What would the community think?

Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would be moving nearly 300 unhoused men out of a vacant luxury hotel on the Upper West Side that had been converted into temporary housing during the pandemic. The decision came in response to intense pressure from a group of residents who claimed that the men’s presence in the neighborhood, where home values average $1.2 million and the median household income of $123,840 is 91 percent higher than the citywide median, posed some kind of danger.

“People are generally concerned to go outside now,” one resident told The New York Times. “The fear is palpable.” These residents, who in a private Facebook group wondered if they should start acting “super aggressive” and “very violently” toward the hotel residents or perhaps use wasp spray on them, did not see themselves as posing any such danger.

The city then began the process of what one advocate called “domino displacement”: moving people from temporary housing and shelters in order to make room for the newly placeless men. It was a cruel mess. People were rightly pissed. Come Tuesday of this week, the mayor abruptly backtracked on his original decision to oust the men from the hotel, though even that feels temporary. More cruel mess.
What struck me while following this story was the language of the campaign to evict those men. The lawyer representing the nonprofit that was hastily formed for this purpose—a former aide to Rudy Giuliani and, incredibly, a vice chair of the New York Legal Aid Society, which was itself threatening to sue the city in order to stop the eviction—greeted the initial news of the relocation as a “testament to community organizing.”

As my colleague Apoorva Tadepalli wrote this week, this is the rhetorical sleight of hand of liberal Nimbyism, and it shows how the language of community can be—and long has been—deployed for violent ends. “Slippery terms like neighborhood and community are quietly and expertly carved out to exclude the people—nonwhite or ill or poor—who reduce property values,” she wrote. “Evictions driven by wealthy residents and property owners become actions taken for the community, and for neighbors, rather than against them. The community ‘came together’ rather than was torn apart.”

I’ll stop summarizing here and just leave you to read the whole thing, since Apoorva’s work on these questions of community, belonging, and the prerogatives of capital speaks so clearly for itself.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor