The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.
Moving to New York is a big, brave thing to do.
I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven't lived in a small town since.
The trouble with New York today is that it's lost its balance. I love the new, greener New York, but it takes all kinds of worlds to make a World.
I was born in Southern California in a city called Norwalk. I grew up there until I moved up to New York when I was 18.
I moved away when I was young, when I was about 19. I'd literally come from an area with dirt roads and stuff like that, right to the centre of a city of about five million people. It's been great. I'm based in New York, and every day, it's amazing.
Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. And the soul of New York has moved to Brooklyn, where everything new and exciting seems to be.
We'd been living in the Arkansas Ozarks, then the Missouri Ozarks, because it is so inexpensive and does have natural wonders, but we shuffled things and moved to San Francisco, the corner of Dashiell Hammett and Pine.
I always felt uncomfortable with real estate because buildings don't move, and neighborhoods change.
And Seattle isn't really crazy anymore. It's a big dot-com city.
You can ride your bike to anywhere in Portland if you want to. I think there was a charming underdog mentality when I first moved here in the late '80s that is definitely gone. People acted more like underdogs, dressed more like underdogs.
Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.
By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers.
I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.
My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things.
