John Cameron Mitchell Quotes

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

New York is a much more bourgeois city, more of a tourist attraction than a muscular metropolis. It's lost moxie and a rough energy, while gaining grace and friendliness. I love both versions of the city, but I wish the prosperous Manhattan would become a little easier for young people to afford.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.

New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.

We've made tremendous strides and changes in the City of New York since 1994.

I'd lived in Portland on and off for a decade before I'd even heard of Vanport. It was this town of 20,000 people that washed away from north Portland.

New York for a long time was a kind of conductor's graveyard.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.

Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

Neighborhoods change. In some ways, it's part of the beauty of New York City. It's in a constant state of flux.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.

As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.

Sometimes, I feel that Manhattan in particular has gotten really tame and gentrified or something.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.