Department of Transplantation

Some things never change. For example, did you know Iron Maiden is still touring?

Also, the Livable Streets Culture War in New York City continues to rage on, with the NIMBY side deriding the YIMBY side as “transplants:”

CM @VickieforNYC hurled insults at @chabot_jackson because he wasn't born in NYC??? pic.twitter.com/b0o6riWDi0
— Open New York (@OpenNYForAll) October 22, 2024

And staunchly defending the Almighty Car:

Transplants who just arrived in New York don't have the right to insist we redesign our entire city according to their agenda just because they hate people who own cars. Sorry we're not Barcelona or Amsterdam. Go be a transplant there if it's so great.

I said what I said.
— Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (@VickieforNYC) October 22, 2024

Having officially checked out of this stuff, I mostly just find the discourse around it all to be amusing, and so it’s impossible for me to muster up any real outrage here. However, while Councilwoman Vicky Paladino and her constituents are certainly entitled to their opinion regarding cars, she’s absolutely wrong about what “transplants who just arrived in New York” can and cannot do. The fact is that this city belongs to the transplants, it always has. Just ask these guys with the pipes:

Oh wait, you can’t. That’s because the transplants took over and sent them packing. And it’s been that way ever since. So whether the transplant is a Dutch trader or a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Etsy, money talks in this town, and that’s that.

Also, while it’s only natural that vintage New Yorkers resent the newer models, they should also keep in mind the whole “transplant” thing isn’t really applicable anymore. Consider bike lanes, which all “real New Yorkers” are supposed to hate, and which began appearing in earnest in 2007 when Janette Sadik-Khan began her reign of terror as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation:

And the city’s first protected bike lane appeared on 9th Avenue in Manhattan:

[From here.]

Now, sticking with the idea that the sorts of people who advocate for these things are a bunch of namby-pamby transplants with liberal arts degrees–which undoubtedly a lot of them are–it’s also true that at least some of them have been reproducing. Well, at least the ones who haven’t decided not to in order to save the planet, anyway:

This means that a baby conceived when Sadik-Khan took office (and a lot of these people probably had celebratory sex when it happened) will soon be old enough to vote. In other words, the so-called “transplants” are well into their second generation now. So is a kid who was born in Brooklyn and grew up being carted around by a transplant in a bakfiets also a transplant? And if in a few years they too are carting their genderless kids around in bakfietsen and advocating for still more bike lanes, is it still accurate to say a bunch of whiny entitled transplants are trying to remake the city? Hardly. What’s happening there is that a bunch of whiny entitled native New Yorkers are trying to remake the city. Really, as I’ve pointed out before, the only difference between a typical entitled livable streets advocate and a typical entitled NIMBY is they type of restaurants they prefer. (One likes expensive farm-to-table restaurants with bike corrals, the other likes expensive Italian restaurants with valet parking.) In fact, I’m sure a few generations ago someone was equally disgusted with one of Vickie Paladino’s transplant forebears for blocking Mott Street with his pushcart or something.

Indeed, when it comes to New York, at the risk of leaning on a cliché, the only constant is change. Consider that before-and-after photo of 9th Avenue I posted above. Before that bike lane, this was a great place to pick up a transsexual prostitute. (Uh, or so I’ve heard!) Now it’s home to Google and an Apple store the High Line and a bunch of fancy galleries and hotels and all the rest of it:

Maybe you resent all this money and corporate monoculture. Maybe you even miss the whores. But it happened, and it’s not because of the bike lane.

Ultimately New York keeps New Yorking whether you like it or not–and you probably don’t, because nobody really likes it here, except the people who have managed come to terms with the first part of this sentence. Or, if you can’t come to terms with that, you can at least come to terms with the idea that you’ve got to make your nut and then get out, and in that respect I suspect the transsexual prostitutes of yesteryear and the tech workers of today share a lot in common.

Meanwhile, Streetsblog points out that New York can learn from other cities: