Thursday, September 29, 2005

 

the sold coast


I'm at the post office on Washington and Montgomery. A fat middle-aged man in front of me is chatting up the rest of the line in between loud conversations on his cellphone. He is real estate law, I soon learn. Oddly enough, I believe him. He does seem to be the personification of some gauche business principle. He is here, he tells an overburdened postal worker, to deal in property. He and his wife (his business partner, we are told) have a line on some houses. I am watching the pineapples on his Hawaiian shirt as he breathes in and out, swaying as if they have been set in motion by a tropical breeze.

I have seen him all over the Downtown -- not this very insect, but different individuals from the same swarm. They stop on the corners of Paulus Hook, point, and take notes. Or they drive by slowly in big cars, windows half down; one man handling the phone, one man steering. The cars don't always have New York plates. But often they do. They love us here, these speculators. We are hot. We've got what they want.

Housing Maps reveals that a one bedroom "parlor" apartment in this part of Jersey City rents for approximately two thousand dollars. Hundreds of miles and several Great Lakes to the west, fifteen hundred bucks gets you four bedrooms in Detroit. On the waterfront. In Grosse Pointe. It is not enough to say -- as if there is a real estate deity holding the scales and devoted to the cause of fair value -- that something is haywire here. But it is legit to ask: are we getting what we're paying for?

Unless those listed apartments in Detroit are booby-trapped and coated with slime, I believe renters there are well within their rights to laugh their asses off at our folly. We pity them for having to put up with the Midwest. But as prices around here double, triple, and quadruple, our knee-jerk provincialism becomes harder to justify. After awhile, it stops looking like admirable, dogged loyalty, and it begins to feel like we're getting played. They've got bookstores, music clubs, and a real arts paper there, which is three better than we've got. I've heard tell that there are a few rock and roll bands there, too.

We've got our Jersey pride, and our proximity to New York City. But Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods aren't proximate to NYC -- they are New York City. As the gap between prices in Jersey City and those in near outerborough neighborhoods continues to close, by rights, we ought to demand a New York City standard of living. And that doesn't mean more cops on Grove Street. It means we shouldn't tolerate aesthetic dysfunction and incoherence. It means there is no longer any excuse for being a municipal basket case.

My new friend who is real estate law isn't selling to me. When he rolls through my neighborhood, peeking out from behind tinted windows, he is scouting for new flats for commuters working in the financial services industry. His ideal buyer works at the World Financial Center, makes a preposterous amount of money working hours that would exhaust a Spartan, and returns home to collapse. His interest in Jersey City will be passing, at best: will the PATH run on time? Can I get an already-made dinner in the small grocery in my condominium complex? Is my view of the City with which I truly identify unimpeded by new construction? Look, I want to stay here, really, I do. But I can't justify paying Manhattan prices to live in a giant banker storage unit. For thirty years, I've waved the Jersey flag as furiously as anybody this side of Thomas Kean. But the Sold Coast is wearing out my patience.

# posted by Spring Chicken 2009 @ 1:58 PM
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