I think Americans have this fixation with the social power of real-estate agents, a class of people I generally find quite distasteful in just about every way. But their necessity comes with urban territory. It is always the argot of these negotiators that set up the expectations of people moving from place to place. We have become accustomed to living in the urban matrix, and these are the agents who inform our vocabulary of locality. There is nothing at all organic about the city or about the urban neighborhood. It's always a market. It's always a commodity. This is a consequence of our desire to have no restrictive covenants. Freedom of association is a corporate, communitarian value. Residents are fungible. I think relatively few people these days consider at length that context of urban alienation which was discussed a lot more in the 50s and 60s when 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' was a metaphor for the collectivist conformist demands of corporate employment and city life vs individual needs of family and home.
The film, like the novel on which it was based, became hugely popular. Historian Robert Schultz argues that the film and the novel are cultural representations of what Adlai Stevenson had described in 1955 as a "crisis in the western world", "collectivism colliding with individualism," the collective demands of corporate organizations against traditional roles of spouse and parent.[4] That increased corporate organization of society, Schultz notes, reduced white-collar workers' (represented by Tom Rath and the other gray-suited "yes men") control over what they did and how they did it as they adapted to the "organized system" described and critiqued by contemporary social critics such as Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte, Jr.[5]
Thus 'gentrification' is unsolvable. It is part and parcel of the larger problem of living on property you don't own (and owning a brownstone on the Upper East Side gives you about zero latitude with respect to what it means to be living on the Upper East Side) and society you don't control. You fit in. You must. You have no choice. If you really wanted that choice you wouldn't live in the city. So I think there's a false sense of freedom that invites people to justify their feelings of violation. But when you live in the city, you should expect to be violated. In fact you should welcome it. That's the skill of being cosmopolitan. You go to the city spots expecting to be invigorated by the random encounter with something slightly alien to your ordinary experience. You wear clothes in an outdoor cafe that will attract a certain attention to you as you observe others observing you. But it is this hope of finding something comfortably strange, an amusement, a diversion, that is part of the risky joy of city life.
I perceive this through the lens of those structures, architectures of thought, if you will, that sustain certain ideas and starve others out. What is it about the 'social geography' or 'cultural geography' of a place that makes it more or less friendly to certain expectations? I think Foucault went batshit in this direction. But I believe that concept that we have no idea of whom we might be sexually compatible with because we only hunt for partners in a very small geographical area. So we actually sexualize neighborhoods and they take on more personal meaning to us than they deserve.
Which is why I used to tell my girlfriend "Pretend we're in Cancun" whenever she made side-eyes at my apartment's relative sloth. Me. I'm immune to Cancun. It's just another place.
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