The Sixties Come Back to Life in "Everything Is Now"(newyorker.com) |
The Sixties Come Back to Life in "Everything Is Now"(newyorker.com) |
I keep seeing this in various places. The rise of the "College Music" scene in Athens, Georgia during the 80's has also been in part attributed to the cheap rent in the student ghettos (typical of many college towns).
Growing up in Kansas City, the neighborhoods around the Kansas City Art Institute were also low-rent. Child (impressionable) me remembers walking through the neighborhood at night, let by my mom, for the free Friday night film ("Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", "Fantastic Planet" to name a few I recall). There was a large chicken leg sculpture, perhaps 8' tall in one yard that always spooked me to walk past. Some kind of sculpture of broken bits of mirror and glass made another small lot look like an alien set from "Star Trek"....
We've collectively destroyed this concept for the next generation of young people and we need to desperately course correct.
Sorry, turns out it's economically way more important for the richest two dozen people in the world to turn all of our collective resources into computer programs that will tell them how special and cool and inventive and totally not "the man" they are. Anything that gets in the way of that must be destroyed.
If people can effectively speculate on something in a leveraged high liquidity environment, they will, and prices will go up. Look at the terrifyingly overbuilt real estate in China with pricing comparable to NYC or London and huge vacancy rates.
Because after a certain point I realized- lots of places are cheap (sure slightly less now) but not everywhere is going to produce some kind of large scale cultural movement.
The one that a lot of people seem to know is Detroit- for the last 20 years everyone has been saying wow, lots of artists, wow, you can buy a house for $10 or whatever, but that hasn't been enough.
Sadly a part of me believes that maybe physically localized culture isn't a thing anymore with the internet. Being able to make beats / tiktoks anywhere is too much of a counter-force to people being in the same physical space, no matter how much people seem to love the idea- and this is the true boring reason why this doesn't happen anymore, not that *blame the boomers* rent has gone up.
San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out in the 1990s (first slowly, then much more quickly -- it's all long gone now. Apologies to anyone who would like to believe otherwise :).
This is also true of New York, on approximately the same timeline.
In the early 2000s, Austin and Portland tried to take up the creative mantle, with some success. Both are struggling to maintain it now, for the same reasons but on a slower timeline.
Cheap rents are a prerequisite, but there are other sparks required for a place to catch fire.
I don't know of any US cities that are doing anything interesting today. Not at the scale of SF and NYC certainly, but also not even at the scale of 20ya Portland and Austin.
I think part of the issue is that rent is not adequately cheap in any US cities now that have critical mass plus tolerable living conditions (climate, economy, politics). This worries me.
Outsiders hate being excluded though so the barriers all get knocked down. In face our modern social norm considers any kind of exclusion a moral failure, even excluding people who dislike the social norms. Maybe this results in a more efficient (perhaps even more pleasant) society but the cost is unique local culture.
(But I reckon cheap rent, leisure time and a laissez faire attitude to drugs are almost always in the mix).
I've watched interviews in which veteran musicians from one city in Texas describe how things developed in the 80s - it was all made possible by rock bottom rents and tons of empty warehouse space. I think the situation was similar across much of the US. Space was cheap enough to allow for low-profit activities and businesses to take root. The stakes were very low compared to today.
An analogous situation emerged in other places (in part for different reasons) such as the former East Berlin. I would guess similar circumstances also emerged in the UK around the same time - perhaps someone here can confirm.
Whilst e.g. Quentin Tarrantino outlined the opposing theory of the witch hunt in the Manson murder trial and its death of the hippy culture.
But I fail to see the connection to now. Social awareness killed by the Nazis again? Or did they overdo it by cancel culture?
Seriously though I have been musing as to how the children of a generation get to define their parent's generation, more or less wrest if from them, in film, etc. Sometimes (often) they take a fairly dim view of the world they grew up in, a dim view of their parents. (And maybe now I am channelling a film like "The Graduate", for example.)
It's referred to as a nostalgia movie, which on one hand seems fitting if you've watched it, but on the other hand, it was written in 1972 about a period in time ten years older. Would a movie screenplay written today by a 28 year old depicting being an 18 year old in 2015 be seen as nostalgic in the same way?
Something not 'polite' to talk about.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a surge in Nostalgia for 80's/90's Cold War era, Russia is the enemy culture.
Like 'Red Dawn', etc...
Agreed that being two hours from Atlanta is too far for high relevance.
If it might make money, it'll get amplified.
We were drowning in crappy corporate driven pop prior to that for years (with bright spots like techno, industrial, etc.)
Nostalgia for a time in the past, but bad things can trigger feelings from the past.
So not Nostalgia for "we really miss when Russia was great".
More like Nostalgia for 99 Luft Balloons, the song, that also came out at same time. And was part of Cold War Culture.
Edit: More specifically in terms of cost of living anyways.
Then we got Uber and Google, and our nationally-cheap housing prices have jumped up closer to the norm - which is too high for the bottom half of earnings population.
Indianapolis has been going through the same thing (we are getting some of the overflow from the housing crunch in Nashville, etc.)
I snagged a house at a decent price last year after looking for over a decade.
There's NOTHING that can't ruin.
Get out of the cities...
This is a terrible public policy if it's the plan. And while I think selfishly it might be better for individuals if they did, I don't think it's actually helping anyone. Cities used to be a place where you made a life for yourself and could earn more and innovate more than you could in rural/suburban areas. Now it's a luxury to live in one and that doesn't bode well for the future of the country.
Canada is seeing that right now where so many people from big cities flooded small towns. All that has happened is something to the tune of 200% appreciation in small housing prices over the last decade with almost no appreciation in wages. It's crushed housing for the smaller towns and the individuals that lived there. It's truly just a kick the can down the road approach.
We were discussing "one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: cheap rents".
Apparently we now need to discuss another crucial factor notably absent in small towns: "density of and proximity to other creative types"
Not to mention, it's more inefficient to sprawl.
There are bad actors in all of these (banks caused the financial crisis and agents are probably paid more than they're worth for $1M+ houses in CA), but the biggest root cause that's missing from your comment is NIMBYs blocking new development almost everywhere.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/private-investment-in-art...
It was everyday people. Not the 1%.
Customer support, sales, accounting, HR, IT, etc., all don't need to go into the office most of the time. Why force them? It also opens up the job market to a larger pool, cuts health care and child care cost, insurance, etc.
Instead I am seeing developers who would rather build an upper-middle class neighborhood, not a starter home one, because they can get a much larger profit for only a little more effort/material-cost.
I suppose when they are finally unable to sell them they'll start addressing starter homes. I have no idea who could still be buying all of these though. (Perhaps people leaving CA like I did after retiring — they're not going to like the property tax rate though.)
Expecting starter homes to be a category of real estate that is newly built seems naive. Starter homes are some combination of older, smaller, bad location which makes them more affordable. Why wouldn't real estate developers satisfy the demand at the high end before moving down market? Seems like the easiest way to turn a profit to me. Rational actors etc
So in the long run, I’d expect that developers are really funneling money into the lower class by overbuilding upper class housing, when they eat the losses on their poor planning.
I’m also fairly positive a 30-year old upper middle class home makes for a fairly good starter home
You don't need to live in the city to earn more and innovate.
Warren Buffet didn't move to Wall Street and he did ok...
I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.