Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - New York After Rent (I of III)

Episode Date: April 8, 2015

The financial crisis of September 2008 overshadows one of the most important events in recent New York History: the arrival of Airbnb. And while your host wasn’t paying attention back then either, today he is fed up with the commodification of every square inch of the city. But what if the Airbnb economy is also changing the way New York City dreams and makes art? Can it be stopped? Housing Activist Murray Cox gives us a tour of his insideairbnb project, Sociologist Richard Ocejo takes us on a jaunt through Hell Square, and legendary performance artist Penny Arcade shows us around “the big cupcake”. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called New York After Rent, Part One. In September of 2008, something really big went down in New York City. It was an event that changed everything. And no, it's not the financial crisis. The closing weekend of Rent was absolutely epic. The last performance was alive with an energy like I've never felt in the theater anywhere in my life. Just the screaming and the cheering and the crying was overwhelming.

When it was announced that Rent would close on September 7, 2008, Jonathan Martin entered and won a contest that hooked him up with a golden ticket to the final performance and to a private party at the Life Cafe, an East Village establishment that's featured in the musical. I want to say there was maybe 20, 25 or 40 hardcore Rent fans that were there. And it was people of all ages and backgrounds. One of the guys had brought his guitar and we did a sing-along out on the back patio of Life Cafe.

And at one point, probably about three quarters of the way through the evening, the energy and the love was just so overwhelming that we pushed the tables together and we recreated the Life Cafe scene from Rent and did the entire thing, all the choreography, dancing on the tables, and played out the entire thing with an entire room full of like-minded rent heads. It was elevating the experience to this whole new level of rent head glory. I don't even know how else to describe it. It was amazing. So, Jonathan, as I mentioned in the email that I sent you, I am trying to find one of the first users of Airbnb in New York City. And my idea is that since Airbnb launched its New York website

a few weeks before that final performance of rent in September of 2008, I'm hoping that there just might be a rent head, perhaps a rent head in your elite rent head network, who used Airbnb that weekend. Well, when we talked about this before, you asked, I looked around, and I checked with a lot of the people, and I couldn't find anyone, people who had went through Airbnb, although there were a lot of people from out of town. There were so many people at the show, you know, it's certainly possible.

I wouldn't be surprised. I don't recall noticing when Airbnb launched in New York in September of 2008. But then again, there was a lot going on back then. Obama was ascending. Wall Street was collapsing. But today, today, I see Airbnb everywhere. And it's not just the billboards and the subway ads proclaiming how great the service is.

It's the commodification of every square inch of this city. And I think the reason why I've spent the past few months trying to hunt down one of Airbnb's first users is because I'm convinced that Airbnb is also responsible for the commodification of the ideas that New Yorkers now think and the art that New Yorkers now create. And I have this crazy notion that if I can just talk to one of the first Airbnb users, then perhaps, maybe, I can learn how to reverse force. Of course, I contacted the folks at Airbnb. And while they are into the sharing economy,

they're not into sharing their data. I put in numerous requests, but eventually the publicist stopped taking my calls and returning my emails. It turns out that if you want to get any data out of them, you need to either subpoena it, as the Attorney General of New York did, or scrape it, like Murray Cox did. I was surprised at how easy it was to get the data. There is a lot of data that is available just by looking at a listing. And all I did was get it for every single listing in New York City. The Australian housing activist and photographer Murray Cox showed up in New York City at the same moment as Airbnb. In 2008, I moved to New York.

Then about four years ago, I moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I've been there since. Murray Cox recently built a website, InsideAirbnb.com. It's data visualizations that show Airbnb's impact on every single neighborhood in New York City. So I'm just going to look at my neighborhood now, Bedford-Stuyvesant. So I type in Bedford-Stuyvesant and it zooms in and I see 1,224 listings. And the tool lets you pretty easily see what type of listing are in your neighborhood,

whether it's entire homes, private rooms or shared rooms. When you set up an Airbnb listing, you have to choose what room type it is, whether it's an entire home, so the guest has access to a kitchen, a bathroom, private entrance, or it could be a private room that you have in your apartment or house, or a shared room, which might be a couch. Then I also scroll down here to look at availability. And so that's basically looking into the calendars of each Airbnb listing and seeing how many days they were available for the next 365 days. So a calendar that's very widely open and it's an entire home,

the host probably doesn't live there. Also, with my tool, I can easily just check listings that are also frequently reviewed, i.e. rented. So that cuts down the listings to 361, which have a review in the last six months and at least one review every three months on average. And so that's 361's apartment that are displacing families in my neighborhood that aren't available to the general housing stock. And they're being rented out practically every weekend for a minimum of 2.6 nights at $142 per night.

