Upper West Side, Manhattan

I thought it would be appropriate to end this series of the blog by discussing graffiti in my neighborhood. Before doing this blog, I hadn't noticed any graffiti on the Upper West Side. Once I started looking for it, I saw it was everywhere.

Some of the graffiti is part of construction sites. Some of it is on buildings, either nice brownstones or commercial sites. Regardless of what building it is on, that building is extremely expensive. Someone is either paying high rent, has massive lease or mortgage, or is sitting on millions of dollars of property. Whether or not graffiti is on it has nothing to do with how it is priced.

This series on graffiti was meant to show a number of things - graffiti might be a symptom of crime, or it might be a symptom of a large artistic presence in an area. It might be a bad influence on a neighborhood, causing property values to go down, or it could be completely irrelevant in how the homes are valued.

Sometimes graffiti matters in an urban area, and sometimes it doesn't. But the presence of graffiti in such different kinds of neighborhoods shows that one cannot judge it before looking at what it means to the area. It is impossible to generalize the effect of graffiti - good or bad.