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New York has grappled with gentrification for years. Covid has brought it to a head

<span>Photograph: Ernst Haas/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Ernst Haas/Getty Images

We were standing at the intersection of 72nd street and Broadway, waiting to cross at the lights. It’s an area that features a Gray’s Papaya and a mattress store, and a low level but reliable presence of homeless people. Behind the subway, meanwhile, there’s a small park that, in 1971, was the setting for The Panic in Needle Park, Joan Didion’s famous movie of crime-ridden New York. It’s landscaped these days, with a pop-up Le Pain Quotidien, but that morning, with a child on each hand, I found myself scrutinising my surroundings with more interest than usual.

A few days earlier, at noon, a woman buying her MetroCard from the ticket machine at the subway had been randomly stabbed in the back by a stranger. A few days after that, there were two muggings in the neighbourhood in quick succession. For a while, the city’s parenting sites have been alive with discussion of New York’s “spike” in violent crime, and the impact of two local hotels lately converted to homeless shelters, on the intake list of which featured several registered sex offenders.

Related: ‘Not what it used to be’: in New York, Flushing’s Asian residents brace against gentrification

There are two narratives of 70s and 80s New York, both resurging and in direct competition. The first is of a crimeridden hellscape, the New York of the Central Park jogger and a mythological place in which no side street is safe and people live in the tunnels of the subway. It’s the New York of Midnight Cowboy, a sordid landscape cherished in the minds of those who lived through it both as war story and a marker of how far the city has come.

The second popular version is that of the poets’ New York, the city of Eileen Myles, the Chelsea Hotel, the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church and the cheap rent of loft space in Soho before Apple moved in. It’s a rendition of the city which, as the value of commercial real estate collapses and affluent families move out, other New Yorkers are anticipating the return of with open arms.

It has been a strange thing to watch, over the last few weeks, as the fight between these two camps has taken off and, in certain neighbourhoods and among certain demographics, completely displaced the virus as the number one conversational topic. “New York is going back to the 1970s.” This is the dire and dark warning issued by those who grew up in the city to anyone who arrived later than around the turn of the millennium, and which if you dare to counter, triggers the response, “You weren’t here, you have no idea.” On the opposing side, meanwhile, the city is at the dawn of a long overdue correction to the ravaging effect of high finance.

There is an element of urban legend in both positions, which, like all such histories, express an emotional if not a literal truth: New York is overpriced and horribly segregated. And it is also a city, a post-Covid hotspot, in which everyone is feeling horribly vulnerable.

The crime statistics, at least for now, are a misfocus, particularly when looked at in the context of the last 30 years. In 1989, the peak of the city’s crime wave, there were 203,000 violent crimes; in 2018, that had dropped to 68,000, and even in the context of what appears to be a mini-spike since 2019 – year on year, there have been roughly double the number of shootings in 2020 – compared with the bad old days, New York is still one of the safest big cities in America.

You would not know this to read some of the literature online. A group called NYC Moms for Safer Streets has popped up to campaign against the homeless shelters – which seems harsh – and also to highlight that housing sex offenders within 1,000ft of a school breaks city regulations, which seems reasonable. The vested interests are strong and diverse; the NYPD, defensive after the protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd and in the face of campaigns to if not be defunded completely, then to be stripped of some of its extraordinary $5.58bn operating budget, has a good reason to promote the city as a place that is becoming more dangerous.

And yet those cheering on the prospect of a New York in which the money moves out offer no solution to the crash in tax revenue and the knock-on effect it would have on the public school system and other services, all of which are already staggering under vast budget cuts and inadequate funding. To promote an image of the city in its broke years as a return to some romantic idyll seems completely delusional.

It is the dilemma of gentrification the city has been grappling with for 20 years, brought to a head by the pandemic, and in which nostalgia for squalor and authenticity seems as falsifying as premature panic that the city is in danger of being lost and degraded if a few middle-class families move out. That day, as we crossed the street at the lights, an NYPD squad car parked opposite the subway to communicate to residents that the matter was in hand. It’s a mark of the psychological state of the city that, for different reasons, it seemed unlikely to reassure anyone.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist