The bar, the space
I saw a hateread recently that I will not be linking, but I will describe it. A young couple, probably somewhere in their 20s, moves from San Francisco to a gentrifying neighborhood in New York. They have enough money to rent a place that is larger than they strictly need, which in contemporary housing-strapped New York is a bit of a feat. Then they pied-pipered a bunch of their friends to the same neighborhood, sometimes even the same building. They did this a few clever ways: by leasing their spare room for temporary periods, by leasing a completely separate 4-bedroom apartment(!!!) and filling it with their friends, by dragging friends to apartment showings nearby. They named their fledgling clique, called it a “community,” and laid out some action steps to grow it henceforth.
Of course, this was picked up on as a flex of massive financial privilege, a sign of significant gentrification in a part of town that could hardly withstand it; and the authors, defiant, doubled down on their becoming the “main character” for a day or three.
Most things about this are, to be clear, bad. The authors are, at best, ignorant about both their privilege and the benefits that come along with being mobile & in your mid-twenties. As they grow older, it will become harder for them to resolve the more significant questions of whom is able to belong, especially as people grow older and have kids. It will also become harder for them to deal with questions of leveraged power as people prove themselves out as bad actors. (My own friend group is still reckoning with the existence of multiple serial abusers in our broader circle.) It is far easier for them and their friends to address these questions at the age of 25. The whole thing is naïve at best and severely problematic at worst.
Don’t we all want our friends to be near us, though? While the process itself is highly suspect, these people aren’t wrong to desire & build conscious, in-person community. We all want that. What they’re doing speaks to a lot of the more collectivist values that already exist in European cities – and that Americans wish they had. Plus, regardless of what you think of their moral character or naïveté, surely some of the connections they are making right now will last them well into adulthood. That’s important!
I know many people who work similarly hard on the ground in their cities to attract jobs, kindred spirits, and to gather in communal spirit. On my own end, I took photos of “for rent” signs in my neighborhood in 2007, too, and would send them to my friends. It paid off: at one point I knew seven people on my block, and dozens in my neighborhood. Many people still have keys to my house. Someone is currently housesitting there while I’m in Marseille. I FaceTimed them to discover another person was crashing in my basement. And I’m not even mad about it!
I went to a wine bar the other day, perched on a balcony overlooking a group of friends that had clearly known each other for years. I counted nine people roll in over the course of the evening, hugging like they had known each other forever. I thought how many friend groups form early in Europe and stick together through high school and college, and how comparatively infrequent this is in the states. Here, cities are small; countries are the size of individual states. It’s easy to commute, and it’s easier to put down roots. That all played out in front of me for an hour or so.
While I watched these people talking, I thought about the routines that I had developed for myself in Chicago. Like the authors of the bad piece, I cook standing meals for anyone who wants to join them. Like the authors of the bad piece, I have multiple standing dates with close people to play games, go out, talk about life, hold space, and envision a better future for ourselves. At the same time, I bristle at naming (or, god help us, branding) my community, throwing my resources at housing in an already cool neighborhood, and even calling what I’m doing a community in the first place. “Community” is too charged of a term to make any sense anymore. “Community” can mean “cult,” “gentrified in-group,” or “fake coworker family,” depending on what the hidden meaning is. This is just my life? It’s whatever it needs to be at the time.
I have some shreds of compassion for the authors of the bad piece, because I see bits of myself in them. But they are also making quite a few mistakes, and I wish they had read the room and understood more about the ills of incorrect American rugged puritanical individualism before they decided to act like thought leaders about ending it. Still: gosh, at least someone is trying to end it.