Where once there were peep shows, now there’s a W Hotel.
The last two remaining strip clubs in Boston’s notorious “Combat Zone” may soon host their final lap dances, says Boston magazine. The neighborhood, once a garish carnival of smut, has fully upscaled. The newest hot spot is a swanky bar at the W that actually boasts design touches paying homage to the street’s bygone sex dens.
We all know this story. America’s urban sleaze centers have zipped up and retreated into the night. The Combat Zone was flushed out, the Sunset Strip sanitized, Times Square Giuliani’d. But almost as soon as they were gone, nostalgia bloomed. When Times Square’s last seedy strip club closed two years ago, New York magazine lamented that its streets had been “completely lost to Bubba Gumps and T.G.I. Fridays.” One poll showed 65 percent of New Yorkers preferred the Times Square of hookers and skin flicks. What could a neighborhood of peep shows, porno and prostitutes possibly offer a city?
The fact that we have the luxury of entertaining that question shows how orderly cities have become. “Now we’ve got great places where you can plug in your computer,” quips Josh Alan Friedman. As a journalist in the ’70s and ’80s, Friedman covered Times Square. “That type of lawless, sexual Wild West, a lot of people miss it. It was renegade, almost like a political statement.”
Governments don’t like renegade political statements. So, since sex-oriented businesses are protected as free speech, cities have increasingly turned to zoning and draconian regulations to disperse them — and sometimes to make operating them more trouble than it’s worth. “People say, ‘Hey, it’s adult entertainment, do anything you want to them. Regulate the hell out of them,” says Angelina Spencer, director of the Association of Club Executives, an adult-nightclub trade group. “But you have to think about the ramifications for that. We’re on a slippery slope.”
Spencer cites a new Missouri law that bans alcohol and strip clubs, sets closing time at midnight (prime time for adult entertainment) and makes it a crime for performers to come within 6 feet of a man. Last month, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that towns can restrict smut simply because it’s accessible close-by in New York. And last year, Louisville, Ky., banned nude dancing citywide, a move that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Welcome to another dreary winter’s day in your newly nudity-free city,” moaned LouisvilleKY.com. “This is not the America my dad grew up in,” declared the local blog Louisville’s Strange Brew.
There’s something about the death of urban tawdriness that gives some people existential agita. It’s been happening ever since VCRs turned every living room into the Pussycat Theater, dragging sleaze off the streets with an assist from politicians and developers. It’s bubbled up through the resurgence of titty-tassled neo-burlesque shows, scattered attempts at porn-theater preservation, a “Deep Throat” documentary, and dewey-eyed paeans to the bad old days. The Times Square visitors center even recently installed three genuine peep booths, complete with the refurbished neon “Peep-o-Rama” sign from the neighborhood’s last peep emporium, shuttered in 2002.
Of course, you won’t see nudes in those peep booths. Instead, you’ll feast your eyes on New York Times articles chronicling the neighborhood’s transformation. Like the bar at the W, it offers a stylized approximation of the scummy experience, without the weird smell. Or, from another perspective, makes “a mockery of what New York City is supposed to represent,” according to the New York Observer.
But what New York and other cities represent, sex-wise, isn’t so cut and dried. While the sticky-floor triple-X joints have declined, chains like Babeland and the Pleasure Chest have thrived, selling high-end dildos and in well-lit shops to a very different clientele. Yelp reviewers draw a stark line between “sex-positive” establishments like the Smitten Kitten, a sex-toy boutique in Minneapolis, and the “neon-signed sleaze-baskets, where you kinda feel you could catch something just by browsing.” As urban amenities of all types have upscaled, from gyms to coffee shops to cupcake emporiums, so too have sex stores, offering a gentler experience at a premium price.
These venues provide a valuable service, especially to women. They’re not degrading or leering, and they preach the gospel of sexual progressivism. But they also emphasize how startlingly appropriate our cities have become, at least outwardly. When we say we miss the old sleazy neighborhoods, we’re not really mourning the sex, which was always for a small number of men anyway. We’re talking about exactly what the respectable sex shops can’t offer: bawdy distastefulness, throngs of misfits, an unapologetic lack of decorum. These were zones where dysfunctional behavior was embraced. “I used to think of it as a loner’s paradise,” says Friedman of Times Square. “You could be all alone and yet you were in the midst of this teeming humanity.”
