Up there in the sky, look at that cloud, is that a silver lining we see? Sure the 'conomy's in the shitter, but let's focus on the positive. New York might be livable again!

In that a new sense of community has sprung up from the faintly green ashes of the economy's grand collapse, that people are starting to look at the slate as clean rather than completely wiped out. Who better to turn this erratic, schizophrenic eye on the city it both loves and loathes than New York magazine, which runs a big old honking cover story about New York City Without Money this week. Because that magazine never really traffics in actual New Yorkers who don't have any money, and never did, they mean like, should you switch condos?

Heh, kidding. Sort of. They don't only talk about real estate and baby bjorns. They also crow about how people are volunteering again!

Right now, in New York, volunteerism is booming. Compared with the first quarter of last year, Citymeals-on-Wheels, which delivers food to the elderly, has seen a 32 percent increase in its volunteers; God's Love We Deliver, which distributes meals to those suffering from hunger or illness, has seen a 20 percent increase. New York Cares, which places people in charities around the city, trained twice as many people in February and March of 2009 as it did those same months the year before.

A new sense of community and work-together-itiveness is blooming all along these cracked sidewalks. So forget the doom and gloom and violence that some had heralded. We've already moved past Hoovervilles and hobo shankings. We're at the New Deal! The cradle is rocking! Hell, even that old, creeping-in doom and gloom is maybe kind of appealing, in a friendly, throwbacky way, isn't it? James Wolcott certainly seems to think so. He writes in his paean to New York's Drop Dead Era:

The municipal-finance crisis of New York in the 70s resulted in meat-cleaver budget cuts and payroll cutbacks and infrastructural rot-a near-death experience that produced an exodus to the suburbs and beyond, a loss of almost 10 percent of the population over the course of the decade. It was hell on the tax base but, for those who migrated to New York and secured a foxhole while the city bled out, terminal conditions weren't all bad. There were upsides to a downward spiral. Having fewer people clogging the scenery aired out the city nicely, opening corner pockets of private and public space where all sorts of termite creativity could take place, and did. It was a more egalitarian city than it subsequently became with the rise of the super-rich, the crime and crumminess more evenly dispersed. Real estate was affordable, even for artistes and aspiring deadbeats.

For our part, we're still stuck on the real estate, giddily rubbing our hands together because we think that maybe, just maybe, we can now afford to move back to Manhattan, leaving Brooklyn and its babies and long subway waits to the birds. Oh, and we held the door open for someone the other day. So.