Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - New York After Rent (post prop f director’s cut)

Episode Date: November 25, 2015

Now that Airbnb has proved it can beat regulation we return to the post-gentrified city. Two! new segments:  we meet a landlord (named Benny) who built an illegal artists space in Bushwick, and we visit Astor Place, the embodiment of the New New York, with writer Ada Calhoun (Saint Marks is Dead).  

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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. 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 a 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, 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. 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 is the commodification of every square inch of this city. And I think the reason why I spent months and 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 think and the art New Yorkers are now creating. I had this crazy notion that if I could just talk to one of those first Airbnb users,

then maybe, just maybe, I could learn how we could reverse engineer the whole thing. You know, turn New New York back into New York. Of course, I contacted the folks at Airbnb. I put in numerous requests. I even got to some higher-ups in the company. But this was just when they were gearing up to fight local governments all over the country, including New York. They were,

as the publicist politely put it in the last email of mine he responded to, busy. Now that Airbnb has won all of their battles, including the fight over Proposition F in San Francisco, I realized I should put out an updated version of the three-part series I did last spring. This is the director's cut. I took out a few segments, added a few more, and while I never found that Airbnb-er who saw Rent in 2008, I did find a landlord for an illegal warehouse space in Bushwick named Benny. As for Airbnb, well, when it comes to data, it turns out they're actually not that into sharing. If you want to get data out of them, you need to either subpoena it, like 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 shed 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 kitchen and 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 apartments 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 Airbnbers 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 the 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, my neighborhood in Manhattan, and we saw the same things. I see that there's 236 listings in Alphabet City that are entire homes, highly available, and they're frequently reviewed, i.e. booked. 162 of those 236, so about 68% of them, are single listings. And you might as well think about there's 162-room hotel run by individuals in your in 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 off 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's 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's Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City. It 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 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 saturation of the area. In fact, it probably 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 lights all come on, and that's when the neighborhood really feels like it's alive which is which is really the opposite of what we think about when we think about residential neighborhoods we think about that when it comes to something like like a Times Square and in the history of the city you know the nighttime economy was you know subservient to the

daytime economy it was the daytime economy the regular nine-to-five schedule that that really drove the city and in many ways that's still the case you know, 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 Airbnb economy. I'm living in the Costa Blanca, not very far from the Mediterranean Sea, and it's beautiful here. It's tranquil. It's affordable. It's healthy. And for the past year and a half that my husband and I have been moved here to Spain, we thank the landlords of New York City for cutting me off from the lifeline of my businesses. We thank them. For 30 years, Kathy Kirkpatrick ran the Life Cafe, an East Village establishment made famous by the musical Rent. Kathy closed the cafe in September of 2011.

At the time, media reports alluded to an ironic landlord dispute. But it was unclear what actually happened. So I recently tracked Kathy down to her new home in Spain. And I asked her about that final chapter of her story. The Life Cafe After Rent. My leases were up in May of 2009, and in the first week of May, I still didn't have an answer about renewing. Fact of the matter was, the landlords didn't, they wanted me out. They didn't want me there again. They knew we had a history, but they

wanted new, fresh blood. They wanted to have businesses there that were more to a liking to a richer neighborhood. The Life Cafe occupied two real estate parcels at the corner of 10th Street and Avenue B. So Kathy had two landlords. And while one landlord was willing to cut her a deal, the other one was not. I also recall a comment landlord number one had made that in all of their years of doing business, never once, he bragged, would their family ever give up any money for any reason whatsoever, no matter how unjust.