Mike Edison, who wrote about Times Square for Screw magazine in the 1980s and who just released a book about American pornography, agrees. “I think it’s important to remember that 42nd Street wasn’t just peep shows and porn. There were grindhouse movies, kung-fu double features, blaxploitation. You could see ‘Shogun Assassin’ and ‘Five Fingers of Death’ for a dollar. There was Playland, a big arcade with pinball machines. It was a great place for a juvenile delinquent like me to hang out.”
Jonathan Tudan, who lived in the Combat Zone in 1969, says there was “an excitement about it. The minute you stepped onto Washington Street you got a jolt of electricity.” These neighborhoods represent a particular fantasy of city life, one where you need to be streetwise to survive. “I learned not to be intimidated by anybody,” says Tudan, who moved to the Combat Zone an 18-year-old virgin from Connecticut. He managed an apartment building there, living rent-free among the sailors and prostitutes, and occasionally scuffling with johns. By the time he moved out, he had the respect of the street and was dating one of the top strippers in Boston.
Old photographs reflect this fantasy: sneering kids drinking in cars, wild-eyed preachers screaming about Jesus, suggestive titles on blazing marquees. Times Square looked like an awesome nightmare. Why did people go there? “Why do people go to horror films?” asks Anthony Bianco, author of “Ghosts of 42nd Street.” “Because it transcends ordinary experience.” Friedman echoes that: “For me, it was like going through the looking glass. Times Square was a world that was upside down and in another dimension.” It was bizarro Disney, a fabrication that existed in the imagination as much as it did in real life. “The grim actualities of the Deuce in the 1980s seemed to matter less than the idea of it as the ultimate antistreet,” writes Bianco in his book.
The sex-oriented businesses that are succeeding in cities today do exactly the opposite. They bring sex down to earth, demystify it and make it easy to explain and digest. There are his-and-hers oral-sex seminars and intimacy-inspiring yoga classes. There are trained professionals on hand to help you decide which butt plug is right for you in a totally non-sleazy way.
And there are strip clubs: Costco-size franchises like Scores and 4Play, with VIP rooms and valet service. There are pole-dancing classes and strip-tease lessons. And there’s the new burlesque scene, which is more like a pantomime of an old-timey art form than what we normally think of as sexual. “I’ve been to the new burlesque places down in the East Village, but the girls are all comedians,” says Friedman. “I think it’s great what they’re trying to do, bring back some of the old burlesque. But they’re doing it for a laugh.”
Could these two worlds, the old Peep-o-Rama and the new Pleasure Chest, coexist in the same city? Of course. In fact, they do — there’s still plenty of filthy behavior going on. It’s just not out in the open anymore. Now sex clubs and orgies are something to find through Google, and prostitution is moving online. But it’s hard to imagine unabashed sleaze in concentrated neighborhoods as part of the new urban order. And maybe it shouldn’t be part of it. It wasn’t all fun and games. “People got hurt,” says Tudan. “Most of the folks who actually lived in the neighborhood, they don’t miss it.” Sex workers, some of them children, endured horrific abuse. And for women in general, these could be mean and outright hostile places. “If these girls had a choice to get a job as a secretary, they would have done that,” says Tudan. (You’ll notice that all the historians quoted on this topic, both official and armchair, are men.)
But the nostalgia persists. It seems like every time a new Rem Koolhaas tower rises, it inspires, along with the oohs and ahhs, a little wistfulness for the old grunge. “You did not have to actually roll in the gutter to take comfort in knowing it was there,” writes Bianco, “affronting bourgeois pieties by its very existence.” And if you did want to roll in it, no shame on you.
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, in Beijing, you can go to bed transit-free one night and wake up the next morning to a new subway rumbling underneath your bedroom.
On Dec. 31, the Chinese capital opened a new subway line and greatly expanded two others. This year it plans to open four more. A total of eight new lines are under construction. The city started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.
Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive. Los Angeles’s Westside subway extension is set to be finished in 2036. Just five years ago, New York’s Second Avenue Subway was supposed to be done by 2020, a goal that seems laughable now.
