Rent

[Monte Davis]

P-List 2013/10/26, on pp. 53-57 of BE:

Some context for the co-opping frenzy: Real estate and its financing are a
large part of any city's economy, and have long been a larger fraction of
New York City's than most. Long ago, Wharton and James inspired me to read
about the Gilded Age and the "Four Hundred
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_McAllister#.22The_Four_Hundred.22>”
families at the top of NY society then. I was struck by how many of the
fortunes were tied to savvy investment in local land. We associate the
Vanderbilts, Astors et al with shipping, railroads, and beaver pelts, but
few of their investments matched the long-term ROI of parcels of farmland
in the path of the city's expansion. Because the value of land and
buildings is so closely tied to public infrastructure and investment in
streets and utilities, bridges, subways, etc. (and to zoning and building
codes since they came into play), the real estate industry is intertwined
with the city's politics from deep underground to the top of the Freedom
Tower <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_tower>. (Again, true of any
city, but the stakes are higher where the dollars-per-square-foot are
higher.)



...Note that March explicitly links the displacement of relatively
well-to-do and empowered Upper West Side tenants here to earlier events
less than a mile to the south: the demolition thirty years earlier (*V.*
days) of a poorer Puerto Rican neighborhood to make way for Lincoln Center
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Center>. Note also that no one is
entirely innocent: Maxine's opera-loving parents Elaine and Ernie have "no
love for Lincoln Center, but you can't keep 'em away from the Met
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_opera>.”


>From here on throughout the book, no reference to matters of NYC real
estate -- from dot-com offices in the Flatiron district to the "Newspaper
of Record" (NY Times) celebrating every form of "urban renewal" -- is
casual. We are never far from demolition slower than that of 11 September,
and construction more concrete than virtual cities in video games. We're
learning the rules (overt, implicit, and deeply secret) of the emerging
cyber-real-estate industry: its land rush, infrastructure, zoning, and so
on...

https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1310&msg=177608
<https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1310&msg=177608&sort=date>

On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 5:58 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Young Pynchon's penned a brilliant short story, "The Secret
> Integration", and at the heart of the tale's conflict is redlining,
> blockbusting, the civil rights act of 1866, the stresses that produce
> the fair housing act of 1968, a homeless Black musician, a childless
> Black family that moves into a "Lily White" Republican neighborhood,
> resembling the one Pynchon grew up in, where his father was a big shot
> in the Party. The author's interest in Real Estate may be quite
> personal, as RE is critical to the economies of Long Island,
> Manhattan, and in the California and PNW communities he's lived and
> worked in, and remember that P's ancestors are the subject of one of
> the most important real estate novels in the American cannon, _The
> House of the Seven Gables_.
>
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:51 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Real estate generally is pretty big in Inherent Vice and Bleeding
> > Edge, but maybe that's just a reflection of the times, or P's later
> > home-owning ways? In IV the supposedly countercultural free-livin'
> > idealists are still pinned within a system that ultimately owns them
> > (you gotta pay the rent at the end of the day) and in BE this extends
> > to the internet, which is an anarchic frontier at first but later
> > becomes a heavily surveilled shopping mall.
> > Can the relationship between renters and landlords be extrapolated
> > into a broader existential dynamic? It's worth a thought.
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Chase Carnot <chase.carnot at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> "[...] Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. ‘A bit late for that, Mr.
> >> Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time
> they pay
> >> anybody rent.’"
> >>
> >> When I saw PT Anderson's IV, this line jumped at me for the first time.
> In
> >> the novel, it must have just washed over me. Anyway, I've been thinking
> >> about diving back into the novel sometime soon with an eye toward rent
> as a
> >> central theme. I felt vindicated when a reading app I use cropped the IV
> >> 'Last Supper' poster... it left the center...
> >>
> >> https://goo.gl/photos/zaJops8hNHUrju2u6
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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