But the nicer landlord, number two, refused to get less money than the scroogey landlord, number one. So when Kathy finally did get a lease in 2010, it was for an insane amount of money. The last year of the lease, the rent, the combined rent from the two landlords would have been $23,000 a month. Now, that's what commercial stores were paying in Times Square at the time. But I so much wanted Life Cafe to go on that I agreed to it. So it was no longer, well, let's get up, let's open the cafe in the morning, let's sweep it, let's sweep the sidewalk, let's set up the tables,

let's turn on the gas and get the coffee going. And let's make huevos rancheros. It was not like that about that anymore for me. It was now all about money. It was a struggle of life and death. In the spring of 2011, Kathy discovered a crack in the basement. She showed it to an engineer who warned her that the Life Cafe was in danger of collapsing. So she alerted the landlords. But to her dismay, they didn't want to fix the problem. They put up scaffolding, and it was our summer season. When you put scaffolding up on buildings in New York City, it does nothing but damages business. So we had scaffolding put up, and it ruined the whole ambiance in the cafe. People stopped coming. Pigeons started roosting in the scaffolding.

It was awful. People let their dogs pee on the posts holding it up. I couldn't conduct business any longer. It was the end. The end was upon us. Now, the reason Kathy never went to the press or publicly turned to the community for help was because of lawsuits. She sued one of her landlords, and her landlord sued each other. It was expensive litigation with no end in sight. And so on the night of September 11, 2011, Kathy closed the Life Cafe for good. Basically I couldn't officially close I was supposed to just leave everything in there and I was I was really forced to abandon the properties because of their their lack they were unsafe to be in but there were some things I couldn't leave

there and I took my Life Cafe tabletops and there was a mahogany bench we had at Life Cafe that I was sure, Jonathan, that's where he sat when he was in Life Cafe researching and writing rent. And then, interestingly enough, that was the same time when my landlord in my Brooklyn place announced he was not going to renew my lease there. And this business had turned out to be a fantastically wonderful, profitable, happy little business over in Bushwick. That was the time when I realized the universe was trying to tell me something. Interestingly, my husband, who's an Englishman, he says New York has a short memory. He was thinking, you know, as things were wrapping up,

he says, we'll soon be forgotten and replaced by whatever. Everything falls apart in the end, and we've got to look to the future and keep moving on. So, Kathy, you mentioned in the email that you sent me that you came back to New York last summer for the first time since you left. And I'm kind of curious, like, if you had to point to one thing that might sum up the new New York, what would it be? Benjamin, I can't believe what happened in Bushwick. It exploded. The word landlord doesn't seem to make sense to me because I definitely didn't own the building and I definitely didn't own any real estate or something. I like signed a lease, you know, and I was signing other leases. I, you know, I wish there was another word for it, actually. There isn't.

There isn't, yeah. Benny arrived in New York at almost the very moment Kathy departed. His original plan was to find a warehouse in Bushwick and build a giant art labyrinth, a maze with secret ladders and hidden mirrors. But instead, he and his friend JR built rooms, 12 of them. And then they started renting out the rooms to friends. So if you were just coming, let's say from Vermont, and wanted to see the space,

I would probably take you in and I would say, just so you know, these are art studios. They're 24-hour art studios and you can't tell anybody that you're living here. You know, you can leave at any time. You just have to give us 30 days notice. We ask for one month rent up front. That's $400. Now, you can't find a legal apartment in New York for anything close to $400 a month, not even in Bushwick. But Benny didn't want to create a cheap crash pad. He wanted to create an artistic community. So he wrote a manifesto, a mission statement for potential tenants to read and agree to before moving in. We'd like to be familiar with nonviolent communication. This is a queer-friendly space.

We have family dinners every Tuesday night, and you have to come to at least two family dinners a month to stay here. These are the trash nights. Don't smoke in the house. There is a no-noise policy, so you can't come out of your room and say, you need to keep it down because I have to go to work tomorrow morning. If you come into the space, you need to keep it down because I have to go to work tomorrow morning. If you come into the space, you have to know that people might be loud. And everyone needs to be respectful, and we're not going to tell people when they're not being respectful. Friends and friends of friends quickly cycled through.

