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The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the 21st Century
The groundbreaking oral history that tells the stories of New Yorkers effecting and affected by gentrification
If you live in a city—and every year, more and more Americans do—you’ve seen firsthand how gentrification has transformed our surroundings. It has so altered the way cities look, feel, cost, and even smell to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise.
Over the last few years, journalists, policymakers, critics, and historians have all tried to explain just what it is that happens when new money and new residents flow in, yet we’ve had very little access to the human side of this phenomenon.
Up and Coming captures the stories of the many kinds of people—brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians and everyone in between—who are being shaped by—and are shaping—the new New York City. In this extraordinary oral history, DW Gibson takes gentrification out of the op-ed columns and the textbooks and brings it to life. Gibson explains— in the voices of the people living through it—what urban change really looks and feels like.
In the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, Up and Coming is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.
If you live in a city—and every year, more and more Americans do—you’ve seen firsthand how gentrification has transformed our surroundings. It has so altered the way cities look, feel, cost, and even smell to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise.
Over the last few years, journalists, policymakers, critics, and historians have all tried to explain just what it is that happens when new money and new residents flow in, yet we’ve had very little access to the human side of this phenomenon.
Up and Coming captures the stories of the many kinds of people—brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians and everyone in between—who are being shaped by—and are shaping—the new New York City. In this extraordinary oral history, DW Gibson takes gentrification out of the op-ed columns and the textbooks and brings it to life. Gibson explains— in the voices of the people living through it—what urban change really looks and feels like.
In the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, Up and Coming is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published April 9, 2015
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1021 people want to read
About the author
D.W. Gibson
9 books11 followersDW Gibson is the author of Not Working and The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Daily Beast, BOMB, and Tin House, and worked on documentaries for MSNBC and A&E®. The executive director of the international writers residency Writers Omi at Ledig House, he lives in New York City with his wife and their daughter.
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August 10, 2016
I spent an extraordinarily long time reading this book. That's partially because it's dense and doesn't really have the kind of throughline that propels you forth, and partially because at times it was so deeply disturbing that I had to put it away, like literally hide it in another room, until a few days went by and my metaphorical pulse slowed and I was ready to face its pages again.
What this is, if you haven't heard, is a collection of interviews that talk about and around and through gentrification, a word and concept that has become fractured and freighted and incredibly charged these days. Gibson talks to all sorts of people — tenants and landlords, squatters and real-estate developers, homeowners and the formerly homeless, activists and politicians — lining up their words one after the other after the other, often with neat connections but just as often unrelated except for the fact that they all lay claim (as I do), in ways large and small, to this huge sprawling wonderful terrible fraught frenetically shifting city.
There's a formerly homeless ex-junkie who's now the director of operations at the Bowery Mission. There's the 84-year-old leather-worker who's been an East Village bohemian since the '40s. There's the young white girl helping to organize tenants against displacement in Crown Heights. There's a young black mother who's working to address lack of access to healthy food in Bed-Stuy. There's a middle-aged white lawyer who provides free legal advocacy for low-income Brooklynites. There's a young Orthodox real estate developer who says —out loud, without remorse, with only the merest cursory "I'm not racist but" — that his company will not allow a single black person into any of the buildings they own.
screeeeeech
One after another after another after another. In some ways, this structure is very effective. It's fascinating to hear from this fella who owns a home and then from the person who sold him that home, or an organizer who rants about housing court followed by a woman who has spent years in and out of said court. (Spoiler: Things are not going well for her.) In other ways, this structure is very frustrating, primarily because it allows for so little editorializing. There are some sections that, as mentioned, are so viscerally upsetting that your eyes cross as you're reading, but Gibson can't then butt in and be like "THIS GUY IS A MONSTER AMIRITE," which might afford apoplectic readers a modicum of relief. All he can do is meekly follow the monster up with a good person, but, really, that tends to feel woefully inadequate.
I am too much the audience for this book to actually be its audience, if that makes any sense. Like, I spend more or less all my time thinking and talking and reading about these issues, so I am heartened but not surprised to hear about the great work being done, and I am sickened but not surprised to hear about all the terrible, greedy, awful, racist, privileged people and entities who seemingly exist only to make things worse and worse and ever more horrifically expensive. There are people I personally know interviewed in these pages, and others whom I'm sure I've passed on the street or seen at gatherings. So dragging me through all this munitua seems almost cruel; it's a reality I face and live erry damn day.
So. I am trying to decide if this is a great book. I don't know. There's no doubt it's an important book, especially for those who are not already steeped in these issues up to their eyeballs. One thing it's not, by any means, is a redemptive book. Although many of the characters we meet are lovely, and hopeful, and working hard for change, the cumulative effect — similar to the cumulative effect of just living, today, in a city, particularly this one — is fairly unrelenting hopelessness. There's an amazing quote that I can't find on quick perusal along the lines of: While the people who spend massive amounts of time in this city and those who spend massive amounts of money here are such drastically distinct groups, things cannot get better for anyone on the ground. Yes. This. That is my feeling exactly. But what can we actually DO?
