Hoboken Is Burning

Key Question Being Explored in This Insight:

Between 1978 and 1983, nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey. Dylan Gottleib discusses the “Hoboken Renaissance.”

View the page of: Dylan Gottlieb

Institution: Bentley University

Explore more insights in:

Arts and Humanities History History of North America and the United States

Media Literacy Toolkit

Faculti's Media Literacy Toolkit helps viewers critically engage with academic insights by analyzing the research context, identifying perspectives, and encouraging thoughtful evaluation.

Critical Questions to Consider ▼

What assumptions does the research make?
Are there alternative perspectives not explored?
What are the limitations of the research method?

Bias and Perspective Awareness ▼

This research comes from Bentley University . Reflect on how the institution's academic focus and research partnerships may shape the questions being explored.

Further Reading ▼

Read the Study

Between 1978 and 1983, nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey. Dylan Gottleib discusses the “Hoboken Renaissance.”

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 22, 2024

Log-in or Sign-up to Faculti
Currently viewing this subject insight as a guest. You have insight(s) remaining for this month. Login to view 8000+ figures on the platform.

Generating Workspace...

Export as PDF

This video video describes the author's research for a PhD dissertation at Princeton, focusing on urban transformation in the 1970s and 1980s. The author initially sought to understand the rise of inequality in cities, particularly through the arrival of young urban professionals (yuppies) in places like Hoboken, New Jersey. An important finding was a wave of arson fires that coincided with this gentrification, which were allegedly set by landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants and convert buildings for higher-paying residents.

The author’s investigation, supported by archival research and oral histories, revealed a narrative of violent displacement that had previously been overlooked in historical discussions about gentrification. The influx of finance professionals during this period led to increased property demand, prompting landlords to resort to illegal means to displace low-income tenants.

This video video highlights the scale of the arson crisis, including significant casualties and thousands of displacements. The author argues that while individual landlords may have seen short-term gains, the broader consequences of these practices included deepening urban inequality and a transformation of neighborhoods that catered primarily to wealthier residents.

Ultimately, the author calls for a reevaluation of how historians and sociologists consider the 1980s, advocating for acknowledgement of the complex social dynamics at play during urban redevelopment. The research concludes that revealing these conflicts and the violence underlying gentrification is crucial for understanding how cities change and whose interests prevail in the process. The author emphasizes that cities should be cautious in pursuing similar strategies for revitalization to avoid repeating the cycle of displacement and inequality.

Language:

Export as PDF

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

00:00.035 --> 00:02.845
When I was beginning my research for my PhD at Princeton,

00:02.845 --> 00:05.765
my PhD dissertation, I was struggling

00:05.765 --> 00:09.325
to find specific actors who could help me tell the story

00:09.345 --> 00:11.645
of city's transformation in the 1970s

00:11.645 --> 00:14.325
and 1980s, who were the people who were doing the work

00:14.385 --> 00:16.885
of making cities more unequal,

00:17.025 --> 00:19.525
of revitalizing commercial districts

00:19.725 --> 00:21.525
and residential areas across the nation.

00:22.225 --> 00:25.005
And I got some great advice from a colleague of mine

00:25.425 --> 00:29.285
who said, pour over the US census, the actual statistics

00:29.305 --> 00:31.325
for say the finance workers you're interested in,

00:31.665 --> 00:33.125
the professional and managerial workers,

00:33.135 --> 00:34.205
you'd like to tell their story.

00:34.665 --> 00:36.765
And I did that. I spent some time with the census

00:36.985 --> 00:40.765
and I dug into where are those folks moving in the seventies

00:40.765 --> 00:43.125
and eighties in New York, you could expect them to live,

00:43.125 --> 00:45.085
say on the Upper East Side, the traditional hunts

00:45.085 --> 00:46.085
for financiers, right?

00:46.625 --> 00:48.565
But I noticed something really interesting when I

00:48.625 --> 00:50.165
mapped where they were moving.

00:50.235 --> 00:52.445
They were moving in places that I didn't expect.

00:52.445 --> 00:53.925
Places like Hoboken, New Jersey,

00:54.535 --> 00:57.205
which is a small working class city

00:57.205 --> 01:00.565
of about 50,000 people just across the Hudson River from

01:00.765 --> 01:02.685
Manhattan in the New York area.

01:02.955 --> 01:04.525
It's about a 10 minute train ride,

01:04.525 --> 01:06.485
importantly from downtown Manhattan

01:06.505 --> 01:08.965
and Midtown, where big corporate offices still existed.

01:09.225 --> 01:10.565
So I use these tools and I see this

01:10.565 --> 01:12.365
increasing concentration in whole book.

01:12.365 --> 01:14.445
And I think as a historian, there has

01:14.445 --> 01:15.565
to be a story there, right?

01:15.595 --> 01:17.045
What happens when these people arrive?

01:17.705 --> 01:19.605
And that's when I went to the local archives,

01:20.585 --> 01:23.405
the Hoboken Public Library, the Hoboken Historical Museum,

01:23.465 --> 01:24.965
not places that historians are beating

01:24.965 --> 01:26.045
down the doors to get in.