So in order to keep the warehouse full, Benny needed a way to evaluate the friends of friends of friends who wanted in. He kind of had to become an art critic. We were trying to find people who were really passionate about what they were doing, creating art, and so we would ask them to show us their art and stuff like that. And sometimes, you know, it was hard to see from the art that they showed us, even what they were going to be like to live with or what kind of art they would be making. But there were some people that made really, really incredible art that were out there performing or out there doing paintings.

There were a couple people that set up art studios in the space. They would have collectors and stuff come through the warehouse and they would see their paintings. One of the artists who passed the test was a freegan named Kevin. One of his art pieces was a shopping cart and he would fill it with stuff and he would walk around with it with this big thing on his head that looked like a big pile of shit. It was really great. He used spray foam and he was borrowing all kinds of new materials from the space. People were, were blown away by it. He was walking around with this shopping cart full of

like, you know, turds and they were like organs that were built onto this shopping cart. And I, I wasn't, I was a little bit conflicted feeling like he was kind of gentrifying homelessness or something like that by bringing the shopping cart around full of art, you know. But he was, at the same time, he was aware of this. He was very self-aware and very conscious of what he was doing. And I think he did it really tastefully. I still think he's one of my favorite artists that came out of that space. Even though he failed to build his labyrinth, Benny was very proud of what he created. It was always really fun. I loved when my week was to cook dinner because I get to cook for all these really awesome people.

And people brought desserts and wine and we talked about art and people would play their newest songs they had just written. It felt good. People felt connected. People felt really inspired. And that was really powerful for people. About a year into this magical period, Benny and his partner happened across another warehouse. It was the perfect setup for that art labyrinth he wanted to build. Although I did have it in mind that we'd finally be able to do this art project we were working on, when we put it on Craigslist to test the waters to see if people would want to live there, you know, in worst-case scenario kind of situation,

we were like flooded, like our inbox was flooded with emails. This warehouse was a few L stops closer to Manhattan. So this time they set out to find tenants who would pay $700 a month to live in an illegal basement with one window. Benny found himself saying yes to people who made art he didn't like or understand. There were a lot of people that made a lot of mediocre art, and it was tough because it felt like they did the art because that's what they felt like they needed to do in Bushwick or something like that. There was this girl who would do food art, I guess you'd call it,

and she would make the milk look really luscious, and she would make the apple look really, really shiny. Some people are able to do their art as their day job, but I'm not sure if I would consider that what she was doing art or if it was just advertising. There was this one guy. I have no clue why he would be interested in this space. He was extremely wealthy.

He owned a TV programming agency company, something like that, over in Union Square, and he was barely in the apartment. I saw him maybe a couple times, and he ended up being a catastrophe. He started Airbnb-ing his basement room to tourists, and he was charging up to Wazoo. He never came to family dinners. And we have this chore chart. Every week you'd get a different chore, like doing the dishes or taking out the trash, those kinds of things.

And this guy was actually hiring a Uber service-like thing for cleaning people to come into our warehouse and clean the scaffolding boards that we built the rooms out of. I could not believe it. As the problems mounted, Benny faced up to his new reality. He was not a curator of an artistic community. He was a landlord. I started trying to create affordable spaces for artists and now I'm creating, you know, a party zone for people to live in the hot spot in Bushwick, you know, to be able to like walk out their door and make some, do some networking. I was miserable dealing with these people, dealing with this space. I did not feel inspired to do this.

I didn't feel like I was really helping people anymore. And I wanted to get out. Benny had built a labyrinth after all. But it wasn't until his landlord called him and his business partner in for a meeting that he learned just how utterly lost he was. One day we went into our landlord's office. They called us in and they told us that the real landlord had done a walkthrough and wanted us out of there immediately. And I was

kind of like flabbergasted because I was like, what do you mean the real landlord? I thought you were the real landlord. And they were like, no, this building's owned by this Hasidic organization and they rent to us and we rent to you and you rent to these other people. And we realized that we were in this complicated chain of money-making operations, and we were more towards the bottom of that. I caught my first glimpse of the new New York in September of 2008 at Crystal Decord's annual birthday party. But it's taken me years to make sense of what went down that night. Crystal was an influential advertising producer who lived on the Lower East Side at the time. She connected filmmakers, animators, actors,

