::It’s all based on the very Gen X attitude — also the premise of the era’s most popular Broadway musical — that people, especially artists, shouldn’t have to pay rent. ::
I think that the attitude towards RENT, at least, is starting to swing back in the premise's favor—maybe not that artists shouldn't have to pay rent, but certainly that young people, including artists, should have AFFORDABLE rent, which as anybody who lives in or around NYC can attest we certainly don't have now! When I first moved to NYC I lived in a Single-Room Occupancy where my rent was $80/week, and I had a hall bathroom (sink in my room so I could brush my teeth, though)—it wasn't great, but I could afford it on an office temp's salary and it was MY space...when my future wife, who literally lived in a garret in New Jersey, wasn't staying over.
Only twenty years later my wife's assistant at that time, a performance artist, was renting a room in a three-bedroom apartment in the wilds of Brooklyn with her boyfriend, with two other couples taking the other bedrooms and a single guy who slept on the living room sofa—and they needed ALL of them paying nearly triple what I paid for my SRO! That's what happens when you have Republicans in the pocket of real estate (Giuliani and Bloomberg, in this case) take over a city like New York City.
And it's only gotten worse from there—corporations are buying up apartments now that they've bought all the SROs and converting them to condos (my ex-wife's first NYC apartment, an one-room "efficiency" in Manhattan, was sold for a quarter-million dollars in the 1990s!). It's gotten to the point where you have to have family money, or a relative who left you a rent-controlled space, to live in NYC if you're an aspiring actor, dancer, singer, writer, artist....
I think the point of "Secret Mall Apartment", whether you like the people who did it or not, is "Here's all this space people could be living in, but zoning laws are written to maximize real estate profits rather than finding affordable housing for people".
::It’s all based on the very Gen X attitude — also the premise of the era’s most popular Broadway musical — that people, especially artists, shouldn’t have to pay rent. ::
I think that the attitude towards RENT, at least, is starting to swing back in the premise's favor—maybe not that artists shouldn't have to pay rent, but certainly that young people, including artists, should have AFFORDABLE rent, which as anybody who lives in or around NYC can attest we certainly don't have now! When I first moved to NYC I lived in a Single-Room Occupancy where my rent was $80/week, and I had a hall bathroom (sink in my room so I could brush my teeth, though)—it wasn't great, but I could afford it on an office temp's salary and it was MY space...when my future wife, who literally lived in a garret in New Jersey, wasn't staying over.
Only twenty years later my wife's assistant at that time, a performance artist, was renting a room in a three-bedroom apartment in the wilds of Brooklyn with her boyfriend, with two other couples taking the other bedrooms and a single guy who slept on the living room sofa—and they needed ALL of them paying nearly triple what I paid for my SRO! That's what happens when you have Republicans in the pocket of real estate (Giuliani and Bloomberg, in this case) take over a city like New York City.
And it's only gotten worse from there—corporations are buying up apartments now that they've bought all the SROs and converting them to condos (my ex-wife's first NYC apartment, an one-room "efficiency" in Manhattan, was sold for a quarter-million dollars in the 1990s!). It's gotten to the point where you have to have family money, or a relative who left you a rent-controlled space, to live in NYC if you're an aspiring actor, dancer, singer, writer, artist....
I think the point of "Secret Mall Apartment", whether you like the people who did it or not, is "Here's all this space people could be living in, but zoning laws are written to maximize real estate profits rather than finding affordable housing for people".