SOON WE'LL BE SLIDING DOWN THE RENT GRADIENT OF LIFE.

An Ed Driscoll post at Insta Pundit dips into Culture War themes, but you can put a Thünen ring around the meming.

Unironically doing the meme pic.twitter.com/OkvK0HY8Ec

— Nemesis 2026 (@Nemtastic1) February 11, 2026

The underlying regional economic analysis is simple enough.

Look, this is not difficult.  Note, there is no shortage of housing per se, there is what the authors refer to as a shortage of "affordable housing," and they persist in their delusion that if you pass a law that makes housing "affordable," there will be affordable housing.  Sorry, no.  On Manhattan, and in San Francisco, and anyplace else where there are serious agglomeration economies favoring high-value-added work, the real estate on which those rent-stabilized apartments sit will be seriously expensive.

When the rent gradient comes for your neighborhood, maybe you have a platform to engage in grievance-mongering.  If you're novelist Naomi Jackson, you surely do.

“I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal,” the novelist Naomi Jackson writes.

Jackson was born in Crown Heights to… pic.twitter.com/aZD8o4wYbN

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) February 11, 2026

As Captain Ed's post notes, had any author who does not enjoy protected status written the following, the cancel mob would be all over her and she'd likely not place another novel with a major publishing house.

My formative years were in Flatbush, which is called “Little Caribbean” even though it becomes less and less Caribbean each day as new Asian, Latino, African, and African American residents move in, making the communities where I grew up feel both less familiar and more diverse. Even the name Little Caribbean, as effective and important as it is as a marketing tool, makes me mildly nauseous each time I encounter it on a lamppost or a street sign; it seems to commemorate a community that doesn’t quite exist anymore.

In that Brooklyn, in the late 1980s, all the kids were, like me, the children of Caribbean immigrants. One would still occasionally see a Black Pentecostal church parade on a Sunday afternoon — white-turbaned women, drums and a horn section playing loud gospel music. In that Brooklyn, I squirmed as my stepmother stopped on nearly every block to greet a neighbor; on Saturdays, when our family’s kitchen was closed, we ordered jerk chicken and festival from the now-defunct Danny and Pepper’s or boiled crab and corn from Mr. Chin, the Chinese Jamaican man who cooked his victuals in a Dutch pot on Rogers Avenue and surprised me when he spoke in patois one day.

That's the nature of the neighborhoods with cheap housing.  Milwaukee's Old South Side used to be Milwaukee's Polonia, and thrifty homeowners would start by building a one-story shack, later they'd jack it up to put additional rooms underneath, and they'd build what the local vocabulary referred to as a "back cottage" later.

These days, though, St. Stanislaus Catholic Church offer services in Spanish as well as in Polish and English.

Icon of the Black Madonna at St. Stanislaus.

Sooner or later, though, those urban agglomeration economies come for neighborhoods an easy journey to the central business district.  That goes for Flatbush, too.

In 2006, I convinced my dad, who helped me by paying for my home inspection, that buying property in Prospect–Lefferts Gardens (while this has been a historic district since 1979, when I was growing up, I thought it was part of Flatbush) was a smart idea. At the time, I was 25 years old and scraping together a down payment on a modest studio apartment through a combination of savings and first-time-homebuyer grants. The neighborhood was already transforming; there was a new coffee shop and more white residents. Back then, the abbreviation PLG felt like a harbinger of gentrification that would protect my property value. Now, it feels more like a death knell for the childhood I remember.

I hope her creative writing is better than her regional analysis.

Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination illustrates how gentrification transforms cities by profoundly restricting the possibilities of what art and ideas are made within them, blocking the creation of “a true avant-garde, a large, vibrant community of people willing to think, fuck, love, live, and create oppositionally.” What is lost in the process of gentrification is not just a Black population but Black culture, communities, institutions, and political power. There are novels that will never be written, music that will never be recorded, innovative ideas that will never be imagined or executed, relationships that will never take flight, policies that will never see the light of day, because these neighborhoods no longer exist. The listening rooms, salons, murals that may have once bloomed in Brooklyn will likely find their roots in other, more affordable cities.

On the corner of Sullivan Place and Nostrand Avenue, for more than 40 years, there was a shoe store where I think my mother once bought my sister or me or both of us shoes that shuttered recently. It’s now a nail salon where I got a gel mani and pedi complete with nail art — hilarious upside-down balloons that looked suspiciously like sperm — for my son’s 5th-birthday party. There are some stalwart holdouts, notably Culpepper’s, a Bajan bakery where I ordered the fish cakes I never had a chance to taste for my first book launch in 2015. And there’s the Trinidadian Allan’s Bakery, known for its famous currant rolls, though my favorite has always been the strawberry-cream Danish, partly because the countergirl always gave one extra when my father ordered because she had a crush on him.

The changes are a source of both lament and ambivalence. I love some of the new coffee shops that have popped up, allowing me the indulgence of my favorite lavender oat latte. I appreciate the new crop of Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn like Miss Barb’s coffee shop and wine bar and Pearl Lee’s Washtub, a jazzy laundromat that also serves beer and wine and has live music twice a month. The Brooklyn Public Library branch where my public school checked out books and once took a class trip to be fingerprinted (it was the 1980s, and we were told that our fingerprints would be held at the local police station to aid in the unfortunate event that one of us went missing) is now a sunlit and airy space populated by a diverse array of constituents. There is less crime, but there’s also more surveillance. The cameras and bright lights that sit on certain blocks in Crown Heights and Flatbush make me feel less safe than watched, ensnared by a modern panopticon.

If it's flophouses and Dostoyevskian garrets you want, maybe you get rid of the zoning codes that made walk-ups, along with contemporary versions of the Polish flat, the back cottage, and the apartments above the store front illegal.  It's not as if I didn't warn you.

Those laws of conservation in economics are a pain, aren't they?  Maybe the best thing for all the planners, advocates, and people who make "commodity" an epithet ought best go away. "Perhaps the best way to 'create' might be to offer fewer guidelines and zoning restrictions, not more."

And if you live within an easy travelling distance of a conurbation that exists to harvest the gains from trade of ideas having sex (the people having the ideas also having the sex is a spillover benefit, that is, if they can make the time to make it with each other) ensure that the coffee shops and wine bars that cater to such people will crowd out the grittier charms of the old shops, and the old neighborhood.  "Unfortunately, with improved transportation, road amenities, and big box apartments comes a change in the rent gradient, and if that doesn't present as 'gentrification,' the neighborhood is in a worse place."