The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980

Abstract

Social scientists who study cities have sparred since the 1980s over the causes (and, more recently, effects) of the revalorization of city-center districts. Geographers, especially Marxists such as the late Neil Smith, hypothesized that after decades of racialized incentives to disinvestment there emerged a “rent gap” between current and potential values. The profit motive, in other words, catalyzed by government duplicity, lured “pioneer” developers and yuppies away from suburbia to neighborhoods such as Manhattan's East Village. Other scholars—including myself, in my work on multifamily homeownership—argued that gentrification was driven by broader shifts in the culture and economy that transformed how, where, and with whom a growing segment of the middle class preferred to live. Aaron Shkuda complicates these formulas by exploring the familiar example of Manhattan's SoHo. With his eye trained on the economics of real estate and, especially, the politics (local, city, and state) of neighborhood land use, Shkuda argues that “historic actors, local politics, the workings of the art market” came together in a kind of perfect storm to generate a particular form of gentrification dominated neither by developers, yuppies, and pursuit of profit, nor by large-scale changes in the culture (p. 5). Rather, when a freeway backed by Robert Moses was planned for Manhattan's mid-nineteenth-century industrial “wasteland,” manufacturing left and landlords began renting and selling to nonindustrial tenants such as visual artists, despite the fact that the buildings were not permitted for residential use.