How much can it matter that there are wonderful little orgs like 596 Acres and the New York City Coalition on the Continuum of Care, wonderful people starting tenants' groups and lobbying for change, when the enemy is SO MASSIVE, so unforgiving, so unstoppable? We the people are outclassed, out-maneuvered, and woefully, preposterously inadequate to the task of taking down, essentially, all of capitalism and its associated rapacious greed and far-removed heft and facelessness.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.
What this is, if you haven't heard, is a collection of interviews that talk about and around and through gentrification, a word and concept that has become fractured and freighted and incredibly charged these days. Gibson talks to all sorts of people — tenants and landlords, squatters and real-estate developers, homeowners and the formerly homeless, activists and politicians — lining up their words one after the other after the other, often with neat connections but just as often unrelated except for the fact that they all lay claim (as I do), in ways large and small, to this huge sprawling wonderful terrible fraught frenetically shifting city.
There's a formerly homeless ex-junkie who's now the director of operations at the Bowery Mission. There's the 84-year-old leather-worker who's been an East Village bohemian since the '40s. There's the young white girl helping to organize tenants against displacement in Crown Heights. There's a young black mother who's working to address lack of access to healthy food in Bed-Stuy. There's a middle-aged white lawyer who provides free legal advocacy for low-income Brooklynites. There's a young Orthodox real estate developer who says —out loud, without remorse, with only the merest cursory "I'm not racist but" — that his company will not allow a single black person into any of the buildings they own.
screeeeeech
One after another after another after another. In some ways, this structure is very effective. It's fascinating to hear from this fella who owns a home and then from the person who sold him that home, or an organizer who rants about housing court followed by a woman who has spent years in and out of said court. (Spoiler: Things are not going well for her.) In other ways, this structure is very frustrating, primarily because it allows for so little editorializing. There are some sections that, as mentioned, are so viscerally upsetting that your eyes cross as you're reading, but Gibson can't then butt in and be like "THIS GUY IS A MONSTER AMIRITE," which might afford apoplectic readers a modicum of relief. All he can do is meekly follow the monster up with a good person, but, really, that tends to feel woefully inadequate.
I am too much the audience for this book to actually be its audience, if that makes any sense. Like, I spend more or less all my time thinking and talking and reading about these issues, so I am heartened but not surprised to hear about the great work being done, and I am sickened but not surprised to hear about all the terrible, greedy, awful, racist, privileged people and entities who seemingly exist only to make things worse and worse and ever more horrifically expensive. There are people I personally know interviewed in these pages, and others whom I'm sure I've passed on the street or seen at gatherings. So dragging me through all this munitua seems almost cruel; it's a reality I face and live erry damn day.
So. I am trying to decide if this is a great book. I don't know. There's no doubt it's an important book, especially for those who are not already steeped in these issues up to their eyeballs. One thing it's not, by any means, is a redemptive book. Although many of the characters we meet are lovely, and hopeful, and working hard for change, the cumulative effect — similar to the cumulative effect of just living, today, in a city, particularly this one — is fairly unrelenting hopelessness. There's an amazing quote that I can't find on quick perusal along the lines of: While the people who spend massive amounts of time in this city and those who spend massive amounts of money here are such drastically distinct groups, things cannot get better for anyone on the ground. Yes. This. That is my feeling exactly. But what can we actually DO?
How much can it matter that there are wonderful little orgs like 596 Acres and the New York City Coalition on the Continuum of Care, wonderful people starting tenants' groups and lobbying for change, when the enemy is SO MASSIVE, so unforgiving, so unstoppable? We the people are outclassed, out-maneuvered, and woefully, preposterously inadequate to the task of taking down, essentially, all of capitalism and its associated rapacious greed and far-removed heft and facelessness.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.
October 1, 2016
In the summer of 2014, I quit my job and joined an apartment brokering company on Fulton and Classon in Brooklyn. Over the next five weeks, I gained enormous insight into the way the rental market worked in Brooklyn. It was pretty horrifying. Since then, I've always wondered when I was going to see some of the abuses and bigotries and illegal-ish behavior called out.
Then I read a pre-release review of this book that made me sprint to Amazon and preorder it. It included an excerpt from the chapter where he interviews "Ephraim," the Hasidic hustler who admits to excluding black people from buildings. (On grounds that he feels are defensible.) It sounded like exactly what I saw on the job, so I was excited to see that someone had documented it.
The result is a fine work that didn't land as powerfully as I'd hoped.
