The massive real estate covid boom has made this question outdated. Every real estate market is increasing in value nearly evenly due to low interest rates and remote work removing the hyper segmentation of the real estate market based on local jobs

Just be a working class person and act in solidarity with your class and don’t be whiny about it. If you want to move to the city than do it.

Besides if you think you’re going to get this beautiful authentic urban experience where you can be surrounded by beautiful urban proles that you need to worry about displacing then you’re probably going to be disappointed. You’re just going to see suburban transplants, tech workers, finance bros POC NGO/PMC class people and descendants of NYC oligarch and landlord linages of all colors.

Unless you move to anywhere more than a 20 minute walk from a subway or commuter rail line but let’s be honest if you’re posting here and moving to NYC and having a lil existential crisis over existing as a white person then we both know you aren’t moving there.

The only people you’ll displace are the people that displaced the actually good things about NYC before you. Hell even the wave of transgender and queer diaspora that “gentrified” Brooklyn in the early 2000’s either got tech jobs or got displaced. Nothing of what you think is NYC is left

Rent an apartment, then kill your landlord

Bodega

Exclusively shop at bodegas

I’d argue that you aren’t the gentrifier per se, it’s the landlords and developers who quite literally forget that non-billionaires exist. It’s like using a plastic straw, the people on charge want to shift the blame on you and then grin as if they themselves did nothing wrong, even though they make the rules. Of course, you can :troll: in ways that lower property values.

Kinda off-topic, but how good is NYC as a potential left-wing enclave? I forgot where I heard it, but IIRC it was a common tactic in Cuba’s revolution I believe where leftists would concentrate on one area, and once when that was “claimed” move on to the next.