Safety breeds complacency. It robs people of the virtues bred by adversity.

From For Whom Were The Cities Saved? by Matthew Schmitz.  

The class that benefited most from conservative urban reforms was never likely to love the right. Though these millennials would often be called gentrifiers, they differed from the first gentrifiers in that they were generally unable to purchase and renovate derelict homes. They have instead made up a class of long-term, even permanent renters who have different economic interests from the earlier generation of home-buying gentrifiers.

These are the people who volunteered and voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A handful may have founded businesses, but the great majority have more conventional jobs. Though their careers are described as “creative,” they rarely live up to the billing. Young women who delayed marriage and childbearing, maximizing productivity during their years of peak fertility, soon found themselves saying, “Me Too.” Hippie entrepreneurs are outnumbered by discontented professionals ready to join an uprising of the not-quite-wealthy.

Disorder in my neighborhood is on the rise. On the way to church on one recent Sunday morning, my wife and I navigated around a shirtless man holding a half-empty bottle of Jack who almost fell backward into our stroller. Some homeless, like Tony, have lived in the neighborhood for years. But there are many new faces on the streets.

Perhaps the decline in urban order, cheered on by creative-class liberals, was inevitable. Safety breeds complacency. It robs people of the virtues bred by adversity. But I suspect that something more is at work. New York did not just enjoy plenty and peace, it suffered from shocking inequality. A middle class powered by manufacturing, trades, and good union jobs lost ground to a high–low coalition of professionals and service workers, of those who order Seamless and those who deliver it. This was the vaunted gig economy, once expected to be the greatest success of the creative class. Like the conservative urban policy of recent decades, it has delivered immediate benefits. But it is doubtful whether its achievements are sustainable.