01:26.815 --> 01:28.995
But in those archives, I found a shocking

01:29.015 --> 01:31.875
and really important story of a string of fires,

01:32.165 --> 01:34.475
arson fires at the same moment

01:34.585 --> 01:36.875
that these professionals are arriving in the city.

01:37.455 --> 01:40.275
Um, I literally found this in a manila envelope titled

01:40.445 --> 01:41.875
Fires in the Public Library.

01:42.115 --> 01:44.115
I don't think historians had dug through there before,

01:45.015 --> 01:47.395
but I found this material from tenants rights groups,

01:47.485 --> 01:48.915
local newspaper clippings,

01:49.415 --> 01:50.515
and they all argued

01:50.515 --> 01:52.515
that these fires were in fact, intentional.

01:52.945 --> 01:55.035
That they were set by local landlords

01:55.295 --> 01:57.475
to drive out their rent controlled tenants,

01:57.745 --> 02:01.035
convert their buildings to condos and charge rents five

02:01.055 --> 02:03.635
or even six times more than they were receiving before.

02:04.215 --> 02:05.955
And it was part I discovered later

02:05.975 --> 02:09.555
of a wider shift in urban redevelopment in this period,

02:09.615 --> 02:11.835
I'd be happy to discuss more, you know,

02:11.835 --> 02:13.635
as historians we're obsessed with sources,

02:13.735 --> 02:14.995
and these were some great ones, right?

02:14.995 --> 02:18.195
It was wonderful to find sheaths of newspaper clippings

02:18.195 --> 02:20.075
that had been assembled by tenants rights groups.

02:20.415 --> 02:21.635
It was a wonderful place to start.

02:21.655 --> 02:23.235
But I knew I needed to supplement

02:23.255 --> 02:25.955
and kind of contextualize those archival fines

02:25.955 --> 02:28.035
with reading across urban history.

02:28.135 --> 02:29.835
That's something I'd already been doing, right?

02:30.375 --> 02:33.795
And there's a big existing literature on gentrification in

02:33.795 --> 02:35.435
the 1960s and seventies,

02:35.435 --> 02:38.275
what I call the first wave of gentrification.

02:39.665 --> 02:41.605
Um, so I read thoroughly in there,

02:41.605 --> 02:43.885
and everyone's talking about the artists who come

02:43.885 --> 02:45.645
to live in lofts in places like Soho.

02:46.305 --> 02:49.045
Um, people who are working to renovate

02:49.115 --> 02:50.885
with government money in places like Harlem,

02:51.585 --> 02:53.165
cities like Toronto.

02:53.165 --> 02:55.125
There's a kind of international literature about this.

02:55.125 --> 02:56.765
First, back to the city movement, people

02:56.765 --> 02:59.485
who renovate brownstones, they're socially liberal,

02:59.515 --> 03:01.325
they're interested in historical diversity.

03:01.425 --> 03:03.525
But what I found was that my story,

03:03.605 --> 03:07.245
I was finding in the archives of violence, of fires

03:07.385 --> 03:09.245
of intense increases in price

03:09.745 --> 03:11.085
for a very different demographic.

03:11.185 --> 03:13.885
People who had a lot more capital yuppies,

03:13.885 --> 03:15.445
the young urban professionals I write about

03:15.555 --> 03:16.605
that hadn't been told.

03:17.145 --> 03:19.005
And so that's when I really started digging in,

03:19.005 --> 03:22.315
doing interviews with people who remembered the events,

03:22.805 --> 03:24.315
uncovering oral histories

03:24.335 --> 03:26.555
and other primary source materials in Hoboken,

03:26.555 --> 03:28.835
and seeing could I tell a story that expanded

03:28.835 --> 03:30.875
that existing literature on the sixties

03:30.935 --> 03:34.555
and seventies to a different era when the political economy

03:34.735 --> 03:37.395
shifts in favor of finance and professional work,

03:38.215 --> 03:41.035
and this process of urban change intensifies,

03:41.665 --> 03:42.805
but we didn't know much about.

03:42.945 --> 03:44.485
So that's really got me pushed,

03:44.865 --> 03:47.165
pushed me further into the research, was

03:47.165 --> 03:48.845
to pursue this missing story

03:48.845 --> 03:50.845
that historians had really told.

03:50.905 --> 03:53.565
Yet this is of course, a period of crisis

03:54.065 --> 03:55.685
for American cities decline

03:55.705 --> 03:57.885
and crisis is how it's usually narrated, right?

03:58.105 --> 04:02.245
Cities continue to lose population jobs capitals flowing out

04:02.265 --> 04:05.285
to the American south, to the sunbelt, to the west abroad.

04:06.025 --> 04:08.725
But what I discover and argue here is that a small number

04:08.725 --> 04:10.525
of neighborhoods, places like Hoboken,

04:10.525 --> 04:13.645
but you know, Boston's back bay, Chicago's north side,

04:14.705 --> 04:18.245
we see the earliest stages of another type of crisis, one

04:18.245 --> 04:19.485
of over investment.

