Debating the Qualities of a Changing New York

Kevin Baker penned a scathing missive about the changes transforming New York City. The dramatic nature of the article is summed up in its headline and subhead: titling the article "The Death of a Once Great City: The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence."

Baker explains that he's lived in New York for 40 years, but the recent changes in the city's character are unprecedented in his experience: "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."

In a pointed response, Ben Adler takes Baker's points to task. Noting that Baker's work treads familiar ground, Adler has plenty of responses at his disposal.

"Only someone who neglects to venture the tiniest bit off the beaten path, where New York is more diverse and alive than ever, would think it’s truly dead," according to Adler.

Adler's most salient point to the discussion of growing cities and gentrifying neighborhoods, recalls the large forces that control the evolution of cities. "The assertion that New York is particularly adrift also mistakes national and global phenomena, chiefly capitalism and growing inequality, for something distinctive to New York and within its own control."