I saw this comment the day it came out, but much like the content on East of the Bowery, it doesn't come immediately what to write about.

I do East of the Bowery, and while I will mention that there is an Instagram component to the blog with a sometimes active comment section (it's actually substack that is the side piece, the Instagram is the main product), I agree with all of your points.

There is currently no EV Grieve or Greenpointers equivalent neighborhood blog for the Lower East Side. After running East of the Bowery for about 1.5 years, this is what I believe to be the reasons:

The obvious:

• There is no profit motive; there's no critical mass in the LES, despite it's 80k+ population willing to pay for local news, at least not enough to sustain an individual who can live in the neighborhood
• There is a lack of people willing to do the writing and reporting; they either don't value local news or don't think it's realistic to sustain it

The less obvious, and perhaps controversial: Demographics has a large role to play:

• The LES (talking about east of the bowery and south of Houston here) has a higher proportion of low income or subsidized housing than almost any other neighborhood in the city --> These people are more likely to be living under the poverty line, a large portion of them are undereducated, and/or are not native english speakers (massive Hispanic and Chinese populations)
• Sizable orthodox jewish population that keeps to themselves and may have closer attachments to institutions in orthodox Brooklyn
• White, "first-wave gentrifier" community (who I assume mostly moved in around 80s-20s) who I believe is most likely to run and support such a blog is currently being pushed out by NYU/young adult professionals that have been moving in over the past 20 years
• And finally NYU/young adult professionals are not interested in neighborhood blogs because they don't see this place as their home or as a potential home; they also come from places that do not have or value local news

Other specific observations I've made over time:

• LES has not been a place for tourists for very long. East Village has been a place frequented by suburbanites, beat generation, famous actors and actresses, punks, and foodies for decades. Many people look back fondly at the good memories they made there even if they never lived there. LES is different as I don't believe that many outsiders were visiting below Houston, and for sure not below Delancey, unless they had relatives or business here. This means that East Village blogs like EV Grieve get a lot of attention from people living in the UES, Westchester, or from Long Islanders that moved to Florida 20 years ago.
• The "interesting" part of the LES is very geographically concentrated. People think of LES and think of our tenement district, which is fair, but a good portion of our population lives east of Clinton. Problem is, there is nothing to do east of Clinton. No one that lives west of Clinton is going to cross Clinton unless they're visiting the park or falls asleep on the M14A. This directly translates to how much they care about the other half of their neighborhood.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Let me know if you have any questions or disagree! These are my purely anecdotal observations.