Joe Lovell is a terrific writer with a piece in the February 11 New York Magazine that I just love. Really love. It’s called “The Upside of the Downside” and in it he really tells it like it is about this money and real estate obsessed community called Park Slope.

“Here’s to bad times,” Lovell writes. “May they restore the city that many of us moved here for.”

Lovell is a Park Sloper. He and his wife arrived in PS in the mid-1990’s and they live somewhere above 9th Street somewhere between 7th and 5th Avenues. They now have three kids and they feel like the poorest people they know.

That’s easy in Park Slope with all the multi-million dollar brownstones and everyone’s obsessive fixation on real estate and designer kitchens.

Lovell had me at hello with his reporting of this crazy scene on the F-train. You see, the train is stopped between York and East Broadway (a sick passenger or something) and a stroller kid is pitching a fit while his mom tries to take off his snow suit.

An older, gray-bearded guy next to him, who also had a seat, turned and nudged the well-groomed guy and said, “Why don’t you give her your seat?” The well-groomed guy looked up from his iPhone, a little befuddled and irritated, and replied, “Why don’t you?,” then went back to caressing his little device. Gray Beard leaned in real close and looked the guy straight in the face. “Why don’t you stick that thing up your ass,” he said, loud enough for everyone in the near vicinity to hear, and before the well-groomed guy could respond, he added, even louder, “You Wall Street dick.”

But that’s not even the final punch line.

True, Gray Beard was obviously a total crank, and who knows if the other guy had anything to do with Wall Street, or if he was even all that unlikable (though he did have a look about him)? I just loved it as a pure expression of class rage, a small rebellion, as I’ve come to think of it, against the ethos that has dominated the city in recent years. A couple of other passengers laughed, and Gray Beard looked up. I was smiling right at him, but rather than locking eyes in solidarity, as I thought we would—me and him and the struggling young mother and child allied against this latest American Psycho and all the aggressive wealth-hunting he embodied—he said with complete disdain, “What’re you smiling at? You’re a dick, too.”

Lovell goes on to confess his own class envy. But he also portrays the Slope zeitgeist pitch perfectly. He asks, “I’m amazed at how poor we feel in relation to our surroundings. When did we move to Beverly Hills?”

My question exactly. When did we move to Beverly Hills?

Sure, I’ve covered some of the same ground on my blog with my posts about Jennifer Connelly’s limestone and Jonathan Safran Foer’s brownstone, and my nasty case of house envy.

But this guy Lovell really writes Park Slope like he knows it; and like he knows me so well.

What I’m mostly struck by now is how much poorer we feel in relation to our surroundings than we did then, though we make about five times as much money. We have another baby, and when I walk with her at night, I still feel the wonders of parenthood, sure, but I don’t experience nearly the same connection to the people around me. The neighborhood now seems like a colonial outgrowth of Manhattan money culture, and I tend to feel envious and critical and, if I’m really being honest, even fairly hostile toward many of my neighbors. (And then, of course, I’m soon full of self-loathing for comparing my life—my things, really—with theirs, and for thinking I’m anything but absurdly lucky and comfortable.)

Like Lovell, I’ve watched the world of Park Slope change. And I too have much self loathing about not being richer, not having more. I thank Lovell for putting into words this culture of Wolf ranges, and Sub-Zero refrigerators. For Buddha’s sake, if I hear one more Park Slope mom complain about her kitchen renovation or which private school she’s sending her kid to I’ll just burst.

Thanks Lovell for this, too:

But it’s not just real estate. It’s everything, or near everything, and it’s ratcheted up even more in the last few years. As the value of homes and stocks and salaries has spiked, there’s been a kind of arms race of acquisition that has touched every little facet of our lives. You don’t just go to the store and buy groceries, like a regular person; now you fetishize the meat at Fairway and the fish from Blue Moon and the organic greens and the Greek yogurt and the cheese, always the cheese. The place that became a cigar bar in the late nineties, now it’s a Union Market, where among other preciously presented items there’s a loaf of raisin-walnut bread that isn’t quite as fresh and delicious as the raisin-walnut bread the Lopezes used to bake. But it is three times as expensive.

Lovell calls for a mythical return to the New York City of Bob Dylan and Basquiat. I think I am somewhat older than Lovell and I grew up in Manhattan so I can attest that New York City has always been about money and real estate—it’s just that the stakes are so much higher now. Still, I know what he means. It’s the West Village of the folk revival, the Soho of the real artist’s lofts, the Tribeca of Art on the Beach, and the Collective for Living Cinema, and the Park Slope of the Lopez Bakery, Al’s Toy Store, Book Link, social workers and Legal Aid lawyers and the Upper West Side of the Famous Dairy Restaurant, the Tip Toe Inn, the New Yorker Bookstore, the New Yorker Theater, the Thalia, Herman’s Toy Store and the original Liberty House that we long for.

That’s what we miss.

So despite Lovell’s overly romantic picture of what New York used to be, I love his honesty about himself and the world he sees around him.

It’s about time someone got it right. Thanks Lovell. You did just that.