I
realized I might need to leave New York when I became envious of every
friend who’d managed to escape. A Swiss friend moved back to Lucerne
with her American husband and New York-born child, and I found myself
wishing my husband were from someplace else, so I might have an excuse
to flee, as if an honorable discharge were necessary. But honorable
discharge or not, we had to face facts: We had a baby now, and could no
longer afford to live in the place where we’d both been born.
This
was 2007, and just that week in Park Slope, parents had camped out
overnight to secure spots for their children in the pre-K program they
were zoned for. The schools in our Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect
Lefferts Garden were failing. We heard gunshots every night. (Shouldn’t
failing schools and gunshots come with affordable housing, like in the
old days?) What exactly were we struggling to hold on to? The idea of
New York? Our identities as New Yorkers? What was that worth?
But we also could not imagine living elsewhere. New Yorkers don’t leave New York. It was unthinkable.
I
was born on the Lower East Side in 1973 and dragged to New Jersey at
age 5 when my father changed jobs. My grandparents remained in the
neighborhood, as did our closest family friends, and we visited often
enough that I knew what I was missing, viewing New York as my true
(lost) home through the romanticized eye of the suburban kid who longed
to escape New Jersey.
When I moved back to the Lower East Side —
in 1991, to my college boyfriend’s apartment on E. 11th between B and C,
and later to my own tiny rent-stabilized studio on St. Marks and First
Ave — I returned to a neighborhood that challenged my middle-class,
suburban notions of how a life is to be lived, a neighborhood that
pushed me to consider my assumptions and habits, that made me
uncomfortable in some very necessary ways, forcing me to think, for the
first time, about race and class and privilege.
But in the time I
lived there, the Lower East Side grew more and more gentrified, more and
more homogeneous and unchallenging for the returning kids of the
parents who’d fled for the suburbs in the ’70s. It also became colder
and more anonymous. My apartment building, 76 St. Marks Place, sat
across the street from the building where the poet W. H. Auden had once
lived. In the time I lived there, Auden’s majestic old stoop was torn
down and replaced by a boxy storefront soon filled by a crappy but
expensive bistro.
Our
building was a small, vital community. We knew each other’s names and
took care of each other’s pets and hung out on the stoop in the evenings
and always, always held the door for each other because we were
neighbors. As the cost of living in Manhattan rose and the turnover in
our building increased, vacated apartments got bumped up to market rate
and the new residents, who paid a premium for their cramped tenement
spaces, didn’t learn our names, didn’t sit on the stoop, would let the
door fall closed in your face.
In 1999, I got engaged (to my first
husband, another story entirely). Two hundred and fifty square feet was
too tight a space for two adults and two dogs, but we couldn’t afford
anything bigger in Manhattan. Like many of our friends, we moved to
Brooklyn. By 2001, I didn’t know anyone my own age in Manhattan anymore.
I knew only those in my parents’ circle who still lived in Stuyvesant
Town in their rent-controlled apartments. My friends and I leaving
Manhattan for more affordable Brooklyn (in my case, Prospect Heights)
drove up real estate prices there — and so gentrification crossed the
river and marched eastward. You could say I’m responsible; you could say
I conspired to price myself out of New York. You could say that I was a
part of the very gentrification that so pains me. (Go ahead. Say it.
It’s OK.)
* * *
There’s no place
like New York when you’re in your 20s — or so it seems when you’re in
New York in your 20s. That’s the thing about New York, isn’t it? That’s
the city’s neatest trick, its most readily swallowed propaganda. (And
you have to buy into it to live there, to make all the suffering seem
worth it — noble even. You’re brave to struggle. You’re in New York and
hell yeah, it hurts. Suck it up.) What New York does, better than most
places, is convince you that it is absolutely the best place to be. The
only place to be.
So
there you are in New York. You’re struggling and broke, but you’re
happy. You’re in the center of the universe, right? And you’re so in
love with the city that the sight of the Manhattan skyline as you ride
the Q train over the bridge at night is enough to make you weep. Or
maybe you’re crying because you’re tired from working your barely
living-wage publishing job and then doing freelance work all night to
cover your rent; or maybe you’re crying because New York is an
absolutely brutal place to be a single woman; or maybe you’re crying
because you’re in your 20s and it’s all so beautiful and big and
overwhelming, the city spread out before you like that.
