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May and September are my favorite months in New York. Nothing is too dreadfully hot, and the world is full of possibilities. This week, I won second place at trivia, walked across boroughs, ogled at Liz Gillies in Little Shop of Horrors, and successfully attended three parties in one night. In other words, I’m outside.

And so is the rest of the city, but being outside looks whiter and whiter each year, prompting a renewed debate on gentrification. As a gentrifier trying to make something of myself in the big city, I’m here to propose a solution I think we can all agree on.

Starting with the Dutch and English, New York has always had invaders: colonizers forming new governments, European immigrants finding jobs during the Industrial Revolution, and Puerto Ricans eventually forming their largest community outside of Puerto Rico.

Media taught us that New York is the place to follow your dreams and be your authentic selves. We fantasize about what it would be like to party at Studio 54, to hang with Bob Dylan at the White Horse tavern. Lost and bored people of all kinds have become New York transplants for decades. It’s just that now that demographic seems to be whiter and richer than before.

The Cut’s “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl” examined a community of homogenous white girls living their Sex and the City fantasies, having fun and eroding a community’s formerly more creative character while doing it. The author (who seems to be quite the clout chaser even amongst losers) talks to these simple girls as well as other older West Villagers either amused to see them liven up the neighborhood or, mostly, lament what used to be a cool, alternative place.

You can go anywhere on the internet to find critiques of this demo from this viral article. Although I agree with them, I have a few gripes: 1. The West Village is just as finance bro-y as it is marketing girl-y, but it’s always easier to crap on young women. 2. The West Village has been an inaccessible neighborhood for decades and is where some of the worlds richest people have lived for a while. 3. As someone who was reading the article wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and hoops like the girls pictured, I don’t think that most of the neighborhoods parasites live there and instead trek from other neighborhoods to frequent their trendy establishments.

I think #3 because living there is just too darn expensive; there are only 5 listings on StreetEasy right now in the neighborhood that are under $3,000/month (4 studios, 1 1-bed). To be a West Village Girl, you need a remarkably lucrative post-college gig and a lot of family money, too.

Obviously, living anywhere in New York is too darn expensive. There is not enough housing and landlord greed knows no bounds, so people who don’t come from oil money must live elsewhere. It’s like a trickle-down effect; if the richest people (a certain breed of homogenous American whites or exorbitantly wealthy foreign people) take up the best neighborhood, each wealth rung is pushed out to a lesser area until neighborhoods like Bushwick and Bed-Stuy that used to be known for poverty, crime, and non-whiteness start to look more like the West Village.

I find it interesting that the West Village article goes after the West Village because gentrification already happened there. The days of young artists partying in the Meatpacking District and stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning or protesting for gay rights is long over. Gentrification has won so much that calling any development in that neighborhood gentrification feels incorrect because the process is complete.

The more bitter fights happen in neighborhoods like the one I live in. People who grew up in these neighborhoods find them unrecognizable and unaffordable. Neighborhood character and culture is upended, first by starving artists that make the neighborhood cool, attracting lamer and lamer, richer and richer, and often whiter and whiter people until gentrification cannot be reversed.

Gentrification happens everywhere, but New Yorkers are extra protective of what they have, both because it’s the coolest place to live and because they’re not just priced out of their neighborhoods — they’re priced out of their whole city. This island isn’t big enough for all of us (unless the powers that be want to change that), and the gaping wealth gap only widens. Immigrants (foreign, cool) and transplants (domestic, considerably less cool) are a huge part of why New York is the way it is, but the transplant slice of the pie is getting too gluttonous. More often than before, transplant and gentrifier are synonyms.

As a Bushwick transplant myself, of course I’m going to advocate for blaming institutions rather than individual people. We should all be able to live in the cities we want to, and those of us who can do. It’s unfair that not everyone can, especially people from here, but I don’t think someone graduating college and wanting to live in New York isn’t committing a sin.