04:20.385 --> 04:21.805
So the professional

04:21.805 --> 04:24.445
and finance sectors, which are seen as maybe this great hope

04:24.465 --> 04:27.005
to revive these cities', fortunes do indeed begin

04:27.005 --> 04:28.805
to grow in the late seventies

04:28.805 --> 04:31.605
and early eighties, particularly as deregulation of finance

04:32.135 --> 04:34.525
makes these more profitable centers of the economy.

04:34.985 --> 04:36.725
So for example, in New York, over that period,

04:36.725 --> 04:39.605
you just mentioned about 90,000 financiers arrive in

04:39.605 --> 04:41.005
New York City, right?

04:41.015 --> 04:43.765
Hired by Wall Street Banks, recruited from colleges

04:44.345 --> 04:46.765
to do the work of financializing the economy.

04:47.065 --> 04:49.125
And they all need somewhere to live, ideally close

04:49.125 --> 04:51.685
to their jobs where they're working 10, 12 hours a day.

04:52.505 --> 04:54.805
And so these yuppies, as I call them, is the term

04:54.805 --> 04:56.565
of the time, but one I've adopted, right?

04:56.565 --> 04:59.325
These young urban professionals look to places

04:59.815 --> 05:02.765
where they can live in close proximity to their jobs,

05:03.265 --> 05:05.885
but they've got much higher wages than the first wave of,

05:05.945 --> 05:08.525
say, brown donors or artists who'd come before.

05:09.735 --> 05:11.195
And so speculative landlords

05:11.195 --> 05:12.595
and developers realize, wow,

05:12.595 --> 05:15.235
there's this incredible demand from the new population

05:15.295 --> 05:18.835
who is moving to the city, but we've got a problem, right?

05:18.965 --> 05:21.635
We've got, particularly in New Jersey, and parts of,

05:21.635 --> 05:23.795
and New York still had rent control

05:23.795 --> 05:25.155
or rent stabilization laws,

05:25.325 --> 05:27.555
which protected existing tenants, many

05:27.675 --> 05:29.715
of them low income in Hoboken, many

05:29.715 --> 05:32.275
of them Latino from displacement.

05:32.275 --> 05:33.435
You couldn't just say, please leave,

05:33.455 --> 05:35.875
you couldn't raise their rent 200%.

05:35.975 --> 05:37.155
It was literally illegal.

05:38.055 --> 05:39.915
So, you know, they try various things.

05:39.915 --> 05:42.635
They take advantage of renovation, exclusion.

05:42.635 --> 05:43.995
So if they rip out an old sink

05:43.995 --> 05:46.595
and put in a new one, that's one way to displace your tenant

05:46.595 --> 05:47.835
because you can then raise the rent

05:47.855 --> 05:49.075
for the cost of the renovations.

05:49.495 --> 05:52.115
But that's too slow. They can't capitalize on this crush

05:52.175 --> 05:56.115
of interest in, housing and Hoboken places like it.

05:56.745 --> 06:00.405
So what do they do? My research reveals that they turn

06:00.465 --> 06:04.445
to arson paying, young, often young people, it seems

06:04.985 --> 06:07.285
to start intentional fires in these buildings.

06:07.865 --> 06:09.605
And these landlords will go to the length

06:09.605 --> 06:12.765
of actually threatening to use fire before doing it.

06:12.785 --> 06:14.605
And they'll tell their tenants,

06:15.545 --> 06:17.325
I'm gonna burn you out if you don't leave.

06:17.385 --> 06:19.685
And some tenants leave willingly, but many don't.

06:19.685 --> 06:20.965
And even after threatening

06:20.965 --> 06:22.525
to burn down the building, they still do.

06:22.525 --> 06:26.365
So, and I've uncovered records, contracts of sale that say,

06:26.895 --> 06:28.965
we'll, buy, the developer will tell the landlord, we'll,

06:28.965 --> 06:31.365
buy your building under the condition it's delivered.

06:31.365 --> 06:34.165
Vacant that is cleared of all inhabitants

06:34.705 --> 06:37.685
and fire was a deadly, very effective way to do that.

06:38.785 --> 06:40.485
So the scale of this is pretty remarkable.

06:41.025 --> 06:42.405
Um, as you say in the,

06:42.405 --> 06:45.285
that roughly five year period when fires are a weekly

06:45.285 --> 06:46.565
occurrence in Hoboken,

06:47.135 --> 06:50.285
56 people die in these intentional fires.

06:51.105 --> 06:55.485
Um, my research determined maybe 8,000 people are displaced.

06:55.985 --> 06:58.125
Um, some of those willingly and it

06:58.125 --> 07:00.325
because, well willingly, they're coerced

07:00.325 --> 07:02.045
because of the fear of future fires.

07:02.515 --> 07:04.805
Some directly as buildings are destroyed.

07:05.385 --> 07:07.325
Um, some just from the trauma

07:07.325 --> 07:09.925
of losing family members decide to decamp to Puerto Rico

07:10.025 --> 07:12.525
or to other neighboring towns

07:12.955 --> 07:15.085
that are not experiencing this yuppie surge.

