a love letter to nyc

I came to nyc a skeptic. Growing up in a Dallas suburb makes one accustomed to a certain spacious life style and convenience of transportation by car. It’s a feeling of supremacy that leads to statements like “I would never want to settle down in a big city like New York.”

Now that I’ve moved out, however, I feel quite conflicted. I only lived in nyc for a grand total of 734 days, but I am now connected to it in a way that I would have never thought I would. I used to make fun of the common stereotype of people who move to the city and make cliché claims about how they fell in love with the city and couldn’t think of a life outside of it. While I definitely can imagine a life outside of nyc, I leave it with an impression of nyc being the ultimate city. It’s as if most other places I visit now have lost their luster and end up underwhelming. There’s a big asterics next to every city I visit that says “this is no New York”. Of course there are many pros and cons to living in nyc, but it is damn hard to find a place that checks as many boxes. One of these boxes is neighborhood identity. I haven’t lived in a large number of places so far, but one thing that I deeply enjoy in a city is neighborhood identity.

Dallas and most of its surrounding suburbs didn’t have any sense of identity and Pittsburgh actually had a decent amount for the size of city that it is, but nyc is the king of all cities when it comes to neighborhood identity. Each community has naturally been built around either some ethnic identity or a theme. For neighborhoods in Manhattan, even though this core identity has shifted over time for neighborhoods (as rent prices have gone up and those core groups of people that created the neighborhood identity have moved further deeper into Queens and Brooklyn) the qualitative distinctions are clear through the various restaurants, establishments, and community leaders that make up each given neighborhood. I’ve realized that what I want most in a long term place to live is both somewhere that promotes an active lifestyle and also is enjoyable to explore where each of the neighborhoods has a distinct identity. It’s true that a cushy settled down life in nyc is very expensive but it is quite evocative for the dreamers like myself.

The delay in emotionally connecting to nyc came as a suprise to me because frankly, I love cities. I love the way you can look at another person’s face and dream about all the experiences that they have gone through in their lives, I love the way that you can sit on a bench and try to reminisce about everything that has happened on that sidewalk over the past hundreds of years, and I love how you can contemplate about the micro interactions between people and communities from the physical real-world ebbs and flows of a neighborhood. That’s actually how I originally got into economics. The same way one can use physics to understand the way a river carves into the surrounding environment over time, I view economics as a tool to understand the dynamics of humans and the structures that they build; a tool to help understand why cities change the way that they do; an instrument that helps you visualize the latent structure behind those timelapses of satelite images.

I’m moving to Minneapolis now for grad school. It will be quite the change from the past two years but a change that I am very much looking forward to.