If you have read any of the New York City blogs the past few days, you have probably seen posts about the 70 or so students who stormed and barricaded NYU’s Kimmel Center for Student Life last Wednesday. What could have been a demonstration in favor of legitimate causes — the disclosure of NYU’s budget as well as tuition reform — quickly became a hastily constructed bricolage of stock lefty issues perhaps best exemplified by a student banner proclaiming "Solidarity With Gaza."

The demonstration was diluted by such gestures. In the laughable move of trying to solve the world’s problems in a single bound, Take Back NYU! received, well, laughs. As a writer for the NYU paper Washington Square News points out "[NYU] is now represented as little more than a joke on media outlets ranging from Gawker to The New York Times." By Friday morning the uprising was quelled, with not a single demand met by the administration. 

Thus, I offer up one solution to meet TBNYU’s demand that their schooling be more affordable: move to Bushwick.

NYU is infamous for its high tuition: it gets raised about 5% per year; this year, full costs will set students without financial aid back $50,182. But a sizable chunk of that — $12,810 — is for room and board. (The high numbers certainly do not deter applicants to the school: this year it once again received a record number of undergraduate applications — more than 30,000). 

Students can save by reducing their cost of living in the city. Two years ago, I lived in a converted living room/kitchen in a one-bedroom dormitory on Union Square with three other students for about $1400/month each. In 2008 I packed my bags and headed to Jefferson Street, where my portion of the rent is $634/month for a two bedroom apartment within a neighborhood of good restaurants, a thriving art and music scene and plenty of young people. NYU is still expensive, and its budget remains closed, but moving here coupled with my financial aid package certainly makes the school more affordable.  

A problem, of course, remains for the protesters. In his now defunct blog, TBNYU! leader Duncan Meisel once said that "Gentrification means more than losing history. It means a loss of the human elements that make life happen in your neighborhood." So how can these bourgeois NYU demonstrators decrease their tuition without becoming gentrifiers, the very agents of history’s destruction? There is no simple answer, I suppose. But conflicts of conviction are certainly not foreign to most of these students — surely they hate paying the salaries of an administration they so publicly loathe.

Ultimately, these idealists must face an admittedly harsh reality: living in this expensive city sometimes requires a realization — and acceptance — that they, too, are affected by an organic urban economy and may not always be able to live where they prefer.

So to the ten or so students now facing expulsion from NYU housing, I open Bushwick’s gritty doors to you. And please don’t worry — we’re not life-draining, history-destroying automata. But would we tell you if we were?

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