important in interior design in the 80s and 90s and you know probably on into the 2000s. Soho and Tribeca weren't just the rise of acronyms. They were the birth of industrial chic. They created the whole aesthetic that comes to mind with these neighborhoods. In Soho artists embraced the vestiges of the factories they were living and working in. They found the big metal fixtures and beams and loading docks charming. And this became a kind of expensive minimalism that marked high status taste in interior design. Exposed brick walls, distressed floors, big windows, large open spaces, big beams

and bronze fixtures, the old factories became trendy and new wealthier residents added layers of conventional luxury. Now people install very expensive marble baths and floors and wine vaults into former industrial lofts so that the simplicity of the first generation of industrial chic has turned into the excess of the current multimillion dollar lofts. Lofts in these genuine old buildings now go for millions of dollars, and new condos and developments are actively trying to look like old warehouses. And in other parts of New York and other cities around the world, developers started to copy

so-ho, not just in industrial areas, but in all kinds of neighborhoods, independent of whoever was already living or working there. Real estate developers around the world copy this and they say, let's bring some stores. Let's encourage some performance spaces, some art galleries. Let's make this area interesting. Let's give it a name. And as time went on, a new name, especially an acronym,

became the big indicator that your neighborhood was about to change. What we're seeing is something of an era of gentrification. This is Jacqueline Huang, a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. In 2006, she did a comprehensive study of residents in a section of South Philadelphia, where she basically went up to them and asked, what do you call your neighborhood? So in this section of Philly, most of the minority residents refer to it as South Philly.

But not the new mostly white residents and the real estate agents and Craigslist posts that listed the properties. Most commonly they use the name Graduate Hospital, so named because a hospital used to be in that neighborhood. Other people have referred to it as Geho, Soso, which is so-so to represent South of South Street. Even if they groaned or laughed at GehoH-O or so-so, these newcomers really identified more with graduate hospital than south Philly.

Now, just to be clear, neighborhoods do shift and change names periodically. But Jacqueline says the recent naming rush is different. I would say that there's an intention behind this and sort of a power play happening. You know, there's a group that's redefining it while another group is trying to hold on to this older name. As cities boom and gentrification rises, new neighborhoods get made and new names proliferate. I'm not saying neighborhood change is not good for these neighborhoods. They certainly need the investment, but I think the idea that there's this alienation

that's taking place and that, you know, it's intentional of displacing and devaluing the previous name in order to make the neighborhood change faster. This gets at the icky-ness, I feel, about using the term nobi to describe where I live. I don't want to be the newcomer who alienates the old residents by using some term that was fed to me by real estate developers. But nobi is also useful because it's specific

and it's efficient. I mean, saying I live in nobi is obviously faster than saying I live at the border of North Oakland, Berkeley Berkeley and Emoryville. Well, I live in Dobi, which is downtown Berkeley. I just made up the name Dobi. That is comedian and longtime Bay Area resident W. Kamal Bell. I was thinking about my neighborhood and gentrification when I happened to run into him

appropriately at the South Berkeley Farmers Market. I know they call it the South Berkeley farmers market, but I've lived in the Bay Area long enough to remember when this was called Oakland right here. This feels like South, South, South, South, South Berkeley. Kamal feels uncomfortable with these acronyms too. Kono, what's they're trying to make downtown? Kono, what is that?

Korea town market. Kono? Kono. Oh no. But he says, if you're focused too much on neighborhood names, you might be missing the point. And this is just symptomatic of like, this is like the neighborhood name is like

the old log in the woods, and you lift up the neighborhood name and you see all the bugs underneath, and that's gentrification. If you get too focused on the name, you're probably not focused on what's going on under the wood. Acronames are easy to lampoon. They're ubiquitous to the point of parody and often cringe-worthy. So we may see a shift away from these names.

Real estate developers will start using less silly sounding names to market neighborhoods to higher paying customers. These names might sound more authentic like graduate hospital and philly or temescal in Oakland, but they're different names for the same thing, the same log over the ants of gentrification. And as far as what you should call your neighborhood, if you're a newcomer? I mean, I feel like the bigger issue is to respect the neighborhood you're moving into. If you respect the neighborhood you're moving into and you aren't trying to be the change,

you're trying to be the blend, then you should then whatever the people in the neighborhood call it, then call it that. So I took Kamau's advice. I walked around my block and I asked people, what do you call this neighborhood? And I met a few newcomers like me who were just as confused as I was. Was it No-B, was it the Ashby Bart region,

the Golden Gate District, the Lauren district, but the neighbors who've lived here for a while all said the same thing. It's just North Oakland. And really, it doesn't need to be called anything else. Can I put you in there? Can I use the stairs? Oh, you're talking what are you talking about? Can you put me on that empty invisible? Hashtag life goals. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Trouffleman

With Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Delini Hall, Kurt Colstead, Shereef, Yusef, and me Roman Mars Special thanks this week to Jeff Bliss, Tim Wong, W. Camel Bell, and Helen Zoltzman. You should already be downloading Helen's Radiotopia podcast, The Illusionists on your favorite podcasting app, but if not, take this opportunity to remedy that. Kamal Bell hosts a new radio show and podcast called Kamal right now, which I highly recommend its a live talk show based here in the Bay, it's produced by KALW, the greatest radio station in the world. We are a

product of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interior firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join the fine community of people who like this show on Facebook. I fave every 99pi coin I see on Twitter and Instagram every single one of them makes me happy when I see them. So please keep sending them in. But if you want to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world, I recommend you spend some time perusing 99pi.org. Radio Tapio from PRX.