And while it’s not fair to compare American projects to China’s — where protections for workers and the environment are flimsy, and tight construction schedules can sacrifice workmanship — there are nonetheless several factors that conspire to keep American mass-transit projects in a state of perpetual limbo. Here are seven culprits, listed roughly in order of guilt.
1. Bureaucracy
Most big transit projects are partially funded through the Federal Transit Administration, which awards merit-based grants to cities in the president’s annual budget. These grants fund all sorts of projects, from a busway in Hartford, Conn., to a commuter train in Honolulu. But before the FTA decides who gets a chunk, each project has to prove its cost-effectiveness. That means providing the federal government with ridership estimates, possible alternatives and all manner of other analyses that can take years to complete.
Many of these studies are worthwhile. But Martin H. Duke, editor of Seattle Transit Blog, says it shows how government pinches pennies with transit even as it spends wastefully elsewhere. “Whether you’re of the right or the left, you can identify very large budget items that aren’t that valuable,” says Duke, “large enough to fully fund the fantasies of every transit advocate in the nation in a couple of years.”
2. Lack of Funding
The 2012 federal budget allocated $1.9 billion for large-scale transit construction, and the sad fact is, a couple billion simply doesn’t buy what it used to. The central link in Seattle’s light-rail system alone cost $2.4 billion. New York’s Second Avenue Subway is budgeted at $1.7 billion per kilometer.
Part of the problem are these costs themselves. The Atlantic Cities recently examined why New York’s new subway line will be the most expensive in the world. (It’s not because it’ll be the best.) But the other half of the funding problem is the process by which it’s done. Federal funds doled out on a yearly basis keep work from speeding forward. Cities and states are expected to match those funds, and they sometimes refuse. And an enormous project years in the making can be killed by a single budget hawk. Some traffic-choked cities are trying to get around these obstacles with innovative funding solutions. Los Angeles’ 30/10 Initiative (recently rebranded “America Fast Forward”) seeks to complete 30 years’ worth of transit projects in a single decade by borrowing on taxes its residents have already committed to paying in the future. And just a few days ago, L.A. started talking with the Chinese government about possibly investing in the city’s subway extension, apparently hoping that some of that Beijing magic will rub off.
3. Politics
It only takes one politician to gum up a world-class transit plan. “If God himself, and Vishnu, Mohammed and Einstein said, ‘Build this route this way with these stops!’ politicians would still change it around for political reasons,” says land-use expert Roger Valdez. Voters want a subway stop on their block, so their elected officials fight for it, whether or not it really makes sense from an urban planning perspective. Or they don’t want the subway coming near them. Or they want light rail but not a bus. Or they want an airport link, but they want it to go around their neighborhood rather than through it. “Our system allows far too much input from John and Jane Six-Pack,” says Valdez. And every time politicians change up the plans, engineers must head back to the drawing board. “We end up planting seeds that, like a child would, we dig up the next morning to see whether it’s grown yet.”
4. Existing Infrastructure
“Gas mains, steam pipes, electric conduits, sewers, cables, sub-basements, and underground freshets add to the difficulties” of building a subway tunnel. That’s how Modern Mechanix magazine explained why New York’s new subway line was taking so long to build — the Sixth Avenue line, in 1937. Seventy-five years later, it’s even more crowded down there, with more pipes and gas mains and basements, plus newer infrastructure like cable TV lines and fiber-optic networks. “The projects are more complicated than similar projects might have been back then,” says Yonah Freemark, editor of the Transport Politic. “Compared to half a century ago, there’s a lot more to deal with.”
5. Mismanagement
This one should either be higher on this list or not on it at all, depending where you live. But for some cities, mismanagement — or outright corruption — is the biggest impediment to getting stuff done. In San Francisco, where a recent audit of the city’s transit agency found lax oversight of construction efforts, transit projects are averaging 529 days behind schedule.
6. Addiction to Cars
Just ask any bike-lane advocate: Try to replace a lane of traffic with a different mode of transportation and your city’s drivers will threaten to self-immolate. The light-rail project that will connect Seattle with nearby Bellevue is a perfect example. “The train will use two lanes of the freeway bridge,” says Martin Duke. “The state DOT is insisting that Sound Transit replace those two lanes before allowing construction to begin on the rail line. That’s pushing things back by years.” Simply put: Drivers’ demands often prevail, and the mediocre transit that results (streetcars that get shunted into traffic rather than having their own dedicated lane, for instance) only erodes the public’s enthusiasm for more of it.