07:15.705 --> 07:20.485
So it's incredibly destructive and incredibly traumatic.

07:21.425 --> 07:24.565
And what's interesting is the yuppies who move in are kind

07:24.565 --> 07:26.725
of ly unaware of

07:26.825 --> 07:30.685
or about their role in this one.

07:31.035 --> 07:33.805
Stockbroker gives a quote to a local newspaper, says,

07:34.145 --> 07:36.125
you know, I don't want anyone to be burned,

07:36.225 --> 07:37.845
but I wouldn't mind a nicer element

07:37.865 --> 07:39.245
of people in this town, right?

07:39.515 --> 07:42.005
Understanding that yes, this is a violent remaking,

07:42.065 --> 07:43.445
but well, maybe it's all

07:43.445 --> 07:45.605
for the good if people like me can afford to live here.

07:45.625 --> 07:49.215
Now, I think there are two potential answers.

07:49.215 --> 07:51.695
There's a disciplinary gap between historians

07:51.695 --> 07:52.695
who focus on the sixties

07:52.795 --> 07:55.615
and seventies when it came to gentrification, right?

07:55.675 --> 07:57.455
And then sociologists who studied,

07:57.515 --> 07:59.655
or what they've called super gentrification

07:59.675 --> 08:02.135
and say the recent period in two thousands

08:02.135 --> 08:04.335
and 2010s in cities like London or New York, right?

08:04.365 --> 08:07.295
They work on the recent period interviewing subjects,

08:07.905 --> 08:09.415
doing the statistical analysis.

08:10.295 --> 08:12.655
Sociologists historically were working on the sixties

08:12.755 --> 08:15.825
and 70 thinking about for authenticity

08:15.825 --> 08:17.785
and how that brought young people to new neighborhoods.

08:18.165 --> 08:19.345
But there was a gap in the middle

08:19.345 --> 08:21.025
that had just not really been looked at, right?

08:21.525 --> 08:23.665
And my work on the shifting political economy of

08:23.665 --> 08:25.545
that period, the rise in finance

08:25.765 --> 08:28.945
and professional work led me to that time period

08:29.445 --> 08:32.265
and made me feel like it was incumbent upon me

08:32.405 --> 08:33.625
to fill that gap, right?

08:33.645 --> 08:37.865
To talk about the second wave that the sociologists had sort

08:37.865 --> 08:40.145
of missed and the historians hadn't caught up to.

08:40.605 --> 08:43.585
So that's one reason. The second reason is that many

08:43.585 --> 08:46.585
of our narratives across different disciplines about the

08:46.785 --> 08:50.265
1980s tend to kind of efface the complexity

08:50.265 --> 08:53.625
of the period under an umbrella of neoliberalism, right?

08:53.815 --> 08:57.045
It's a term that does a lot of theoretical work to explain

08:57.105 --> 08:59.685
how markets were promised to

09:00.255 --> 09:02.165
enter every sector of American life.

09:02.705 --> 09:03.965
Um, whether you're on the right

09:04.025 --> 09:05.365
and you don't care about inequality

09:05.465 --> 09:07.845
or you're on the, you're a new Democrat

09:07.845 --> 09:09.165
and perhaps you care about inequality,

09:09.225 --> 09:10.405
but you think you need to do it

09:10.405 --> 09:12.045
through unleashing the private sector.

09:12.045 --> 09:14.805
Either way, we talk about this era in terms

09:14.805 --> 09:17.685
of neoliberalism, and I think it's a useful frame,

09:18.145 --> 09:20.885
but there's something kind of bloodless about it.

09:21.635 --> 09:24.365
It's very rarely put into actual place

09:24.585 --> 09:26.765
and understood how it operates on the ground.

09:26.765 --> 09:29.045
It's one thing to look at Reagan's policies at a national

09:29.045 --> 09:30.645
level or Margaret Factors

09:31.185 --> 09:33.045
pronouncements in a national level.

09:33.115 --> 09:35.365
It's quite another to see at the neighborhood level

09:36.455 --> 09:39.155
how the new sort of actors were called into being

09:39.575 --> 09:42.555
by neoliberalism actually go about their day, right?

09:42.555 --> 09:44.515
Where do they live? How do they consume,

09:44.575 --> 09:47.595
how do they make sense of their social position in the newly

09:47.955 --> 09:50.515
unequal society that's being remade?

09:51.095 --> 09:52.795
And that's the story I want to tell in this article

09:52.855 --> 09:55.355
and in my book more broadly, is how do,

09:55.375 --> 09:57.835
how are these big shifts in political economy?

09:58.385 --> 09:59.955
What, what's the social history of them?

10:00.295 --> 10:02.755
How do they take place in real places?

10:03.385 --> 10:04.835
What are the conflicts that erupt

10:04.935 --> 10:06.875
as different constituencies struggle

10:06.875 --> 10:10.235
to find a place in a city that's being violently remade?

10:10.685 --> 10:13.435
Arson is an incredibly hard crime to prosecute.

10:14.025 --> 10:15.795
Mere evidence of economic gain

10:15.895 --> 10:18.395
for a landlord isn't enough to convict someone.