But then
you’re in your early 30s and you’ve met someone and fallen in love, so
now you’re in love with your city and with a person. (Let’s say it’s a
man, because we’re going with me as an example, OK?) So let’s say you’re
me and you’ve met a guy and you’ve still got your low-paying job in
publishing, but now you’re in grad school full-time for your MFA as well
and you’re stressed and busy and running around like a madwoman but
you’re in love and you’re happy and you’ll still hustle to get the
forward-facing window seat on the Manhattan-bound Q train as it crosses
the bridge, just to get that glimpse of the skyline.
And then you
marry that guy, and you get pregnant. Now you’ve got a kid in New York.
Now what? What happens now, my friend, is you drop that low-paying
publishing career because it would have scarcely covered the cost of
childcare, and your husband works 14-hour days, and you stay home with
your kid and stay up all night doing freelance editorial work to try to
bring in some money to pick up the slack.
But the slack never really gets picked up. You’re going broke.
According
to a 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute, the average family of
four needs $93K to survive modestly in New York, the biggest expenses
being housing, childcare and healthcare. (That $93K does not allow for
any vacations, eating out or savings, by the way.) It’s the most
expensive place to live in the United States.
When my husband and I
were born, it was possible to raise a family in New York without
extreme struggle. It was still harder than most places, sure. New York
has never been easy. But it was possible to raise a family in reasonable
comfort without being a corporate lawyer or investment banker or
heiress. To be a middle-class family in New York these days is to be in
eternal survival mode, always scrabbling, always scraping by. What
happens to a city that’s priced itself out of reach of the average
family?
And so we left. We moved to Portland, Ore. We bought into that West Coast dream, backyard chickens and all.
But
always in the back of my mind lies the thought that we failed. That we
could have made it if only we’d fought harder to stay, struggled more,
taken on more debt, more risk. There’s humiliation, in my weaker
moments, when I allow it to creep in, of being one of the families that
was “culled.” Who couldn’t cut it.
* * *
The
thing about leaving New York is that, forever after, people will ask if
you miss it. My default answer, until recently, was no. I missed the
people I’d left behind — my family and friends, the people who’d known
me all my life — but I didn’t miss the city. New York changed, I would
say. The New York I loved no longer exists.
“Do you miss New York?” they ask.
“Yes,”
I say now. Over the years, as I’ve gone back to visit, the sting of
betrayal, of having been priced out of what I thought of as my
birthright — the right to always live and thrive in the place of my
birth — has lessened. The anger fell away and left me with simple loss. I
had been young and open and full of possibility then. Now I am older,
my possibilities narrowed, my life shrunken down to the necessities of
raising small children.
When I go back to visit New York I feel at
home in a particular way that I know I will never feel in Portland, no
matter how lovely it is and how easy a place to live it is. Yes, I miss
New York. I miss New York on the level of bone and blood. I began
writing this essay as an exploration of how I fell out of love with New
York, and what I found in the writing of it is that I never did.
I
love New York, but that love has changed. I love New York as I love the
memory of an ex-boyfriend who treated me badly and then, some years
later, died. Which is to say, my love is worn smooth with nostalgia,
tinged with anger and a bitter sense of lost possibility.
The New
York of my 20s is gone, as my 20s (and, now, 30s) are gone. Those
20-somethings living six to a room in Bushwick or whatever the hell
they’re doing to get by are every bit as enamored of their version of
New York as I was of mine. But I had to leave it, so I could build a
life for my family.
And so I cede New York to you, broke
24-year-olds who still find validation in the struggle; and to you,
obscenely wealthy bankers for whom the city’s been remade. You can have
your New York. I’ll make do with the one I carry with me still. If you
need me, you’ll find me, my husband, and our two kids in Portland, Ore.,
growing asparagus and tending our backyard chickens.
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