Cheap rents and relaxed mores drew the Beat avant-garde to the South Village

Evidence

South of Washington Square and east of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Village was less a neighborhood than a territorial free-for-all. … On another front, the latter were themselves pitted against the police and other municipal authorities (including the Mob) who had allied with the community’s indigenous, working-class, largely Italian families in opposition to the burgeoning Beat element (drawn to the South Village by relatively cheap rents and relaxed social mores). — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Exactly the reader’s core goal — material conditions (cheap rents) as the cause of avant-garde density, the test case against claims of cultural stagnation.
• SEED: The ‘cheap rent + moral permissiveness’ formula for avant-garde production is directly testable against contemporary neighborhoods; a natural angle comparing 1961 South Village to any current ‘arts district.’