7. Basic Fairness
Good public transit is a cherished ideal of many progressives. Ironically, progressive values can end up making transit construction take longer. Part of the reason we don’t build as fast as China does is because we have workers’ unions, ADA compliance rules, and environmental concerns that require time-consuming impact studies. “If we didn’t have to put elevators everywhere and we imported non-union Mexican immigrants to do the work, you could build a lot more of everything,” says Duke, who hastens to add that he’s not in favor of that. Good, affordable transit is a human rights issue too, though, and in many ways the common link in our desire for healthier, less wasteful cities that serve everyone equally.
What’s the best thing in your city?
Which mani-pedi place represents the pinnacle of nail care according to the aggregated opinions of hundreds of people ranking all the mani-pedi places on a scale of one to five?
Thanks to online tools like Yelp, you can now know the answer to questions like that. These crowdsourcing tools have transformed the way we experience cities, often for the better — they help us streamline our lives and avoid wasting time with subpar businesses. It’s now easier than ever to avoid bad meals and dingy hotel rooms. Jeff Howe, author of “Crowdsourcing,” sums it up nicely: “I’m a guy with three jobs and the parent of nettlesome little children,” he says. “I don’t really have time for a lot of bad experiences.”
But for all Yelp’s virtues, pre-screening every experience can inhibit us, too. These days, many of us wouldn’t think of trying a new hairstylist or hotel without first checking others’ impressions online. “There’s something about Yelp that creates hesitancy,” says Howe. “Before going to a trivia night at an East Village bar I check out the bar’s Yelp page to see what others have said about it, what it looks like, what types of people go there — what I’m essentially looking for is, does this look like me? Do people like me go here?”
I know exactly what he means. I pre-screen everything these days. Usually I’m trying to avoid feeling awkward — I’ve ended up at too many bars where I’m the only patron who remembers life before cable. Last year I decided not to attend the annual Time’s Up! “Fountain Ride” after a YouTube video of one of the past rides convinced me I’d feel insufficiently artsy.
But am I dodging uncomfortable situations, or missing out on great ones? “The efficiency that the Web has brought has downsides,” says Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture. “On balance, it works against happy accidents.” Tenner calls this counter-serendipity: when preconceived notions prevent lucky flukes. For instance, a poorly rated restaurant on Yelp might have a few die-hard fans — outliers who, for whatever reason, love the place. Their reviews might even be posted. But many of us go with the general consensus, writing off anywhere with a three-star ranking or less. “Is it possible that a place you really would have liked doesn’t have many positive comments, but you would have been one of the few positive ones?” asks Tenner.
Even if the ranking doesn’t deter us, by the time we do go to the club or the restaurant, we’ve sometimes seen so much of the place online that we’ve basically pre-experienced it. Having online access to so many venues might make us more adventurous in one sense, prompting us to try things we never would have tried or even have known about. But in another sense, it becomes a less-adventurous adventure, certified for us by hundreds of others who’ve already checked it out, assured us we’ll like it, testified to its quality, cleanliness and safety.
This isn’t the same, by the way, as choosing a restaurant based on a review in the paper. Now everything is reviewed — every bar, every corner store — everywhere, all the time. And if Yelp’s popularity is any indication (the site posted its 20 millionth review last July) our need to check these reviews before doing anything is becoming a borderline addiction. When you can no longer have a drink at a bar that wasn’t first vetted by 83 strangers, spontaneity — which, in some ways, is one of the best things about life in the city — is lost.
An example: A trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C. is preceded by a scan of its 1,400 Yelp reviews, from which you’ll learn some useful information: be prepared for a wait, there are vegetarian options. But you’ll also learn that if you sit at the counter you can chat with the cooks if it’s slow, that the TVs play footage of Barack Obama’s visit, and that the crowd swells with concertgoers whenever a show at the nearby 9:30 Club ends. Supplementing these descriptions are 431 photos of the space, the food, the cooks, the servers. No unanticipated curve balls await you. The scene has been thoroughly canvassed in advance.
