THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF NEW YORK CITY

A searching look at how New York changed from a place of affordable (if tiny) walk-ups to a playground for the ultrawealthy.

A sadly characteristic moment in the transformation of New York into a byword for unaffordability was a moment of extreme excess: In 2011, a Russian billionaire paid $88 million for a 10-room apartment for his 22-year-old daughter who would only use it when she was visiting the city. That’s at a far remove from Busà’s experience, arriving from an already expensive Berlin to find affordable if somewhat timeworn digs in Greenwich Village—but then, when chased out by raising rates, to move from one spot after another in Brooklyn, which itself has priced most of the middle class out of the market. The result is that in 2014, “almost 60,000 people filed applications for 105 affordable units in Greenpoint,” and, the next year, “over 80,000 people found themselves applying for 38 newly built affordable units in Brooklyn.” New York is now a brand as much as a place, an evolution that, by Busà’s account, began in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and has been carried out through several mayoral administrations. The latest, he charges, led by the putatively left-populist Bill de Blasio, has been distressingly consistent with the policies of the Bloomberg and Giuliani years. Busà locates much of the change in the Bloomberg decade in power, when nearly half of New Yorkers paid more than 30 percent of their incomes, and one-fifth of them as much as 75 percent, for the privilege of living there. Despite de Blasio’s “mainstream curriculum,” Busà holds that meaningful reform is possible, that “the elite city is a policy choice, not some inevitable God-given mandate.”

The author’s argument would benefit from more specific policy recommendations, but it still offers much for urban activists and disaffected Gothamites to chew on.