How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood

Simultaneously history and current events, Peter Moskowitz’s How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood exposed the underlying forces behind the recent trends of gentrification in four major cities: Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco and New York.

 

Gentrification is often lamented as a natural occurrence that displaces the poor and destroys the local culture of urban neighborhoods. Sometimes it is even celebrated as a “cleaning up” of a previously seedy or unsafe area. But rarely are the economic, social and political forces behind it examined.

Moskowitz does just this in his book, with surprising breadth and depth. He details the historically racist red-lining that created economically depressed areas ripe for gentrification in the first place. He talks about government grants given to new, primarily white-owned businesses in historically minority neighborhoods. About city investment that creates enclaves of wealth few can afford, or even enjoy. In doing this, Moskowitz chronicles the often unnoticed incentives growth-oriented city planners and governments create for gentrification.

Far from being dry and factual, Moskowitz also details personal stories of loss caused by gentrification with pathos; he himself is both a victim and a perpetrator of gentrification, priced out of his native West Village neighborhood to Williamsburg. He emphasizes the displacement caused by gentrification, as the poor are pushed farther from the city center and the communities, organizations and city services whose support they rely on.

As a New Yorker moving into the quickly gentrifying Downtown Brooklyn, I greatly appreciated this book as a window into the fears, doubts and insecurities the long-term residents of the area must be feeling. I learned quite a bit, and although I knew about red-lining and re-zoning, I was surprised at just how much cities over-invest in real-estate capital and under-invest in services for the poor. Because of this, I would recommend the book to anyone in a city affected by gentrification.

But, I remained skeptical of Moskowitz’s solutions. From an economic perspective, I don’t think he fully considered the incentives or the practicalities of establishing a large, government subsidized housing market. His “success story” examples of places like Hong Kong were brief and unconvincing. He also offers solutions to housing inequality specifically, but not the decline of domestic industry and the poverty it created in its wake, which has largely created the current housing crises. This is a much harder problem to solve, but an important one to consider if we are seriously concerned with ending economic inequality and all its many side-affects, including gentrification.