10:19.175 --> 10:22.075
So local prosecutors can't just link landlords

10:22.075 --> 10:25.075
who burned down their buildings in theory and economic gain

10:25.075 --> 10:26.235
and say, we've got a case.

10:26.545 --> 10:29.675
They need to find the torch, the person who is paid off.

10:30.015 --> 10:32.955
But these are frequently young teenagers who are, you know,

10:32.955 --> 10:35.155
slipped a dollar bill and they throw 'em all top cocktail in

10:35.155 --> 10:36.435
a building, they're never gonna find them.

10:37.015 --> 10:39.115
So that's one thing, right? It's hard to prosecute it.

10:39.735 --> 10:41.785
Another reason these go un prosecuted

10:42.125 --> 10:45.825
and largely unpunished is

10:45.825 --> 10:47.945
because I do think local prosecutors have a

10:47.945 --> 10:49.025
sense of ethnic bias.

10:49.095 --> 10:52.705
They, in interviews with me, the DA for the county told me,

10:52.965 --> 10:54.945
you know, there are some sort of ethnic rivalries

10:54.965 --> 10:57.785
or hot-blooded, Latin machismo are to blame here.

10:58.165 --> 10:59.905
It wasn't about real estate redevelopment.

11:00.325 --> 11:02.265
So what are things that actually ended this crisis?

11:02.935 --> 11:04.465
Well, one, at the federal level

11:04.985 --> 11:08.225
Congress investigates in the early eighties, this rash

11:08.245 --> 11:11.025
of gentrification arson, including in Hoboken.

11:11.025 --> 11:13.105
They actually hear testimony about Hoboken

11:13.565 --> 11:16.825
and they upgrade the penalties for arson as well

11:16.825 --> 11:19.585
as the resources devoting to fighting it at the

11:20.145 --> 11:21.505
national level with the FBI.

11:21.505 --> 11:23.985
And that money does trickle down to local law enforcement.

11:23.985 --> 11:25.705
So they do begin to take it more seriously

11:26.005 --> 11:27.545
and investigate it more rigorously.

11:28.945 --> 11:30.165
Two, interestingly,

11:30.825 --> 11:34.045
the developers set their sight on a new area,

11:34.235 --> 11:36.845
just one city over in Jersey City,

11:36.895 --> 11:40.845
which passes new pro development laws that send that flood

11:40.845 --> 11:44.885
of development one town over to the kind of hulks

11:44.885 --> 11:46.925
of industrial buildings that now can be converted

11:46.925 --> 11:48.685
to apartments and conveniently

11:48.685 --> 11:49.965
don't have any tenants inside.

11:50.705 --> 11:52.205
But finally, and most importantly,

11:52.225 --> 11:55.165
the reason these arsons end, I think is the social movement

11:55.165 --> 11:56.885
that arises Ian Hoboken.

11:57.655 --> 12:01.155
Um, there's a first led by Latino tenant activists

12:01.155 --> 12:02.835
who are suffering the brunt of these fires.

12:03.225 --> 12:05.315
They join up with the brown stoners,

12:05.315 --> 12:08.155
those socially liberal folks, many white middle class people

12:08.155 --> 12:10.755
who arrived in the sixties who are part of the new left

12:10.815 --> 12:13.675
and said, Hey, this is a horrible crime against

12:13.755 --> 12:14.875
a community we care about.

12:15.415 --> 12:18.795
And they unite and they elect an anti-development mayor,

12:18.865 --> 12:21.595
this sort of wacky fellow Thomas ti, who's, you know,

12:21.595 --> 12:22.995
the kind of guy who stands in the street corner

12:22.995 --> 12:25.755
with a megaphone, sailing the powers that be.

12:25.975 --> 12:27.755
But he becomes the mayor of Hoboken

12:27.755 --> 12:30.435
and vows to stop gentrification.

12:30.655 --> 12:33.995
And he put places a moratorium on all new development,

12:33.995 --> 12:35.355
particularly condo development

12:35.815 --> 12:38.835
and does what he can while in office to slow the tide.

12:39.925 --> 12:42.825
But ultimately, I think it's just landlords decide this

12:43.105 --> 12:45.465
tactic is providing too much bad publicity,

12:46.085 --> 12:48.745
and they're worried about selling these condos.

12:48.745 --> 12:49.865
They're converting by fire

12:50.085 --> 12:52.145
as the social movement calls attention to

12:52.655 --> 12:54.345
this horror in the city.

12:54.765 --> 12:56.185
So they switch tactics

12:56.185 --> 12:59.105
and they just use economic means of displacement to

12:59.625 --> 13:01.425
continue this regime of transformation.

13:01.525 --> 13:03.785
And now Hoboken is utterly transformed.

13:04.285 --> 13:06.185
Um, if you go there on a Saturday night,

13:06.185 --> 13:09.945
it's 28-year-old stockbrokers enjoying one too many pints

13:09.945 --> 13:11.985
with their mates, as you would say in the uk.