As a gentrifier myself, I experience gentrification through a very particular lens. I walk around a neighborhood where I'm getting affordable rent, thankful that my olive skin and Latin look don't contrast shockingly with my neighbors, and I wonder what they think of me. I nod hello to people, I stay out of the way, I generally try to be respectful. But by not engaging the neighborhood, I always wonder. Am I being aloof to them? Would they rather me get in there and mix it up socially? I don't know, and I'll probably never try to find out. There's a guilt and a hiding-away of assumed superiority that defines the experience of "slumming it." That's what I wanted this book to talk about.
Instead, it compiles a string of primary sources in a somewhat meandering way. I've never read Studs Terkel, but clearly this guy has. (Apparently Gibson's last book was called Not Working.) The difference is, I associate Terkel with work that gives the average man a voice. Only a barber can tell me what it's like to be a barber every day. With the subject of gentrification, there is certainly an aspect of it that lives in the quotidian and the demotic. Actually, that was what I wanted. But you could also talk about gentrification as a scholar, a journalist, a man on the street, a poet, whatever. It exists on many levels. This book's flaw is that it applies an impressionistic, popular approach to a question of a scope that would have been better served by scholarship.
It's not Gibson's fault that he wrote a book I didn't really want. But he did write a book on one of the most interesting and under-digested subjects in my milieu — gentrification in Brooklyn — without finding a way to make it particularly impactful.
For example: any discussion of gentrification necessarily involves a lot of history. This book, however, is a radically present-day documentation of gentrification because it's made up entirely of interviews with people who talked to the author. The only historical dimension comes when Gibson talks to old people or shoehorns in some Neil Smith miscellany in an italics section.
The book is not rooted in any one neighborhood or even borough. It makes a good case that Brooklyn's current development is really a story worth telling — one subject claims he can predict where the next wave of investment money will come from by watching where global instability is, so solid is the allure of Brooklyn real estate — but then Gibson wanders into parks in Manhattan, public housing in Harlem, a lot of art history; and one chapter doesn't necessarily follow the other, despite his efforts.
The politics are similarly impotent. There's probably no one who will leave this book with a different take on gentrification politics than they went in with, provided they didn't hate taggers and had some awareness of the shady tactics landlords use to evict cheap tenants. There was disappointingly little racial animosity; that was one area in which I really wanted this to peer under the hood.
There's plenty of depth to the individual characters, and I'm sure Gibson did a good job representing their perspectives, but in aggregate I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from this oral history. I didn't hate it, but I guess it just felt like more of the kind of gentrification talk we hear a lot of: first-person anecdotal. There's not much talk of a way forward or what the hell we who are in this spot are to make of it all. I guess we'll have to keep letting the ball roll and figure it out.
Then I read a pre-release review of this book that made me sprint to Amazon and preorder it. It included an excerpt from the chapter where he interviews "Ephraim," the Hasidic hustler who admits to excluding black people from buildings. (On grounds that he feels are defensible.) It sounded like exactly what I saw on the job, so I was excited to see that someone had documented it.
The result is a fine work that didn't land as powerfully as I'd hoped.
As a gentrifier myself, I experience gentrification through a very particular lens. I walk around a neighborhood where I'm getting affordable rent, thankful that my olive skin and Latin look don't contrast shockingly with my neighbors, and I wonder what they think of me. I nod hello to people, I stay out of the way, I generally try to be respectful. But by not engaging the neighborhood, I always wonder. Am I being aloof to them? Would they rather me get in there and mix it up socially? I don't know, and I'll probably never try to find out. There's a guilt and a hiding-away of assumed superiority that defines the experience of "slumming it." That's what I wanted this book to talk about.
Instead, it compiles a string of primary sources in a somewhat meandering way. I've never read Studs Terkel, but clearly this guy has. (Apparently Gibson's last book was called Not Working.) The difference is, I associate Terkel with work that gives the average man a voice. Only a barber can tell me what it's like to be a barber every day. With the subject of gentrification, there is certainly an aspect of it that lives in the quotidian and the demotic. Actually, that was what I wanted. But you could also talk about gentrification as a scholar, a journalist, a man on the street, a poet, whatever. It exists on many levels. This book's flaw is that it applies an impressionistic, popular approach to a question of a scope that would have been better served by scholarship.
It's not Gibson's fault that he wrote a book I didn't really want. But he did write a book on one of the most interesting and under-digested subjects in my milieu — gentrification in Brooklyn — without finding a way to make it particularly impactful.
For example: any discussion of gentrification necessarily involves a lot of history. This book, however, is a radically present-day documentation of gentrification because it's made up entirely of interviews with people who talked to the author. The only historical dimension comes when Gibson talks to old people or shoehorns in some Neil Smith miscellany in an italics section.
The book is not rooted in any one neighborhood or even borough. It makes a good case that Brooklyn's current development is really a story worth telling — one subject claims he can predict where the next wave of investment money will come from by watching where global instability is, so solid is the allure of Brooklyn real estate — but then Gibson wanders into parks in Manhattan, public housing in Harlem, a lot of art history; and one chapter doesn't necessarily follow the other, despite his efforts.