But then I also have a feature that shows the top hosts. So in my neighborhood, I can see that someone called Randy in my neighborhood that has 14 listings, Santa that has 13, Remy that has 11. Now, according to the Attorney General of New York, who subpoenaed data from Airbnb, 6% of New York's Airbnb-ers take in 37% of the profits. This incredible statistic is actually one of the reasons I set out to do this series about Airbnb in New York.

Because it not only explains why we can't have an internet of nice things, but it also suggests that maybe, just maybe, we could hold someone responsible. But Murray Cox wants us to see that the users with multiple Airbnb listings, people like Santa and Bed-Stuy, are by no means the villains in this story.

It's very hard to answer that who are the bad actors. I mean, something else to look at out of the 361 that are entire homes, highly available, frequently rented. You can see how many of them are operated by just an individual host, a host that has one listing. So I can see here that 60%, so 220 of that 361, are people that have a single listing. Those 220 are not, at least in my mind, are not real estate developers or speculators or a building owner. They're individuals that are also contributing to the problem. We also took an inside Airbnb tour of Alphabet City, are entire homes, highly available, and they're frequently reviewed, i.e. booked.

162 of those 236, so about your neighborhood that's completely unlicensed and unregulated, and it's displacing families. Airbnb likes to boast about how it owns no real estate. But Murray Cox's data visualizations reveal that in New York City, all that was once solid has simply melted into Airbnb. The company Airbnb is aware of the impact that it's having on the community, but they're trying to minimize the visibility of that impact. So we're here on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington and I see Rouge restaurant, Gali right here, Libation right over there. We have Izzy's right around the street right here. We have Spitzer's Corner right here. We have Fat Baby. We have the hotel on Rivington and we have Verlaine right

over there and I'm sure there's more I can't see with the trucks in the way right now. At night this intersection is flooded with people who come here as a destination really to hang out, to bar hop, and to explore their options in this immediate area. And that's why residents have started to call it Hell Square. Richard Osijo is a sociologist, and one of the things he studies is New York City nightlife. I'm the author of Upscaling Downtown from Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City. Just came out last fall from Princeton University Press. I met up with Richard for a tour of the Lower East Side. He says that places like Hell's Square help us understand just how much New York City has changed in recent years. When we look at Hell's Square,

I mean, it's absolutely the case that all of these restaurants are against the will of many, many people in the community who have been fighting and spending a lot of energy fighting for a long time to prevent places like Hell's Square from developing in the neighborhood. And despite all their energy and all the resources that they've used to fight these bars and these licenses, it's really kind of all for naught because the SLA is far more interested in creating economic growth for New York City. When it comes to licensing nightlife in New York,

it turns out that community boards actually have no real power. They don't even get to define what the public interest is. It's the state liquor authority, or the SLA, who has the final say. There's a part of the law is that if you want to open a bar, you have to appear before your neighbors, appear before the residents of the place where you want to open up your bar. So you have to go before these groups. They're called the community boards and they're throughout New York City. There's over 50 of them throughout the city and community board three represents downtown Manhattan, the Lower East Side area. And for years, I learned that residents who had been living here for a long time and had seen how much their neighborhood had changed and was changing

were vociferously opposing all of these new bars and these new applications that were coming before them. But it turns out there's a law in New York State's alcohol beverage control law which says it's called the 500-foot rule. And basically it says that you can't have three or more fully licensed establishments, which is establishments that could serve beer, wine, and spirits, within 500 feet of each other. And that's a radius.

It's as the crow flies. So it's not just on a street, but pretty much all around you. But there are provisions to it. So there's a grandfather provision. So anything before the law in 1993, there's a transfer provision. So if they already exist and somebody else buys it, that's okay. And then there's the public interest provision. And this is the most interesting one, because basically, if you could establish that having more than three licensed establishments, more than three bars,

restaurants, clubs, whatever, within 500 feet of each other is within the public interest, then you can get the exception and you can be granted the license. And so for 20 years, this is how the SLA interpreted this law, and they still interpret it, for the most part, in those terms to this day. It's a very economic-driven decision. So what's really interesting is that my research ended right around the time when the recession was kicking in in 2008. And so the term Hell Square applied to this area here really emerged shortly after I had left.

And I guess the expectation that a lot of people had was that there was going to be some kind of shrinkage, some kind of retrenchment of nightlife in this area. In fact, it's the opposite that occurred. There wasn't any kind of decrease in the some kind of retrenchment of nightlife in this area. In fact, it's the opposite that occurred. There wasn't any kind of decrease in the saturation of the area. In fact, it probably became even more saturated. So the argument that the SLA was using during the flush years, that bars and licenses and license establishments are good for economic growth, almost became a solution to the economic recession that was going on in the city because it was something that could create more jobs. It's something that could get the economy going to get people spending. So the SLA is still continuously emphasizing the economic