13:12.485 --> 13:15.745
Um, it's utterly a refuge of the young urban professional

13:15.805 --> 13:18.105
who we just begin to see arriving in the eighties.

13:18.445 --> 13:21.465
And it's just as expensive as parts of Manhattan.

13:21.805 --> 13:23.385
My conclusions are one, we need

13:23.385 --> 13:26.945
to take the eighties seriously as a moment when,

13:27.585 --> 13:29.825
economic transformations happen at the broadest level

13:30.175 --> 13:33.625
that have real consequences in cities in America

13:33.645 --> 13:34.785
and indeed around the world.

13:35.115 --> 13:37.185
Those that are experiencing financialization,

13:37.985 --> 13:39.545
a concentration of brain power

13:39.605 --> 13:43.825
and capital in these cities is championed by some as a way

13:43.825 --> 13:46.265
of reviving cities in an era of crisis.

13:46.405 --> 13:47.545
And indeed, there were very few

13:47.545 --> 13:48.825
choices for cities in this period.

13:48.885 --> 13:51.545
I'm not denying that, but the results are

13:51.545 --> 13:52.585
deepening inequality.

13:52.585 --> 13:55.065
Something that we know all too well from the subsequent

13:55.065 --> 13:58.705
decades is that yes, it may spur a real estate revival

13:58.725 --> 14:00.945
to attract these young professionals to your city

14:01.445 --> 14:05.225
to increase financialization, to lure financial

14:05.225 --> 14:06.585
and professional firms to your city.

14:06.655 --> 14:09.345
Fine. But often that comes at the cost

14:09.345 --> 14:11.785
of low income residents quite directly,

14:11.785 --> 14:14.345
as I demonstrate here, not just in the sense

14:14.345 --> 14:16.985
that equality's rising because some are not doing so well

14:16.985 --> 14:20.025
and some are enjoying increased wages and wealth.

14:20.725 --> 14:23.305
No, there's a direct relational aspect.

14:23.885 --> 14:26.905
Um, you might call it plunder as the

14:27.445 --> 14:29.785
elites literally take over the spaces

14:29.855 --> 14:32.785
that were once inhabited by people who arrived in the city

14:32.785 --> 14:34.825
to work in these industrial jobs that have now left

14:35.085 --> 14:37.625
who are watching social welfare evaporate

14:37.625 --> 14:39.505
to be eviscerated in the 1980s.

14:40.045 --> 14:43.345
So I want us to focus on the 1980s, not just in this,

14:43.365 --> 14:44.705
as I said, bloodless sense

14:44.705 --> 14:46.705
that neoliberalism transformed society,

14:47.285 --> 14:48.945
but in terms of social history

14:48.965 --> 14:50.625
and the material history on the ground,

14:51.265 --> 14:53.125
To show us how real people played out

14:53.125 --> 14:54.565
these conflicts in real space.

14:55.305 --> 14:58.365
And perhaps that cities shouldn't look to this method

14:58.385 --> 15:00.725
of revival as the way to,

15:01.345 --> 15:03.285
revive their mound cities, right?

15:03.285 --> 15:06.285
Selling out to interests that'll attract elites,

15:06.285 --> 15:08.805
maybe a bank shot to increasing real estate prices,

15:09.305 --> 15:11.605
but very real consequences, particularly

15:11.625 --> 15:12.685
for working class people

15:12.685 --> 15:16.165
and people of color who have a right to the city as well.

Uncovering Urban Transformation and Inequality Dynamics

00:00:00 - When I was beginning my research for my PhD at Princeton, my PhD dissertation, I was struggling to find specific actors who could help me tell the story of city's transformation in the 1970s and 1980s, who were the people who were doing the work of making cities more unequal, of revitalizing commercial districts and residential areas across the nation. And I got some great advice from a colleague of mine who said, pour over the US census, the actual statistics for say the finance workers you're interested in,
00:00:33 - you'd like to tell their story. And I did that. I spent some time with the census and I dug into where are those folks moving in the seventies and eighties in New York, you could expect them to live, say on the Upper East Side, the traditional hunts for financiers, right? But I noticed something really interesting when I mapped where they were moving. They were moving in places that I didn't expect. Places like Hoboken, New Jersey, which is a small working class city of about 50,000 people just across the Hudson River from Manhattan in the New York area.
00:01:04 - importantly from downtown Manhattan and Midtown, where big corporate offices still existed. So I use these tools and I see this increasing concentration in whole book. And I think as a historian, there has to be a story there, right? What happens when these people arrive? And that's when I went to the local archives, the Hoboken Public Library, the Hoboken Historical Museum, not places that historians are beating down the doors to get in. But in those archives, I found a shocking and really important story of a string of fires, arson fires at the same moment
00:01:37 - I literally found this in a manila envelope titled Fires in the Public Library. I don't think historians had dug through there before, but I found this material from tenants rights groups, local newspaper clippings, and they all argued that these fires were in fact, intentional. That they were set by local landlords to drive out their rent controlled tenants, convert their buildings to condos and charge rents five or even six times more than they were receiving before. And it was part I discovered later
00:02:09 - I'd be happy to discuss more, you know, as historians we're obsessed with sources, and these were some great ones, right? It was wonderful to find sheaths of newspaper clippings that had been assembled by tenants rights groups. It was a wonderful place to start. But I knew I needed to supplement and kind of contextualize those archival fines with reading across urban history. That's something I'd already been doing, right? And there's a big existing literature on gentrification in the 1960s and seventies, what I call the first wave of gentrification.
00:02:41 - and everyone's talking about the artists who come to live in lofts in places like Soho. people who are working to renovate with government money in places like Harlem, cities like Toronto. There's a kind of international literature about this. First, back to the city movement, people who renovate brownstones, they're socially liberal, they're interested in historical diversity. But what I found was that my story, I was finding in the archives of violence, of fires of intense increases in price