Ben’s is an institution that survived the riots of the ’60s to become a D.C. landmark. On Yelp, it’s just another a three-and-a-half-star chili-dog joint. And in some ways, this is one of Yelp’s greatest services: providing a reality check for legendary places hawking average products at insane prices. (Canter’s Deli and the Russian Tea Room also get this treatment.) In fact, in a lot of ways, Yelp is a godsend for good businesses — it’s a meritocratic rating system that rewards quality service with a relative lack of bias.
But quantifying every service and product with a one-through-five ranking can also discourage innovation. One study showed that an extra star on Yelp can boost a business’s revenues by 9 percent. When your cumulative score is worth that much, doing something unorthodox that some people won’t like isn’t necessarily in your best interest. Economists call this the high-level equilibrium trap. Innovating can sometimes mean a brief period of declining quality as you struggle to smooth out the kinks — not such a big deal when you’re only being written about by a professional critic every few years, but a very big risk when you’re being reviewed by your customers on an almost daily basis and those reviews will drastically affect your bottom line.
Even just getting a good score isn’t enough — you need lots of them. “I’m looking for volume,” says Howe, describing how he uses Yelp to find things in the city. “I need at least 35 or 40 reviews. If there are 40 reviews and 4.85 stars, I know that’s going to be good” — a tactic that ends any promise of finding an undiscovered gem.
“And to actually choose … and then to stop looking is to limit your experience of the Internet,” writes cultural critic Lee Siegel in his Internet-skeptical book, “Against the Machine.” Siegel’s talking about the experience of buying watches online in that excerpt. But you could replace the word “Internet” with the word “city,” and the theory would hold up. Today, even a word-of-mouth recommendation can feel insufficient. We want to cross-check it with others’ opinions online, and search for additional options that we might like better. Life in the city is (somewhat embarrassingly) often about consumer choices. Crowdsourcing is supposed to make those choices more manageable, but somehow it also makes them feel relentless.
Too many choices. That’s the first-world urban problem we face. Yelp was created to deal with this problem. And like so much technology, there’s nothing wrong with it. Until we become reliant on it. Then, like Google Maps, we feel lost without it. And suddenly, making the trip to the far-flung neighborhood to check out that Turkish bath or Congolese cafe, having only a vague sense of what it will look and feel like, knowing only what we heard from a friend or read in a blurb in the local alt-weekly — this type of experience becomes a little too unnerving, something we’d better first check out online, just to see.
We all know that the cable-news echo chamber, in which we segregate ourselves into fiefdoms of Lord O’Reilly and Lady Maddow, isn’t ideal for a functional democracy. But is living in a place where virtually everyone shares your basic political outlook — where your opinions are rarely challenged by friends or neighbors — really any different?
Writing in this week’s New Yorker on why President Obama has been unable to bridge the partisan divide in Washington, Ryan Lizza points to a simple yet important factor: our tendency to live near people who always agree with us, creating a Congress without a true center. Is it possible that in building vibrant cities where we want to live, we’ve also created a frozen, extreme politics many of us abhor?
“It would be hard for any president to reverse this decades-long political trend,” writes Lizza, “which began when segregationist Democrats in the South — Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond — left the Party and became Republicans. Congress is polarized largely because Americans live in communities of like-minded people who elect more ideological representatives.”
Lizza is dead right on this count: Americans are flocking to politically homogeneous communities. An analysis by the Pew Research Center found that “nearly half (48 percent) of all votes for president in 2008 were cast in counties that went either for Barack Obama or for John McCain by a margin of at least 20 percentage points.” In other words, for about half of us, a total stranger could predict with unnerving accuracy whom we’ll vote for knowing nothing about us but what neighborhood we live in.
Contrast that with 1976, when only 27 percent of voters lived in such counties, according to Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, authors of “The Big Sort,” a book about political segregation in America. By 1992, 38 percent of counties were delivering landslides. By 2000, the figure was 45 percent.
At the state level, too, the average voting margin has been growing ever wider. In 1976, only 19 states and Washington, D.C., could be considered truly red or blue. That left a whopping 31 swing states for candidates to pursue — even hard-to-believe places like Oklahoma, Mississippi and California, each of which had final margins of victory of less than 3 percent.
