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On one corner of West 26th Street, nestled by the High Line, sits four-year-old Avenues: the World School, an elite nursery-through-12th-grade, for-profit private school with a minimum $49,550 yearly price tag. From kindergarten every student gets an iPad. In high school, they also get MacBooks. The school sits among new and rising ultraluxury developments like the Soori High Line on West 29th Street, which will open in 2017. Sales there have averaged $7.3 million per apartment, most of them featuring their own 20- to 25-foot saltwater swimming pools.
Just 115 steps across 10th Avenue are the Elliott-Chelsea affordable housing projects, which date from the 1940s, where an average family of four's yearly income is roughly $21,000, well below the national poverty level of $24,300. There are 1,015 New York City Housing Authority units for an estimated 2,500 residents, and the average rent is $483 a month.
For independent film director Marc Levin, the contrast between wealthy new arrivals and longstanding, much poorer residents in the Chelsea neighborhood where he works and lives provided the perfect ingredients for his latest documentary, Class Divide.
The 75-minute film, premiering Oct. 3 on HBO, is the final installment in his nonfiction trilogy that explores the impact of global economic forces in the New York area. Told through the voices of the children who live or go to school on two sides of 10th Avenue at West 26th Street, Class Divide is a study of the haves and have-nots who are each, in their own way, reeling from the rapid changes in the neighborhood brought on by the opening of the High Line in 2009. The film explores the pressures that both communities feel and shows how destabilizing the forces of gentrification are on the lives of those in the midst of it. The unanswered question the film raises is how these communities will adapt to their changing circumstances.
Councilman Corey Johnson, whose district includes Chelsea, held two screenings of the film in June...