The Sixties Come Back to Life in "Everything Is Now"
64 comments
·June 8, 2025JKCalhoun
SecretDreams
It turns out that when it's more affordable to live, more people will have things to live for and focus on beyond just grinding to pay rent and scrounging dollars to buy food.
We've collectively destroyed this concept for the next generation of young people and we need to desperately course correct.
coldpie
> We've collectively destroyed this concept for the next generation of young people and we need to desperately course correct.
Sorry, turns out it's economically way more important for the richest two dozen people in the world to turn all of our collective resources into computer programs that will tell them how special and cool and inventive and totally not "the man" they are. Anything that gets in the way of that must be destroyed.
dnissley
It was actually just everyday people who chose to destroy the concept of cheap housing, not "the richest two dozen people in the world". By limiting supply in the name of neighborhood character, boomer environmentalism, and property values.
null
kurthr
Real estate and rent, just like bitcoin, designer fashion, "art work", and watches. Unfortunately, you need somewhere to live. If it's more profitable to hold empty real estate than or less dense/improved property waiting for it to go up then that's what will happen.
If people can effectively speculate on something in a leveraged high liquidity environment, they will, and prices will go up. Look at the terrifyingly overbuilt real estate in China with pricing comparable to NYC or London and huge vacancy rates.
awongh
I always believed in that narrative but nowadays I do think there's some selection bias at work- no one mentions all the other places that have some creative people that were never the birthing ground for a cultural movement.
Because after a certain point I realized- lots of places are cheap (sure slightly less now) but not everywhere is going to produce some kind of large scale cultural movement.
The one that a lot of people seem to know is Detroit- for the last 20 years everyone has been saying wow, lots of artists, wow, you can buy a house for $10 or whatever, but that hasn't been enough.
Sadly a part of me believes that maybe physically localized culture isn't a thing anymore with the internet. Being able to make beats / tiktoks anywhere is too much of a counter-force to people being in the same physical space, no matter how much people seem to love the idea- and this is the true boring reason why this doesn't happen anymore, not that *blame the boomers* rent has gone up.
quesera
Right. Necessary, but not sufficient.
San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out in the 1990s (first slowly, then much more quickly -- it's all long gone now. Apologies to anyone who would like to believe otherwise :).
This is also true of New York, on approximately the same timeline.
In the early 2000s, Austin and Portland tried to take up the creative mantle, with some success. Both are struggling to maintain it now, for the same reasons but on a slower timeline.
Cheap rents are a prerequisite, but there are other sparks required for a place to catch fire.
I don't know of any US cities that are doing anything interesting today. Not at the scale of SF and NYC certainly, but also not even at the scale of 20ya Portland and Austin.
I think part of the issue is that rent is not adequately cheap in any US cities now that have critical mass plus tolerable living conditions (climate, economy, politics). This worries me.
awongh
It seems relevant that now it's extremely accessible for US people to move abroad to another country. It feels like Mexico City, Costa Rica, Bali, Thailand, etc. have taken up some of the slack from Austin and Portland.
Edit: More specifically in terms of cost of living anyways.
FuriouslyAdrift
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chattanooga, the (far) suburbs of Nashville...
twic
I think you need a place with cheap rents that is within striking distance of places with very expensive rents. Artists can afford the former, but their customers (literal art buyers, or culture vultures of various other kinds, media execs, journalists, etc) are located in the latter.
awongh
The counterpoint is in the GP post though- Athens, Georgia. It's sort of close to Atlanta, I guess?
msgodel
I think for localized culture to develop it needs to be exclusive in addition to the need for it to be cheap for people to focus on cultural rather than economic output.
Outsiders hate being excluded though so the barriers all get knocked down. In face our modern social norm considers any kind of exclusion a moral failure, even excluding people who dislike the social norms. Maybe this results in a more efficient (perhaps even more pleasant) society but the cost is unique local culture.
awongh
idk, I think cultural elitism is alive and well.... no matter which area of culture you're in. If anything "curator" culture is making it worse, everything needs to be categorized, rated and put on tier lists.
flir
I think it's more about Capitalism. It took about 6 weeks for grunge to make it from a Seattle basement to a Paris catwalk, and that was three decades ago.
