The death of a once great city

[link to harpers.org (secure)]

I just read this and noticed the same thing all along the coast of california. I also see the same things happening here from seattle to everett. Once thriving yet seedy communities transformed into starbucks and high end stores selling overpriced shit we dont need.

It of course, has an eat the rich undertome but is well written and relatable to any formerly great city.

(way less the 50%)

New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.