benefits that bars and nightlife bring for neighborhoods, for the city, for the state, really. Now, it's tempting to view the SLA's doubling down on its narrow definition of community interest, economic growth, as a response to the financial crisis of 2008. But according to Richard Osijo, it's more a recognition, an affirmation of the growing importance of the nighttime economy. It's completely inescapable when you go from day to night, when you go from weeknight to weekend, just how much this area is completely given over to nightlife. That's when really the the lights all come on and that's when the the neighborhood really feels like it's alive uh which is which

is really the opposite of what we think about when we think about residential neighborhoods um we think about that when it comes to something like like a time square and in the history of the city you know the nighttime economy was you was subservient to the daytime economy. It was the daytime economy, the regular 9-to-5 schedule, that really drove the city. And in many ways, that's still the case, obviously. But the nighttime economy has really emerged in importance in the city. And I think there's a relationship between the daytime and the nighttime economy when it comes to the economic engine of the city that was never really there before.

The nighttime economy is not just for leisure anymore. It's really risen in importance, and it creates conditions like quality of life issues, but more importantly for residents down here who are the most vocal and most active, it creates a different sort of neighborhood. It creates a neighborhood and a community that's clearly no longer for them. But if the nighttime economy is based on the visitor and built on the idea of destination New York, then perhaps a better name for it is the first time.

The New York Times is writing about it. Time Out is writing about it. It's a buzzword. Every city in America is experiencing gentrification. All over the world. Skyrocketing housing prices. Lofts in every downtown. There are lofts downtown Dubuque, Iowa.

Everyone asks the same question. there are lofts downtown Dubuque Iowa everyone asks the same question whether I'm in Manchester England or Dubuque Iowa or New York City who can afford these places in the past even as the world moved forward we brought our history with us. The German bakeries, the Irish beer halls, the Spanish bodegas, the Chinese restaurants, the Indian restaurants, the socialist bookstores, the hippie head shops, the black jazz and blues clubs. Am I missing anybody? No. These layers meshed and intermingled and became part of the fabric that was unique to New York.

And it was all available to newcomers. And newcomers internalized these histories, even as they moved forward in their own future. Now, that lineage is broken. Outside, the wounded spirit of New York cries out. Gentrification is broken. Outside the wounded spirit of New York cries out. Gentrification is over. Hyper gentrification is over. We have been colonized. But this is the new colonization. It's not only out there. It's in here. Like many people, even the young seekers who come to New York, I'm filled with longing for this New York that's disappearing

in front of our eyes. Young people come up to me and they say, what happened? And where is it? They too, they seek that mythological New York, the New York that belongs to everybody, where freedom was palpable on the streets and belonged to everybody. Everybody. That New York was fugitive, ephemeral,

unbeholden to the rules of the middle class. New York was about pleasure and pleasure is a radical value. That New York was anonymous, urban, not suburban. That New York screamed, you can do what you want, you can be what you want. In 2001, Giuliani sold the broken spirit of New York to America, and America was thrilled that New York had to be like everywhere else. New York has been invaded by America. I just recently realized

that these horrible people that are marauding through the streets are the children of the people that I came to New York to get away from. They are so banal. It is the new weapon of capitalism. Boredom. They're trying to bore us out of New York. New York is in a coma.

New York went from being the city that never slept to the city that can't wake up. From antiquity, the apple symbolized the fruit of knowledge. Adam and Eve ate from the apple in new sin. New York was sin city, i.e. the big apple. I don't know about you, but I came to New York to sin. How did New York go from being the big apple to becoming the big cupcake?

So you can understand why I'm freaked out by all these cupcakes. There are 500 cupcakes in a 20 block radius of my house. They sell cupcakes. That's just it. Just cupcakes. People are staggering from one cupcake shop to another. A trail of cupcake crumbs across the city. Cupcakes are the latest narcotic of the masses. These people want a cupcake the way I want a fucking cigarette. Like the addictions to prescription drugs, internet porn, computer games.

People have formed an addictive relationship with cupcakes. Look what happens when somebody walks in with a box full of cupcakes. You'd think that they came in with an ounce of Coke. Why are so many people suffering from OCD, obsessive cupcake disorder? People who hate history love a cupcake. Oh yes, because a cupcake is vintage. It's retro. It reminds them of their childhood with their good mommy and their good daddy. And now New York has been taken over by these robotized, infantilized freaks who want the approval of the middle class and a cupcake.

I'm sick of this part. Okay. All right, I did that already. Taylor Swift. Fuck her. I'm sick of this part. Okay. All right, I did that already. Taylor Swift. Fuck her. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called New York After Rent, Part 1. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker,

and it featured Murray Cox, Richard Osijo, and excerpts from an original production by Penny Arcade from her performance, Longing Lasts Longer. Thanks to Steve Zettner, Mathilde Biot, Jesse Shapins, Jim Colgan, Ilya Meritz, Roman Mars, and Karen Frillman. The Theory of Everything is a founding member of Radiotopia, the world's greatest podcast collective. Our founding sponsors are the Knight Foundation and MailChimp and listeners like you.