photographers, models, and graphic designers with automobile makers, fashion labels, kitchen appliance marketers, and snack food conglomerates. The financial collapse magnified her power. Overnight, she became an arbiter of life and death for freelancers like my friend Brendan, who brought me with him to her party. As we ring the buzzer to her apartment, Brendan confesses that he's having trouble sleeping. I'm terrified I'm going to have to leave New York, which is why this party is so important, he says. I have to make Crystal understand the gravity of my situation. And then the doors open and we are whisked inside.

Brendan and I are showered with high fives and kisses and drugs. It's like a conga line, a cocaine-fueled conga line that takes us up the stairs, past the elevator, and into Crystal's apartment. Crystal has an amazing place, an endless number of rooms, an internal staircase that connects two floors, and on the roof, a private

terrace. It's a decadent amount of space, especially since Crystal spends most of her time in Los Angeles. In the kitchen, I start talking to this guy who says he does motion graphics. Everyone laughs when I admit that I have no idea what this is, except my friend Brendan. He just gives me a dirty look, and then he disappears into the crowd. Everybody I meet at this party works in advertising, and everybody knows that it is now or never, and thus everything is on the table, not just drugs. But there are a lot of drugs

on the table, and I try most of them. I want to have a good time. I don't want to feel so out of place, but with each toke, puff, and sniff, the dread and discomfort and distance intensifies. I get unbearably off. I can't even speak, so I park myself by a window and stare out at the darkening sky. There's a couple smoking a joint. The woman is talking about her apartment. I need to find someone to take my place for October so I can go to London. Put it on Craigslist, the man says. I did, the woman replies, and I got the strangest email yesterday. This website wrote me and said that if I use their service,

I can rent out my room like a hotel by the night, by the week, or even by the month, and they'll take care of everything. What is this website? the man asks. Airbedandbreakfast.com, the woman replies. When I'm finally able to steady myself, I set out to find my friend. This turns into an epic quest. I float through a number of rooms that all seem to contain the same people, consuming the same substances and repeating the same phrases. I start to freak out again.

But eventually, I locate Brendan in Crystal's bedroom. He's crawling on all fours, weeping and pulling at her pants leg, pleading about a job animating Keebler elves that she says she just can't possibly give to him. I first met Brendan back when he used to draw comics, back when he had a cheap rent in the East Village, back when the New York Alternative Weeklys had comics pages and audiences. It is devastating to see him reduced to this. Crystal's leaning into a mirror, putting on her makeup. She's unmoved by my friend's misery.

But she does jump when she sees the horrified expression on my face, staring back at her like an apparition in her giant looking glass. I spin around and duck into a bathroom. But when I close the door behind me, I say, I'm escaping. For this, one of them offers me a few millimeters of a smile, while the other one taps the mirror in her hand. She has shooting stars painted on her nails, stars that jump and animate in the light. Both of these women look like they've just emerged from a magazine.

There is so much I would like to tell them, but I decide that in this situation, actions will speak louder than words. So I open the window and climb out onto the metal ladder I hope will take me to the roof. As I climb, I can see the Williamsburg Bridge. The sun is setting, or has set, because on the Brooklyn side there is already a darkness. And it is from this darkness

that the car commercial director emerges. I take his outstretched hand, and he pulls me up onto the roof. Now, I don't remember the car commercial director's name, but I can still feel his strong manly grip and his swaggering confidence. And I'm taken aback when he tells me that he directs car commercials. I have no idea how to even talk about car commercials, so I ask him if he does anything else. Like what, he snaps. Weaving? Yodeling? Fucking? I've made a terrible mistake, and the

night starts pulsating like an alarm. His buddies close in around him. Oh, I didn't mean it like that, I stammer. I just was wondering if you do other stuff besides directing car commercials, like art. This makes him angrier. Are you saying that commercials are not art? This is a serious and direct question, and his three buddies who have now taken up positions behind him make it clear that he is also serious about getting a direct answer. This time, I carefully measure the words in my mouth before letting them out. No, I don't. The car commercial director's posse erupts. Who invited this pretentious loser?