There are plenty of sins for transplants to commit once they arrive, though, and these sins differ based on who you’re talking to. Are you shopping at local businesses? What kinds? Are you calling the cops on your neighbors? Are you only friends with other transplants? Are you only friends with other white transplants? Are you loudly talking on the phone on your way to the bOdEgA? Are you staying informed on local news and politics? Are you making fun of other transplants? Do you think you’re a gentrifier? Are you calling yourself a New Yorker? Do you want to live here forever, or is this a stop on your journey of life? You’re already taking up space — so how do you plan on doing it?

Maybe I think this because I’m a perpetrator, but I think gentrification is a complicated issue, and there are lots of ways to be right (and lots of ways to be wrong). On the Internet, I sometimes learn a lot and other times feel myself rotting. In one TikTok scroll, I might watch this video of a born-and-raised Bed-Stuy guy talking about how white transplants have ruined his neighborhood…then this video of another native New Yorker that hates gentrification but is white and is frustrated that people assume he’s a transplant just because he’s white…then I get a video of someone chastising someone else for complaining about homeless people bumping into me everywhere and telling him he doesn’t have to live here and deal with it…and finally a video (that I can’t find now) of two girls on a run in Van Cortland Park thinking they’re the first people to find this park 30 minutes outside NYC and can influence other transplants (and are obviously bombed with comments on how the Bronx is part of New York).

I haven’t heard people talk about this before and want to know if others agree with me or not: I find a lot of online wokeness eventually devolves into a segregation debate. Sometimes people say transplants when they really mean white people. Sometimes transplants are learning about the city’s true culture by trying restaurants in lesser known (by other transplants) neighborhoods, other times they’re seen as poisoning a neighborhood’s favorite restaurants. Sometimes we are encouraged to go outside of our white bubbles and other times are chastised for doing so. Some of us care and some of us don’t.

Some of us don’t approach these conversations with nuance or a hope to accommodate. Plus, the hope to accommodate can be so large and misinformed that it just ends up centering whiteness anyway. How much of the transplant debate is about transplants and how much is it about whiteness? Is the rich, apolitical white West Village girl who doesn’t go above 14th Street and has never heard of Flushing worse than a leftist white Harlem resident that crawls through neighborhoods with less people who look like them? The newsletter writer who owns her gentrifier status, is she saying the quiet part out loud or is she making it all worse? Is her questioning and self-flagellating in this entry worth taking up any space?

As being part of the problem, I obviously do not have the answer to what to do about gentrification in New York.

Sike! I have a modest proposal:

The big apple vs. the hub of the solar system. A rivalry that New Yorkers pretend is one-sided and Bostonians pretend they’re winning. Rivalries often exist because two entities are more similar than they want to be, whether they’d like to admit it or not. New York’s size and diversity separates from its puritanical sibling, but the Northeast Regional and coastal elites connect these founding cities of American culture.

We cannot stop people from wanting to live in New York, so the only way to stop them is to prevent them from living there through legislation. I believe this would be on the federal level, and I know this administration hates immigration. I first had this idea last year in a tweet that got zero likes.

Although it’s a city, Boston is the best college town in the country, and I’m not just saying that because it was mine. In 2018, 150,000 students from 35 colleges lived in a city of 690,000, meaning that more than 20% of the city is made up of college students. September 1st is the worst day of the year…or the best if you like scooping furniture from the curb. Like New York, people come from around the world to soak in the history, culture, and innovation Boston has to offer. Boston is used to transplants staying for short stints, roving their streets while smoking their weed.

Young, check. Transient, check. But wait, I want to spend so much money for no reason, especially on rent! Not to worry — Boston is among the top five most expensive places to live in the world. It’s so expensive, in fact, that 25% of young people plan to move out of the city in the next 5 years. Overpriced coffees and workout classes aren’t just a New York thing, you know.

Being in one of the country’s most diverse cities — in the most educated state — might scare you. Please, have you forgotten? Boston’s long had a well-deserved reputation of being one of the most racist cities in America, a reputation they can’t shake despite the city growing more diverse.

