I want more gentrification so I can eat more pizza
Emily is a pizza place that opened this year in Clinton Hill Brooklyn, and as of now, it has the distinction as ‘that place where Adam Kuban is doing his pop up/preview of Margot’s Pizza.’ I suppose a pizza place could be known for worse things, so that’s not so bad. I can sum up Emily in about one sentence: it’s fairly decent for a neighborhood place in its neighborhood which has no other good pizza places, but most of you probably shouldn’t rush out to Clinton Hill just to try Emily.
Emily makes good enough pizza that probably falls into a special niche for super pizza lovers. For normal people, it’s good pizza but it’s hard to place what kind of style it really is. It’s not the Neapolitan style that has been popular the last few years. We tried their version of margherita, another pizza called William (sauce, mozzarella, olives, onion, garlic, basil), The Colony (sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, pickled chilis, honey), and their namesake, Emily (mozzarella, taleggio, pistachios, truffle sottocenere, honey). So it was one of those rare occasions where we actually tried enough variety for me to feel pretty confident about saying that.
Even saying all that, I think it would be nice to have a place like Emily in my neighborhood, which doesn’t have anything like that right now. That brings me to the topic of gentrification and what it means in my eyes. The dictionary.com definition as of today is as follows: “the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses.” And I generally look at gentrification based on the effects, and basically gentrification then becomes “When white people move into working class neighborhoods and its more ‘native’ inhabitants get priced out.”
So I voted for De Blasio because he was the right choice. He wants a lot of affordable housing. But you know the thing is, there’s a ton of affordable housing in Brownsville and Canarsie. And also the population of food blogging readers who live in those type of neighborhoods is zero. The other thing they don’t say is when working class rises to middle class, they don’t want to live in Brownsville or Canarsie. They want affordable housing in better neighborhoods with lower crime and no stop and frisk.
But I think the general point for me is, I always favor gentrification even if it means pricing out lower income citizens because then I get pizza places like Emily. There’s a reason Emily is in Clinton Hill and not in Brownsville. I think there are good hearted liberals who think we can have a neighborhood be revitalized and have all the original working class inhabitants stay there and reap the benefits of increased property value and better neighborhood restaurants… but the thing is like finding a cure for cancer or getting world peace. If it’s super feasible for that to happen, it would have happened already somewhere in the world, and many large cities would scramble to replicate it.
Instead we have Park Slope being gentrified 25 years ago and now you find Park Slope hipsters decry gentrification that uproot folks in East Billy-burg. Meanwhile the gentrification that carved out the space for current Slopers was alright, right? cuz that was 25 years ago. So really there’s no way for good gentrification to happen, only the unfair kind that liberals who currently live in nice neighborhood say is a sham. So I just want to say a giant fuck you to people who dislike gentrification because either you already have an Emily in your neighborhood, or you’re some self-loathing fuck who doesn’t understand reality. I don’t care if people are uprooted if that means I get my pizza. At some point I’m getting priced out of New York too.
Posted by Danny on June 10, 2014 at 2:15 pm
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