Can you picture an electoral map so purple today? We’ve gotten to the point where merely being a Republican in brownstone Brooklyn is news enough to get you into the New York Times. A group of Ron Paul supporters is building its own town on the salt flats of West Texas, a libertarian utopia called Paulville where they can live according to their ideals (sort of like a ’60s commune, but exactly the opposite).
The effects of all this political sorting can land extremist candidates in office, as Lizza points out. But at the neighborhood level, in our daily lives, how toxic is it, really?
Let’s start with the upsides. There’s no evidence that such grouping makes people seek out more partisan media, according to the book “Niche News: The Politics of News Choice” by Natalie Jomini Stroud. People in politically homogeneous communities tend to be more engaged in civic life. And even the very ability to cluster with like-minded folk is a sign that increasing wealth and mobility are allowing us to live in places that seem like a good fit.
And while the urbanist Edward Glaeser sees reason for concern, he preaches the gospel of perspective. “Yes, America has a lot of sorting, but we have always had a lot of heterogeneity,” he wrote in the New York Sun in 2008, pointing out that between 1896 and 1936, just under 30 percent of the electoral votes were legitimately up for grabs, about the same (or even fewer) than today. He also wonders if political diversity is really as important as other kinds: “Racial segregation has fallen substantially. Any gulf in attitudes between red states and blue states today is dwarfed by the gulf in racial attitudes 50 years ago.”
That said, it’s clear that this kind of grouping isn’t helpful. The Michele Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the world would be fewer and farther between without it. And studies suggest that we ourselves might become more extreme when we always hang out with people who share our views — one found that Republican-appointed judges rule more conservatively when the other judges on their panel are also Republicans.
Just as important, life in an echo chamber doesn’t exactly lend itself to personal growth. Why do we abhor economic and racial segregation but not seem to mind dwelling in bubbles of groupthink? In this polarized era, maybe living side by side with people whose views are different than our own would help us see those people not as “others,” but neighbors.
With penny-farthings, handlebar mustaches and four-pocket vests back in fashion, the rise of urban farming should just about complete our fetish for the late 1800s. Today, you can find chicken coops on rooftops in Brooklyn, N.Y., goats in San Francisco backyards, and rows of crops sprouting across empty lots in Cleveland.
That it fits so snugly into the hipster-steampunk throwback trend is what makes urban farming ripe for ridicule. (“Portlandia” has taken a crack or two at it.) But could city-based agriculture ever make the leap from precious pastime to serious player in our cities’ food systems — not just for novelty seekers and committed locavores, but for the Safeway-shopping masses?
“I don’t want to make a statement like, ‘This is the future of farming,’” says Gotham Greens co-founder Viraj Puri, sitting at his laptop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, steps away from hundreds of rows of butter lettuce. “It’s probably never going to replace conventional farming. But it has a role to play.”
If the greenhouse we’re sitting in is any indication, that role looks nothing like the 1800s.
Gotham Greens is a 15,000-square-foot hydroponic farm on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse. It had its first harvest in June, and expects to produce 100 tons of food per year. The crops (mostly lettuce) grow in rows of white plastic tubing, their roots massaged by recycled water, under grow-lights and fans controlled by a central computer system. The system collects data from sensors throughout the room and adjusts the environment accordingly. This pampered produce will eventually end up on restaurant menus and shelves at stores like Whole Foods.
Two years ago, Forbes predicted that by the year 2018, 20 percent of the food consumed in U.S. cities will be grown in places like this. It’s safe to say that’s almost certainly not going to happen. Right now, urban-grown produce represents a minuscule slice of the food system. But there are several plausible scenarios that could make such food more commonplace in the city kitchen of the future.
Several of these scenarios are growing more likely by the day. If energy prices spike, your average grapefruit’s 1,500-mile journey to your fridge could make local food seem cheaper by comparison. Droughts are becoming more common, and soil-free hydroponic agriculture uses a fraction of the water of conventional farming and can easily be set up in urban environments. And there’s always the unforeseen Black Swan event: World War II “victory gardens” made urban farming a temporary reality for millions in the early 1940s.