If it might make money, it'll get amplified.
flir
Shades of The Tipping Point. You can't replicate it because a slightly different melting pot is at the root of every cultural explosion.
(But I reckon cheap rent, leisure time and a laissez faire attitude to drugs are almost always in the mix).
fiftyacorn
Barry Miles book "London Calling" about the evolution of london counter culture post-war also cites this with all the artists living in squats
thomassmith65
Mark Fisher was arguing the point about cheap rent ages ago in 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future'. As an example, he used London squats in the 70s enabling punk rock.
Telemakhos
The sixties ended before I was born. Why do they have to keep coming back to life? I just keep getting older, but the boomers have an eternal youth of reviving their favorite decade.
JKCalhoun
"American Graffiti"; when I was growing up they were going back before I was born too. I don't mind though because, for example, that film is excellent (and is that filmmakers best film ;-)).
Seriously though I have been musing as to how the children of a generation get to define their parent's generation, more or less wrest if from them, in film, etc. Sometimes (often) they take a fairly dim view of the world they grew up in, a dim view of their parents. (And maybe now I am channelling a film like "The Graduate", for example.)
rufus_foreman
American Graffiti didn't depict boomers, they were kids who had graduated high school in 1962, that was Silent Generation.
It's referred to as a nostalgia movie, which on one hand seems fitting if you've watched it, but on the other hand, it was written in 1972 about a period in time ten years older. Would a movie screenplay written today by a 28 year old depicting being an 18 year old in 2015 be seen as nostalgic in the same way?
JKCalhoun
I realize that. It depicted 1962 — I was born a few years later. I meant to use it as an example that it has always been generations holding on to their formative years, not just boomers (there are just a lot more of them).
sevensor
We’ve been reviving the 80s nonstop since The Wedding Singer was in theaters. I was alive for that decade the first time around, and I’m ready for it to be over now. 1990s was really only about a seven year hiatus.
thecolorblue
We will be doing the same thing for the 90s soon.
CalRobert
The nineties were the last time I remember a real sense of optimism in the future
FuriouslyAdrift
It was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Internet Age
krapp
Nostalgia tends to follow a 20 year cycle, so we'e already done that. People are doing it for the 2000s now.
jhbadger
And for over half of a decade already! The award-winning 2017 movie "Ladybird" was a nostalgic look at that distant year of 2002!
whilenot-dev
I wonder when we'll ever become nostalgic for anything after 2007...
Maken
Disney is already remaking movies from the early 2000s. But maybe it's just because they ran out of material.
brookst
I miss being nostalgic for the 80’s
unstablediffusi
bro I missed 2019 for almost six years now
FrustratedMonky
Yes.
Something not 'polite' to talk about.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a surge in Nostalgia for 80's/90's Cold War era, Russia is the enemy culture.
Like 'Red Dawn', etc...
larrled
Not nostalgia. Putin is what he is. Movies about hitler aren’t nostalgic. Germany under Hitler was an “enemy culture” no? We must never minimize the global disdain for Russia under Putin. How many have died? Nostalgia just isn’t the right word, or it shouldn’t be.
subdane
The mainstream audience was young and open to new ideas. Folks could create new things that impacted the culture at large and in that way punch above their weight class. In NYC, people could create art movements that would live for the next 50 years. Sort of like the way kids could create new technology in a garage in Silicon Valley in the 70s, or a dorm room in the 00s. It was a time in culture where the doors were open and you could have profound impact. The doors closed again, so people look back and have an appreciation for what was possible and what became and perhaps long for it again.
> Hoberman makes clear one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: “cheap rents.”
I keep seeing this in various places. The rise of the "College Music" scene in Athens, Georgia during the 80's has also been in part attributed to the cheap rent in the student ghettos (typical of many college towns).
Growing up in Kansas City, the neighborhoods around the Kansas City Art Institute were also low-rent. Child (impressionable) me remembers walking through the neighborhood at night, let by my mom, for the free Friday night film ("Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", "Fantastic Planet" to name a few I recall). There was a large chicken leg sculpture, perhaps 8' tall in one yard that always spooked me to walk past. Some kind of sculpture of broken bits of mirror and glass made another small lot look like an alien set from "Star Trek"....