New York is my star-crossed lover. I don’t know how long I can hang on here. My parents immigrated to the Bronx in 1977, when the Bowery was famous for bums and Basquiat, when a dancer named Madonna was trying to get a break on East 7th St, when Spike Lee was learning how to load film into a camera at NYU, and when the international language of hip-hop was being born on these streets. One can say great art comes out of facing life’s struggles. It has become increasingly difficult for artists to make art and culture in “New York, New York” because it has fundamentally become too expensive to live here.

As a filmmaker, I keep tabs on all the cultural movements and flows in the city. It is no longer possible for a young Paul Auster to work a part-time job, rent a $300/month studio on East 3rd St, walk everywhere instead of subway or cabs, buy $40 groceries for the week, and spend the majority of time writing, re-writing, and revising more in order to get published. This young Paul Auster would have to move to Flushing or be independently wealthy. This East Village studio would rent for $300/day to French tourists. I appreciate the positive contributions of the 90’s and 00’s redevelopment plans. I appreciate the fact that I can walk down 3rd Ave at 3am as a young woman and feel pretty safe. My mother didn’t have that in the 70s. However, we lost a lot of our cultural capital in the process. We lost Live/Work Studio spaces to condo conversions. We lost hearing different languages on the street. We lost seeing people of wide age and wealth ranges. We lost affordable living & housing, and we lost some of our international landmarks — CBGB’s, galleries, little boutiques by emerging designers. More than just storefronts, these were gathering places, artistic labs, nurseries for the young talent that made this city worth living in. Without all this, we may as well live in Nevada and at least have some money saved up at the end of the day.

I’m not a policy analyst. I don’t know the right Economics equation or who to lobby in City Council. Frankly, I’m a little skeptical of politicians. I’m just trying follow my dreams. There are millions of people in my position. I guess we all need to take more responsibility over our government, vote for people we believe in, continue the momentum from 2008. It’s 2010, and we’ve all gone back to chasing our own dreams.

What happened to the prosperity of the 00’s? Which Swiss Bank now holds all this money that has suddenly vanished? Why are New York City school children losing their free metro cards to get to school? Why is the MTA going bankrupt again and talking about closing the subway at night?

So — I guess I’m talking about a lot of things here. I suppose the “innovation” would be to protect the innovators. Some of these artists were also our greatest business people. There should be an “artistic investment exchange”, a better way to link those in the financial sector to the arts. There should be more public funding for the arts, as with the British Film Council’s Lottery Fund or any other developed nation. There was talk of a Cabinet Post for the Arts in 2008. But all these things affect High Art, not daily living. I don’t really know the technicalities of the grand, 30-year urban re-development plans. I do know that we need to get some of that cultural capital back. We need to make this city affordable to live & create in again.