Priced out of Paris

First, the working classes and bohemians were priced out. Nowadays the only  ribald proletarian banter you hear inside Paris is from the market sellers, who  don’t live there anymore.

That was gentrification. Now comes plutocratisation: the middle classes and  small companies are falling victim to class-cleansing. Global cities are  becoming patrician ghettos. In 2009, says Sassen, the top 1 per cent of New York  City’s earners got 44 per cent of the compensation paid to its workers. The “super-prime housing market” keeps rising even when the national economy  collapses. After Manhattan, New York’s upper-middle classes are being priced out  of Brooklyn. Sassen diagnoses “gradual destruction”.

Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent  reproduces itself. Elite members don’t live there for their jobs. They work  virtually anyway. Rather, global cities are where they network with each other,  and put their kids through their country’s best schools. The elite talks about  its cities in ostensibly innocent language, says Sassen: “a good education for  my child,” “my neighbourhood and its shops”. But the truth is exclusion.

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