Yeah, didn't he just climb up from the street? I bet he doesn't belong here. Toss his ass back down. And then the two girls from the bathroom show up on the scene. The one with the nails drapes her arm over the car commercial director's shoulder, who is genuinely shocked by my answer. Like it's obvious that he's never even considered the idea that his commercials are not art. And all of his friends feel the same way. It's now six against one. And this is when it hits me.

What if I'm outnumbered because I'm wrong? What if I'm not at a party filled with people who work in advertising, but a party filled with artists, an emerging generation of new New York City artists? Perhaps art historians in the future will call this new movement post-commercialism or post-commodity. Well, I'm certain it will definitely make it into the canon though, because look around, that car commercial director it was all just too much for me. The drugs, Brendan, the car commercial guy getting the girl with the shooting star nails. Plus, I didn't want to end up a footnote in their story. Some old guy who kept screaming that there's a difference between saying something and selling something

as he fell to his death, thrown from the roof of a legendary party. I fled. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could. And then I ran all the way to my apartment in the East Village, and I dove into my bed, and I pulled the sheets tight over my eyes. Some people have nothing and want nothing and are free Some people want to burn the world with their greed We just want to have a good time Just want good time Just want good time Just want good time Just want good time

Just want good time Just want good time Just want good time All the time Right now, 90,000 people have died of AIDS in New York City. But when you look at the statistics about the neighborhoods that had the highest AIDS rates, those were the neighborhoods that gentrified the fastest. The West Village, the East Village, Harlem, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, completely gentrified.

Sarah Schulman is one of the founders of the Act Up Oral History Project, a collection of interviews with the survivors of the Act Up Oral History Project, a collection of interviews with the survivors of the AIDS coalition to unleash power. It turns out you actually can't decouple the story of AIDS from the story of gentrification in New York. Sarah Schulman witnessed this firsthand in her neighborhood, the East Village. In my building, there was a guy named John Hetwer who died of AIDS. And his apartment went, I don't remember the exact figure, but it was somewhere from $200 to like $800 to $1,200. So somebody would die, and then the next person

who moved in would be paying five, six times what that person had been paying. In New York, AIDS killed thousands of artists and thinkers and creators. And even though gentrification is over, this loss continues to define the city. These were people who came to New York because most of them were refugees from America. They couldn't be gay in their little small towns. Their families did not want them. Or they were international refugees, people who came to New York to have sex, to get away from religion, to make art, to be themselves.

And these were oppositional, high-risk personalities. And they created global art ideas. They created political ideas that went around the world. When they died, they were replaced by an entirely different kind of person. Because to be the person who's going to pay the $1200, replacing the dead person who paid $200, you have to be a lot more economically functional, which meant you had to be able to participate and cooperate better with the economic system. You would be more likely to have a wealthier family and to be on better

terms with that family. You'd be more likely to have relationships with institutions, like to have gone through an MFA program instead of just being an artist. It was a person who was more assimilated into the power structure with more resources and more allegiances to the power structure. And that's who came in. And a certain kind of social ethic accompanies that. So for example, if you have a neighborhood that's being gentrified, we get told that that means the neighborhood is getting safer, but for the people who live there it's more dangerous because their homes are now endangered. So we have this complete flip of point of view where the experiences of the people who

live in the neighborhoods are completely erased and only the experiences of the gentrifiers and their perspectives dominate. It's like people looking in the mirror and thinking it's a window. The other people no longer exist. In many ways, gentrification is simply the latest chapter in the story of New York City immigration. New York City was built by immigrants and shaped by immigrant experiences and values. But this recent crop of immigrants, the ones who hail from the suburbs, their values, Sarah Schulman believes, are antithetical to cities,

especially New York. These people have been raised in suburbanization. So they grew up in really racially stratified, class stratified, privatized living, conventional gender roles, homogenized aesthetics, car culture, all that kind of stuff. And they come to New York City and they don't want to become New Yorkers. They want to interact with other people who are from the same racial and class background. They don't want the urban mix. They don't want urbanity. That's the basis of the gentrified mind. In her 2012 book, The Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Shulman argues that the rampant suburbanization and commodification is destroying both New York's physical and spiritual infrastructure.

