In “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West”, author Neil Smith discusses the concept of gentrification and how certain neighborhoods have developed over time. He describes how certain areas have evolved from run down and low income neighborhoods, occupied by working-class residents to affluent communities, dominated by high end fashion boutiques and upper-class citizens. Throughout the text, Smith parallels the gentrification of New York City to the “Frontier Myth” or the “Taming the Wild West” in order to represent the attitudes of the residents of New York City, as well as the “pioneers” who claim to have been the first settlers who started the transformation of these neighborhoods. The frontier myth is so powerful in that it, “makes the new city explicable in terms of old ideologies”, and even more goes as far as to, “rationalizes social differentiation and exclusion as natural and inevitable”. Smith puts forth that two industries defined the new urban frontier of the 1980s: the real-estate industry, and the “culture ” industry (art dealers, patrons, gallery owners, artists, designers, critics, writers and performers who “converted urban destruction into ultra chic.”). As a three-year resident of the Lower East Side, it is so odd grappling with the notion that not so long ago there were a sizable group of people the saw it as an undiscovered territory marked by danger and the unknown.
In reading Smith’s composition, I was taken aback by the notion that, “there was a strong ideological objection to the concept of relief itself and a belief that the rigors of unemployment were a necessary and salutary discipline for the working class” (67). With such societal dispositions amongst those of privilege & in power, it is no surprise that poverty was an inescapable condition. These attitudes reminded me of Barbara Ehrenreichs efforts in her book Nickel and Dimed, in which she sets out to examine the fundamental misunderstanding of American poverty, namely, that it is curable by employment, and the complexities of low-wage labor. Ehrenreich leaves her home, takes the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepts whatever jobs she was offered moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota. While one might think someone who has a Ph.D. like Ehrenreich could easily hold down a low-wage job, this quickly proves not to be the case, as no job is “unskilled,” and each required concentration and learning new terms, tools, and skills. Ultimately, Ehrenreich does not manage to find stability and longevity in any of the locations, despite pushing herself to borderline dangerous/unhealthy limits.
The complicated truth Ehrenreich investigation reveals is that many of the nation’s poorest citizens remain poor no matter how hard they work, no matter how many jobs they hold. They sweat, labor and toil, running on little sleep, eating mostly junk food, living in overcrowded conditions, and having to support young children just to survive day by day. This state is further exacerbated die to ever-rising rents at seemingly unpredictable times. Although Ehrenreich trials take place between 1998-2000, there is still significant overlap in mentality between upper echelons of society described in Neil Smiths, “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West”.
Amy Starecheski “Who Deserves Housing? The Battle for East Thirteenth Street” opens with the first-person voices of squatters in the six squatted buildings on East 13th Street. This diverse bunch of people moved into left-behind spaces in the Lower East Side. They fashioned a community, built of their own imagination, connecting green space, community gardens, and the buildings they rehabilitated. These squatters sought legal title by virtue of their ten years of labor and occupation of the buildings, arguing that their history constituted them as a legitimate group that could claim urban space and collectively own inalienable property. Yet, despite their ardent efforts in court, ultimately their case was lost. An interesting dynamic arises in that the squatters were challenging private property, yet “some were dreaming of homeownership”. Therefore, similarities arise between the argument of some of the squatters and John Locke. In “Of Property”, Locke asserts that “Labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to”. Likewise, it was the improvements and overall labor the squatters put into these East 13th Street building for so long that they felt legitimized their clam.
I’m glad you saw the connection to Locke! I was hoping someone would mention that. Your connection to Ehrenreich’s book is also interesting insofar as it demonstrates that low-wage workers are necessary to the functions of our everyday lives, but are also imprisoned in low-wages and precarious circumstances to satisfy the growth mentality of those who already have plenty. Consider how hard it was even to get a $15 minimum wage for student-workers at NYU! So how does that translate to urban space? It seems to me that Smith is showing us that those who make our economy function — or those who are considered surplus labor during austere times like the 1980s — are treated as disposable, criminalized, considered unworthy of decent shelter. They are also treated in many ways as Locke treated the First Nations who occupied this land — their labor was not real labor, their humanity was not real humanity, their right to have the necessities of life was not as important as those of the colonists. The frontier myth is powerful, isn’t it? But does it have to be so?