But even if these scenarios came to pass, wouldn’t it still make more sense to grow on cheaper land just outside city limits, rather than right in the bustle of the city? Depends which city you’re talking about. Money manager John Hantz has spent the last few years putting together plans for a massive farm right in Detroit — not just to grow food, but to boost land values in general. “We need scarcity” in Detroit, he told Fortune magazine. By which he means, depopulated Detroit has way too much land. Turning hundreds of acres of the city into farmland, his theory goes, would make land scarcer (and greener), which would raise real estate values. It would also take dilapidated properties off the city’s hands. It’s a fairly wild scheme that some suspect is nothing more than a real-estate land grab. Still, Hantz has the city’s interest piqued.
There’s another reason to grow food right in the city. Puri says he and his partners chose Brooklyn for lots of reasons: to help create jobs, to green the area, and to avoid a commute to the country. “We didn’t select Brooklyn because it was cool,” he insists. But Brooklyn is cool — if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be used as a brand by all kinds of companies, from salsa to beer to the ubiquitous hoodies. And until we sail past peak-oil or face a water crisis, for many people, the main appeal of buying veggies grown in the city is that they’re vegetables that were grown in the city. That holds whether that city is Brooklyn, Seattle or Montreal. Which is why the Gotham Greens’ packaging is emblazoned with some version of the phrase “New York City” no less than three times — four if you count the word “Gotham” itself.
Because the fact is, locavorism is something people are willing to shell out for, and you can’t get more local than across the street. But agriculture that’s that local is also something others want nothing to do with. In November’s municipal elections in Vancouver, urban farming became a political wedge issue used by the center-right NPA opposition party, which ridiculed public monies proposed for wheat fields and chickens. The funding was minimal (and some of it was never spent), but it didn’t matter — urban farming itself was held up as a loopy liberal lifestyle being subsidized by the city.
“The same people who were opposing the wheat field and chickens were opposing the bike lanes in Vancouver, too,” says Peter Ladner, who actually led the NPA as a mayoral candidate four years ago. He’s since become an advocate for urban agriculture, and says the issue, like bike lanes, is becoming a cultural battle that’s bigger than urban farms — it’s about the definition of progress. “We have a large Asian population in Vancouver, and there’s a big concern [about urban farming] among immigrants who are moving here from places where there are chickens and pigs running around,” he says. “They moved here to upgrade their lives and live a sophisticated urban existence. They’re like, ‘Why are we going back to this?’ For a lot of people, progress means getting a nice, smooth lawn.”
“The people who are idealizing urban farming have a choice — a choice between grocery stores and greenmarkets, between cars and bicycles,” says Richard Longworth, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Last year Longworth wrote a provocative piece for Good magazine titled “Forget Urban Farms. We Need a Walmart,” blasting the idea that such farms can spur an economy like traditional businesses can. “What I object to is the hyping of their reality and potential,” he says. “There are a lot of people in this country who simply hate megafarms, but those folks are feeding the world. Locavore agriculture isn’t going to change that.”
That may be true. But urban farming may carve a path to sustainable success by creating a new type of subsystem within the larger food system — one that’s bigger than boutique but smaller than Big Agra. A company called BrightFarms is pioneering a method that aims to do just that — one that takes place directly above the stores that sell the produce it grows. BrightFarms builds greenhouses on supermarket rooftops and manages the growing operations for free. In return, the store below signs a long-term contract agreeing to buy the food that’s produced. BrightFarms estimates it can harvest up to 900,000 pounds of produce annually per acre. It’s a solution that seems custom-built for cities, places with plenty of roofs but little ground.
A lack of space on the ground is what might someday make vertical farms a cost-effective reality. But for now, large-scale towers holding rows of corn are strictly sci-fi. Nevertheless, city-based agriculture seems poised for some kind of flowering that’s more than a fad. If 2011 was the year that bike lanes became the poster child for the New Urbanism, urban farms could claim that mantle in 2012.
(Credit: Salon, Mignon Khargie / Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Phillip Capper / CC BY 3.0) 
A map of US counties, colored red and blue to indicate Republican and Democratic results during the 2008 Presidential election. (Credit: M.E.J. Neuman) 
(Credit: Salon, Mignon Khargie / Chee-Onn Leong via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Nathalie Trutmann) 