One of the things that I've learned about life by being a New Yorker is that people have contradictions and people make mistakes and there's nuances in behavior. You know, if you grow up in an apartment building, you hear people fucking, you hear people crying, you see people go through drug problems, you see that people have problems, right? If you walk down the street in New York City, you see that people cry, you see that people are broke.

You learn that having problems is part of being a person. You don't have to hide the fact that you're having problems. You don't have to hide the fact that you're upset because all around you are people who are upset, right? There's like knowledge. Riding that subway gives you knowledge about the variation of emotionality in human beings. Urbanity teaches us every single second of every single day

that other people are different. And that knowledge is crucial for creating new ideas for the future. Okay, so I have one last question. I'm kind of hoping you can maybe describe the kind of art that the gentrified mind makes today. Like, yeah, how would you describe it? Well, there's a higher production of banality, and there's a lot of corporate support for banality. And there's a corporate investment in the confusion between quality and familiarity. So now, those of us who are making

work that's actually true, we have to compete with the fake. And that's quite difficult. I had my first big break in 2008. And I had a really, I had, I had, it was a crash and all, but I mean, I had the year that I had the year that I always kind of wanted and I had imagined in New York. And I really, you know, commissions were pouring in, and I was getting a lot of attention, and I really felt like, okay, okay, I'm here. I'm a New Yorker now. David X is a New York playwright. Well, he's sort of a New York playwright.

But then something funny happened with the economic downturn and all that, which is I started getting much more commissions from out of town. Obviously, you know, I Airbnb'd my flat when I was gone, but I really felt like I was just, you know, floating. Like I'd lost my connection to New York, but I still had a connection to New York because all my bios always said this playwright is in New York. For the past couple of months, David's been ensconced at a writer's colony in Boston, Massachusetts. But a few weeks ago, he got a call from his agent, who ordered him to get on a bus and go to New York immediately.

A Broadway producer wanted to meet with him about a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity. So, David went to New York. The meeting takes place at DBGB's, which is this Daniel Bouloud restaurant down on the Bowery. And I go in, and it's me and this producer, who shall remain nameless, and this is the weird part, the artistic director of this major non-profit theater in New York, like a downtown one.

And the long and short of it is they wanted to commission me to do an update of Rent. I kind of prevent my jaw from dropping and and I look over at the artistic director, and the artistic director, who's been looking at me, he kind of puts his hand on my knee, very paternally. He's a paternal kind of guy. And he says, here's the scenario, right? We're moving it from the East Village to Bushwick. That's kind of what we're thinking right now.

I mean, obviously, we're really open to your input, but the basic layout is that we're moving it from the East Village to Bushwick. The way he's got this worked out is that the characters are all app developers. But they're all app developers who recently graduated from MFA programs. So they make kind of disruptive apps. One of them is a filmmaker who's, and this is the Mark character from the original, who's trying to do something totally new with Snapchat. The Mimi character is kind of one of those artisanal burlesque types rather than like a

stripper, you know, like one of these people who's been like studying the whole form and stuff like that. And there's one mixologist who's really struggling to remake the whole thing. Most of them are addicted to Adderall. Then the producer guy jumps in and he says, somebody has actually bought a big warehouse in Bushwick and they've subdivided it as kind of, they've subdivided half of it as workspaces and then the other half of it as living spaces. And then they Airbnb out a couple of the other rooms,