Uncovering Urban Transformation and Inequality

00:03:11 - People who had a lot more capital yuppies, the young urban professionals I write about that hadn't been told. And so that's when I really started digging in, doing interviews with people who remembered the events, uncovering oral histories and other primary source materials in Hoboken, and seeing could I tell a story that expanded that existing literature on the sixties and seventies to a different era when the political economy shifts in favor of finance and professional work, and this process of urban change intensifies,
00:03:42 - So that's really got me pushed, pushed me further into the research, was to pursue this missing story that historians had really told. Yet this is of course, a period of crisis for American cities decline and crisis is how it's usually narrated, right? Cities continue to lose population jobs capitals flowing out to the American south, to the sunbelt, to the west abroad. But what I discover and argue here is that a small number of neighborhoods, places like Hoboken, but you know, Boston's back bay, Chicago's north side,
00:04:18 - of over investment. So the professional and finance sectors, which are seen as maybe this great hope to revive these cities', fortunes do indeed begin to grow in the late seventies and early eighties, particularly as deregulation of finance makes these more profitable centers of the economy. So for example, in New York, over that period, you just mentioned about 90,000 financiers arrive in New York City, right? Hired by Wall Street Banks, recruited from colleges to do the work of financializing the economy.
00:04:49 - to their jobs where they're working 10, 12 hours a day. And so these yuppies, as I call them, is the term of the time, but one I've adopted, right? These young urban professionals look to places where they can live in close proximity to their jobs, but they've got much higher wages than the first wave of, say, brown donors or artists who'd come before. And so speculative landlords and developers realize, wow, there's this incredible demand from the new population who is moving to the city, but we've got a problem, right?
00:05:21 - and New York still had rent control or rent stabilization laws, which protected existing tenants, many of them low income in Hoboken, many of them Latino from displacement. You couldn't just say, please leave, you couldn't raise their rent 200%. It was literally illegal. So, you know, they try various things. They take advantage of renovation, exclusion. So if they rip out an old sink and put in a new one, that's one way to displace your tenant because you can then raise the rent for the cost of the renovations.
00:05:52 - of interest in, housing and Hoboken places like it. So what do they do? My research reveals that they turn to arson paying, young, often young people, it seems to start intentional fires in these buildings. And these landlords will go to the length of actually threatening to use fire before doing it. And they'll tell their tenants, I'm gonna burn you out if you don't leave. And some tenants leave willingly, but many don't.

Arson, Gentrification, and Urban Transformation

00:06:20 - to burn down the building, they still do. So, and I've uncovered records, contracts of sale that say, we'll, buy, the developer will tell the landlord, we'll, buy your building under the condition it's delivered. Vacant that is cleared of all inhabitants and fire was a deadly, very effective way to do that. So the scale of this is pretty remarkable. as you say in the, that roughly five year period when fires are a weekly occurrence in Hoboken, 56 people die in these intentional fires.
00:06:55 - some of those willingly and it because, well willingly, they're coerced because of the fear of future fires. Some directly as buildings are destroyed. some just from the trauma of losing family members decide to decamp to Puerto Rico or to other neighboring towns that are not experiencing this yuppie surge. So it's incredibly destructive and incredibly traumatic.
00:07:24 - of ly unaware of or about their role in this one. Stockbroker gives a quote to a local newspaper, says, you know, I don't want anyone to be burned, but I wouldn't mind a nicer element of people in this town, right? Understanding that yes, this is a violent remaking, but well, maybe it's all for the good if people like me can afford to live here. Now, I think there are two potential answers. There's a disciplinary gap between historians
00:07:52 - and seventies when it came to gentrification, right? And then sociologists who studied, or what they've called super gentrification and say the recent period in two thousands and 2010s in cities like London or New York, right? They work on the recent period interviewing subjects, doing the statistical analysis. Sociologists historically were working on the sixties and 70 thinking about for authenticity and how that brought young people to new neighborhoods. But there was a gap in the middle that had just not really been looked at, right? And my work on the shifting political economy of
00:08:25 - and professional work led me to that time period and made me feel like it was incumbent upon me to fill that gap, right? To talk about the second wave that the sociologists had sort of missed and the historians hadn't caught up to. So that's one reason. The second reason is that many of our narratives across different disciplines about the 1980s tend to kind of efface the complexity of the period under an umbrella of neoliberalism, right?
00:08:57 - how markets were promised to enter every sector of American life. whether you're on the right and you don't care about inequality or you're on the, you're a new Democrat and perhaps you care about inequality, but you think you need to do it through unleashing the private sector. Either way, we talk about this era in terms of neoliberalism, and I think it's a useful frame, but there's something kind of bloodless about it. It's very rarely put into actual place