Are you white and basic? There’s this great neighborhood called Seaport, which didn’t exist like 10 years ago. You can swing in oversized, light-up swings, drink while playing mini-golf, and go to court for your federal crimes when you lie and move to New York without going to Boston first. At night, get ready for the enchantment of South Boston, affectionately called Southie, full of kids just like you that you’ll see at the same five Irish pubs forever.

Are you white and alternative? We love that you’re too cool for Boston, so head across the river and check out Somerville instead. That city passed the first ordinance of its kind to protect polyamorous people from discrimination, validating all of your Twitter fights over the past few years. They’ve also added more train stations in the past few years. If trains or polyamory are not your thing, at least you can see The Mortal Storm in 35mm at the Somerville Theater.

Are you not white? DEI is a bad word now, so we don’t have to treat you fairly and therefore force you to stay in Boston like we will with everyone else. You can choose to stay in Boston (for my Asian readers, you can thank Harvard for why affirmative action ended to benefit you and the aforementioned whites) and benefit from their woke sanctuary city policies from a woman mayor who likes a Green New Deal and public transportation. Or you can just go straight to New York — someone might just assume you’re their doorman or train conductor and not catch you in our city’s crackdown on illegals (that we don’t call immigrants obviously — they’re migrants).

We aren’t sure how long this Boston limbo period should go…maybe a year? If you stay in Boston for a year and still want to go to New York, you are free to move to the great American melting pot. I postulate that this period could be enough to sift the more obnoxious transplants out from the slightly less obnoxious ones. Boston is the answer to lots of complaints NYC transplants have, anyway.

New York…

These should be enough pros to shrink the New York transplant pool and raise its quality. Moving to New York after living in other cities first makes you less insufferable and more grateful for what this city has to offer. Trust me, I’m humble enough to know.

Transplants, although not able to quickly call themselves New Yorkers, will have ample background to properly shit on Boston. Lots of transplants do so either as sports fans or insecure snobs, but — little do they know — that they might actually love Boston. This lived experience to figure out if that’s the case will authenticate their jeers at Knicks games and pop girl songs.

Cities, natives, and transplants all benefit from this foolproof, easily enforceable plan. Not all lost people have to go to just New York, Denver, or LA anymore; Boston can take some of the load off. I spent part of my Saturday in Industry City, what could be called a neighborhood on the other side of the highway in Sunset Park that’s a bunch of old warehouses now filled with food halls, bars with bocce courts, and high-end furniture outlets. My friend got us tickets through her job to a food festival that we got to skip an ungodly line for after waiting a bit in one of the “neighborhood’s” soulless but yummy bars. I saw the biggest line I’ve seen for anything in New York for a festival people paid $50 just to enter, waiting for over an hour and maybe two in the hot sun.

This demand for mediocrity by waiting in an insane line or spending a day at rehabbed warehouses that could exist in any other American city showed me that the people yearn for Boston. Everyone deserves to have fun, and maybe we don’t need to go in the most fun place in the whole world to be satisfied. Maybe going to a brewery with a trivia night every week is fun enough and we don’t need to pretend that we need more than that. People who love to complain about homelessness in New York and how dangerous it is (nevermind it being one of the safest cities in the country) can go somewhere smaller and do something smaller, like complain about traffic.

Besides, everyone everywhere wants to have fun and might benefit from new ideas. My mom’s bagel shop is in a reviving part of a neighborhood she spent part of her childhood in. There are a bunch of new businesses at the intersection hers is on, but neither of us have heard any complaining about gentrification (not meaning that it doesn’t exist). Instead, people come into the shop and thank her for bringing such a fun place to the neighborhood, one person even saying We never get anything! The locals are not worried about their community or character being pushed out and they’re happy to have new life in their often sleepy spot.

Fictional New Yorker from Spider Man Uncle Ben said that with great power comes great responsibility. Being a New Yorker is a great power, which comes with the great responsibility of tending to your community and putting the needs of others above your own. If we want to be New Yorkers after living here long enough, we have to step back and listen to people around us instead of imposing what we want. There are plenty of other cities that will welcome transplants and their values. And if you hear anyone saying that gentrification is a problem in Boston, too, especially from its college and postgrad population, don’t listen to them. Why? They’re from Boston.

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