which lets you bring in more colorful characters, at which point, and I'm really kind of dreading the answer to this, I'm like, where's the Life Cafe? And the artistic director, without breaking a beat, says, Screens. And I'm like, I'm sorry, what? And he's like, Screens. Because, you know, we're all living online now that's really where we're connecting whether we like it or not and we feel like this

is really and also in addition to sort of bringing Jonathan's message back this is really a chance to make this theater piece using like new tech that will almost be nothing but screens. Like we can have IMing live and we can have Venmo. So finally, finally these guys stopped talking and they're just kind of looking at me like waiting for my opinion. And I'm like, guys, AIDS? So then the artistic director, hand on my knee again, he's like, you know, I'm just concerned about the relatability

of AIDS to millennials right now. And the producer is like, how about Ebola? So the dinner's over. And I say, look, guys, I really appreciate this, and I really appreciate you thinking of me. It's a lot to take in. So I'm going to have to think about it for a little bit. And they're like, oh, no problem, no problem, no problem.

Take your time, take your time, take your time. Just get back to us soon. So we leave, and we shake hands, and I'll tell them I'll get back to them in a week or so. And then I just take this long, lonely walk up Bowery, and it's about, you know, it's about 10 at night on a Sunday, and the city's kind of empty, except for a bunch of NYU kids running here and there.

And I walk up to the L, and I'm trying to imagine, like, what the L must have been like in the 80s. And, like, was there counterculture on that L? And I get into the L, and I'm trying to imagine what the L must have been like in the 80s. And was there counterculture on that L? And I get into the L, and I'm like, is there counterculture on the L now? Is this counterculture? And then it just stops. It has just stopped underground. And everybody's bitching and moaning, and everyone's really really annoyed and there's a lot of sighing. And everyone's acting like 80-year-olds, even though no one on this train is older than 25, except maybe me.

And I'm just like, fuck, fuck, fuck. I just want to get home. I have to get up really early tomorrow morning, get back on a bus to go back up to this colony. And I've got a commission to work on. I can't do anything on this fucking train. And I'm thinking to myself, why the fuck didn't I just Uber my way home? And then I'm like, that's it. Our guy, our Mark, the Snapchat guy, right? He's taking the L all the time. And one day he just can't take it anymore. So he decides to Uber it. And he gets Ebola from the driver of his Uber, who is like patient zero.

And that's how the plague comes to Bushwick. It's not about the gentrification of a neighborhood. It's about life in a post-gentrified world. My steps they'll try to retrace And speak to loved ones I fear I touched my face Now I'll be shunned They'll keep me quarantined

I can't go where I choose It's fall I thought it was the flu Uber arrived Uber and I Regret, regret I didn't take the L. Uber and I, Uber and I. Regret, regret, he didn't take the L. One of the reasons I'm revisiting New York after rent

is because when I was putting this series together last spring, a lot of people I spoke with, especially activists like Murray Cox, told me that I needed to chill out with all the Airbnb hand-wringing. Regulation, they said over and over again, would soon put an end to the Airbnb-ification of New York. Well, now that Airbnb has defeated a citizen-led regulation, Proposition F in San Francisco of all places, and now that most cities are getting used to the tax dollars Airbnb is collecting on their behalf, I think it's fair to say that housing activists are the ones who have to chill.

Regulation isn't coming. Another reason I wanted to revisit my story is because I never took you to the corner of St. Mark's Place and 3rd Avenue there's a building here that went up in 2014 that for me is the ultimate manifestation of New York after rent 51 Astor Place a lot of folks call it the Death Star building. To me, it just looks like a giant parking shed sheathed in dark glass. It's hideous and expensive. Facebook occupies half the building,

IBM the other. And there's a statue of one of the artist Keith Haring's signature dancing green stick figures from the 80s out front with its leg outstretched. It's one of the darkest places in my neighborhood. But maybe that's just because my eyes aren't open. There was a story about this Keith Haring statue clonking texters in the head who weren't paying attention. They kept walking into his foot. That's Ada Calhoun, author of the book St. Marx is Dead, a history of the East Village's most famous street. And while she's not going

to give the Death Star any props, she does think I'm wrong about what this building represents. I think that these huge buildings, by comparison to what was here 20 years ago, are not so different from what went up in the 1830s compared to what was there 20 years before that. And I think that, you know, yeah, they're shiny and they're big and they're glass and they look weird compared to these little tiny six-story brownstones. But, you know, I don't know. It's part of it. It's part of the neighborhood changing.