Neighborhood Transformation Amid Neoliberalism and Gentrification

00:09:26 - It's one thing to look at Reagan's policies at a national level or Margaret Factors pronouncements in a national level. It's quite another to see at the neighborhood level how the new sort of actors were called into being by neoliberalism actually go about their day, right? Where do they live? How do they consume, how do they make sense of their social position in the newly unequal society that's being remade? And that's the story I want to tell in this article and in my book more broadly, is how do,
00:09:58 - What, what's the social history of them? How do they take place in real places? What are the conflicts that erupt as different constituencies struggle to find a place in a city that's being violently remade? Arson is an incredibly hard crime to prosecute. Mere evidence of economic gain for a landlord isn't enough to convict someone. So local prosecutors can't just link landlords who burned down their buildings in theory and economic gain and say, we've got a case.
00:10:30 - But these are frequently young teenagers who are, you know, slipped a dollar bill and they throw 'em all top cocktail in a building, they're never gonna find them. So that's one thing, right? It's hard to prosecute it. Another reason these go un prosecuted and largely unpunished is because I do think local prosecutors have a sense of ethnic bias. They, in interviews with me, the DA for the county told me, you know, there are some sort of ethnic rivalries or hot-blooded, Latin machismo are to blame here.
00:11:00 - So what are things that actually ended this crisis? Well, one, at the federal level Congress investigates in the early eighties, this rash of gentrification arson, including in Hoboken. They actually hear testimony about Hoboken and they upgrade the penalties for arson as well as the resources devoting to fighting it at the national level with the FBI. And that money does trickle down to local law enforcement. So they do begin to take it more seriously and investigate it more rigorously.
00:11:30 - the developers set their sight on a new area, just one city over in Jersey City, which passes new pro development laws that send that flood of development one town over to the kind of hulks of industrial buildings that now can be converted to apartments and conveniently don't have any tenants inside. But finally, and most importantly, the reason these arsons end, I think is the social movement that arises Ian Hoboken. there's a first led by Latino tenant activists
00:12:03 - They join up with the brown stoners, those socially liberal folks, many white middle class people who arrived in the sixties who are part of the new left and said, Hey, this is a horrible crime against a community we care about. And they unite and they elect an anti-development mayor, this sort of wacky fellow Thomas ti, who's, you know, the kind of guy who stands in the street corner with a megaphone, sailing the powers that be. But he becomes the mayor of Hoboken and vows to stop gentrification. And he put places a moratorium on all new development,

Urban Transformation and Inequality in the 1980s

00:12:35 - and does what he can while in office to slow the tide. But ultimately, I think it's just landlords decide this tactic is providing too much bad publicity, and they're worried about selling these condos. They're converting by fire as the social movement calls attention to this horror in the city. So they switch tactics and they just use economic means of displacement to continue this regime of transformation. And now Hoboken is utterly transformed.
00:13:06 - it's 28-year-old stockbrokers enjoying one too many pints with their mates, as you would say in the uk. it's utterly a refuge of the young urban professional who we just begin to see arriving in the eighties. And it's just as expensive as parts of Manhattan. My conclusions are one, we need to take the eighties seriously as a moment when, economic transformations happen at the broadest level that have real consequences in cities in America and indeed around the world.
00:13:37 - a concentration of brain power and capital in these cities is championed by some as a way of reviving cities in an era of crisis. And indeed, there were very few choices for cities in this period. I'm not denying that, but the results are deepening inequality. Something that we know all too well from the subsequent decades is that yes, it may spur a real estate revival to attract these young professionals to your city to increase financialization, to lure financial
00:14:06 - Fine. But often that comes at the cost of low income residents quite directly, as I demonstrate here, not just in the sense that equality's rising because some are not doing so well and some are enjoying increased wages and wealth. No, there's a direct relational aspect. you might call it plunder as the elites literally take over the spaces that were once inhabited by people who arrived in the city to work in these industrial jobs that have now left who are watching social welfare evaporate
00:14:40 - So I want us to focus on the 1980s, not just in this, as I said, bloodless sense that neoliberalism transformed society, but in terms of social history and the material history on the ground, To show us how real people played out these conflicts in real space. And perhaps that cities shouldn't look to this method of revival as the way to, revive their mound cities, right? Selling out to interests that'll attract elites, maybe a bank shot to increasing real estate prices,
00:15:12 - for working class people and people of color who have a right to the city as well.

Faculti AI can make mistakes

Research

Policy

Analysis

Data

Originals

Explainers

Podcasts

Faculti

New on Faculti

Idea Explorer

Definition

News Context

Critical Questions and Answers

Research Summaries

Hoboken Is Burning

Media Literacy Toolkit

Critical Questions to Consider ▼

Bias and Perspective Awareness ▼

Further Reading ▼