The Better New York Foundation symbolizes how outside money can gentrify communities without those communities’ consent. In the novel, great cities can come alive and choose a human protector, an “avatar,” from among its human residents. When New York is born, it chooses six avatars: one representing the whole city and one for each of New York City’s five boroughs. The avatars derive power from things that represent the essence of New York City: an antique Checker cab, the subway, and so forth. A creature from a parallel dimension, the Woman in White, seeks to destroy human cities at their birth. The novel first introduces the Better New York Foundation, a nonprofit the Woman in White seems to control, when the Foundation buys two brownstones that belong to Brooklyn’s avatar, Brooklyn Thomason, and her family. Brooklyn and her family didn’t want to sell the brownstones; in fact, Brooklyn was using these essentially New York buildings as safe houses immune to the Woman in White’s influence. The novel implies that the Woman in White uses political connections to repossess their home on a legal technicality, thus evicting the protagonists from a safe space and taking possession of this essentially New York building as a hostile outsider.
Later, the Woman in White poses as Dr. White of the Better New York Foundation when she offers the Bronx’s avatar, Bronca Siwanoy, an enormous donation to the Bronx Art Center (which Bronca directs) in exchange for replacing the graffiti art of New York City’s avatar (a young, homeless Black man) with the racist art of an almost entirely white artists’ collective called the Alt Artistes. When Bronca refuses the donation because she won’t exhibit racist art in the publicly funded Center, the Center’s board of directors threatens to fire her. This demonstrates the power of money to gentrify and racially homogenize a community’s culture as well as its buildings. Finally, the boroughs’ avatars learn that the Better New York Foundation is owned by an LLC called “TOTAL MULTIVERSAL WAR” that has been using its money to gentrify various great cities around the world—making them less essentially themselves and thus, in the novel’s universe, less powerful. This final revelation shows how money can invade local communities and gentrify them against the will of the original inhabitants.
Better New York Foundation Quotes in The City We Became
“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
“The Better New York Foundation—”
“Jesus, really?”
“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”
Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
Better New York Foundation Symbol Timeline in The City We Became