One of the best things about Ada's book is that we learn that people have been saying that St. Mark's is dead pretty much since the beginning. People have been saying the street is dead and the East Village is dead and New York City is dead forever and ever and ever. There's this song that I found from, 1913 about New York that's like, goes New York, what's the matter with you? And it's all about how the lights used to shine brighter. It's all over now.

And I just saw that repeated again and again. You know, 1870s, there was depression. People fled the neighborhood. There were riots. People said that wasn't going to, nothing's going to happen again after that. Gangsters took it over. Then it was this working-class neighborhood. And then the beatniks came in, and all the people who had been here before hated the beatniks.

And then all the beatniks hated the hippies, and the hippies hated the punks. And the punks hated the hardcore kids. And it just goes on and on and on. What if it's not even the city that's changing? I interviewed probably 250 people for the book, and every time I talked to somebody new, I would ask them, what was the best year on the street? When was it its most exciting and vibrant and alive?

And they would tell me a year with total certainty. They would say it was in 1977, or it was 1982 or it was 1955 and I did some math and it turned out that basically everyone thought the year the street was at its best was the year that they themselves were at their hottest. I get people who feel like it's over. We need to at least entertain the possibility that it's not over, it's over for you. A lot of people like to say that all these kids we're seeing walking by us are, you know, they're dumb, or they don't understand

the real history of this village, or there's something lame about them in a way that we weren't lame. And I just think you can't tell. I mean, any of them could be the next Keith Haring. And also, I really like that people saw the punk kids walking down the street, and they're like, who are these thugs? They have nothing to contribute.

They have nothing to offer. And then 20 years later, you know, then they love the Ramones. Many of the kids dodging Keith Haring's outstretched foot attend NYU. Some of them even take classes at the nearby Leslie Entrepreneur Lab. This is where entrepreneurs from across all of NYU's schools and colleges, be they students, faculty, or researchers, come together to turn their ideas and dreams into startups. They have writing on the wall that says, start a startup.

They can't stop saying says start a startup. They can't stop saying starting a startup. Lauren Graham and Hannah Salwin are the co-founders of one of these NYU startups, Borrow. Borrow is a platform for renting. You can rent anything you want on our platform. That at least is the ultimate goal. As of right now, we have a 3D printer, a drone, a GoPro, things that you may not want to buy but you want to play with. You can make a lot of money off of that. Like many young people today who hope to make their fortune in New York City, Lauren and Hannah cite the influence of Airbnb.

Airbnb has been an inspiration to us from the start. We're really taking cues from what they're doing. In the future, startups will enable us to rent out our memories, feelings, and dreams the same way we now rent out our extra bedrooms and the stuff in our closets. In the future, every flight of fancy eventually will be commodified. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker Theory of Everything. This installment is called New York After Rent. This episode was produced by myself with Celeste Lai. It featured Ada Calhoun, Murray Cox, Richard Osijo, Kathy Kirkpatrick, Sarah Shulman, David Levine, Benny,

and the musical genius Taxstar gave us a peek of that new version of Rent. Tax Star had help from Garrick Neal, Ian Jayner, and Stephanie Ruscio. Let's hope the whole thing gets made one day. If you missed the original series, there's more for you to hear, including an essay by the writer Tim Kreider. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, the world's greatest podcast network. Check out all the other shows in our tribe. Everything you need to know is at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia.

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