This artist hacked a CitiBike to make NYC's affordability crisis harder to ignore

Meet San Francisco's 'permanent underclass' — and the ones who think they still have a shot

A single mom works as a makeup artist and NYC real estate broker. Here's how she affords life in the city.

Justin Blinder was lugging Taco Bell burritos from neighborhood to neighborhood on his bike for his Uber Eats gig in 2020, watching as skyscrapers and modular apartment buildings gave way to brown-bricked housing projects and cracked streets.

It made the Brooklyn-based artist and software developer think viscerally about affordability, and how abstracted the concept had become in modern discourse.

"We're sort of confronted with that via top-down maps, and it really doesn't touch upon the lived experience," Blinder told Business Insider. "That was sort of like the seed of the project."

"The project," as Blinder describes it, is a 3D printed CitiBike attachment that adjusts pedal resistance depending on how rent-burdened the surrounding neighborhood is.

With the device attached to a CitiBike, a rider can glide through parts of the Big Apple where renters give less of their paychecks to landlords. In areas where renters give more — many parts of the Bronx, for instance — the device applies the brakes.

Blinder said the device is meant to physically tie riders to high rent prices in the city. He said that too often, real problems in the world become innocuous data points that are read online and forgotten about soon after.

"It's so easy to just reduce people to numbers and forget that each is somebody's sister or child, and these people have names and stories," Blinder said.

The device earned Blinder a $10,000 grant from Idle Hands, an artistic philanthropic organization, this year.

It did not, however, impress CitiBike. A spokesperson for Lyft, which owns CitiBike, told Business Insider that CitiBike's terms of service prohibit modification of any bikes.

Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you’re searching for what matters.