The politics are similarly impotent. There's probably no one who will leave this book with a different take on gentrification politics than they went in with, provided they didn't hate taggers and had some awareness of the shady tactics landlords use to evict cheap tenants. There was disappointingly little racial animosity; that was one area in which I really wanted this to peer under the hood.
There's plenty of depth to the individual characters, and I'm sure Gibson did a good job representing their perspectives, but in aggregate I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from this oral history. I didn't hate it, but I guess it just felt like more of the kind of gentrification talk we hear a lot of: first-person anecdotal. There's not much talk of a way forward or what the hell we who are in this spot are to make of it all. I guess we'll have to keep letting the ball roll and figure it out.
April 1, 2016
Wasn't crazy about the way Gibson blended in his voice in italics throughout the chapters, but that's a tiny gripe considering that the author's research. There are interviews with people I've met, one of whom describes a close friend of my father's who died in 1975, years before I was born, but who I've heard about hundreds of times. I bet other native New Yorkers who read this will notice similar connections specific to their lives.
July 13, 2016
Having read some Studs Terkel, I had an inkling of how this “oral history” was going to play out – illuminating nuances here, shreds of local politics there. I was floored by some of the stories, mildly disgusted by many, and bored by others. I do like the intimacy that interviews can provide. However, I think most readers want more structure and more lucid information, not to mention insight from residents of cities other than New York. With Terkel you go in expecting meandering stories (I always think of it as finding a nursing home full of the least bland elderly people possible), you go in without a clear goal, just to absorb information as an aside. For the portrait of gentrification, I’m not sure interviews were the best layout device. I did learn more than I expected though. And how else could you hear from a graffiti artist, a house-flipper, a civil rights lawyer, a squatter, an architect, a developer, a beautification enthusiast, and a stalwart who refuses to be bought out at any cost, all in a row?
February 28, 2016
The Edge Becomes the Center contains various stories of gentrification from all different stakeholders-- from residents being pushed out, to investors pushing folks out, to community organizers, to real estate agents. I enjoyed how the author seamlessly collected these diverse voices, and seemingly connected with all these people in a meaningful way, because he elicited amazing stories from one and all. This is an important snapshot of New York City at the crossroads. I wish the Mayor and city council members would read this book (and take it to heart).
June 3, 2016
I really enjoyed this ethnographic account of gentrification in several New York neighborhoods. Gibson interviewed an interesting variety of New Yorkers on their experiences of gentrification, and occasionally inserted commentary and narration in italics, which I thought was well done. Definitely made me think about the issue from a lot of different perspectives.
April 6, 2016
A balanced mix of anecdotes, facts and theory, creating a great enthography that reads like a story. Definitely helped me understand the process of gentrification better, and shape my thinking on it more clearly.
December 12, 2015
One of the best books I've read in the past several years. Unblinking portrayal of what it means to live in a major metropolis in this age. Highly recommended.
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September 17, 2015"...I've changed and that place has changed" ___ Raul
October 5, 2015
Enjoyable & coherent but not a world-shaker. Some horrible verbal tics from some of the interviewees.
September 23, 2015
Very engaging, and Gibson genuinely does a good job of talking to a wide range of people. Would highly recommend this as an alternative to William Helmreich's "The New York Nobody Knows"
August 3, 2016
Interesting, widely discusses ideas without a lot of depth.
March 22, 2018
Loved this. The structure of linked narratives is really successful in pointing out the incredible complexity of this thing We call gentrification. But the urgency of the problem is not lost.
January 30, 2019
A look at gentrification in NYC from all levels - the person living in a space that is now unaccessible, the developer, the real estate agent, the activist, etc. Interesting read, but tells you a lot of what you already know, its all about the money. And the people that have the money don't seem to care about the actual neighborhood they buy in and develop. Well written, quick and easy (though sad) read.
February 3, 2020
I think this book takes on a complicated subject like gentrification, and successfully showed how complicated it is via a tirade of different perspectives. I think it's worth reading.
February 15, 2022
What a cursed final sentence
September 17, 2016
Infuriating in ways both intentional and unintentional.
May 17, 2017
Such a prevalent issue today for not only nyc--but also communities around the world. Highly recommend this book; it definitely helped me grasp what is going on. A passage that stands out to me:
"Each of us defines gentrification in accordance with our own relationship to a piece of land, a neighborhood. And as is the case in all meaningful relationships, our feelings are conflicted; our actions, contradictory. We have hopes for what the land may bring us--profits, security, community--and we have fears about what it can do, and what it might become...It is not unreasonable to argue that the people that spend the most time participating in a neighborhood should also be the people who bring most of the money to that neighborhood. But in this era of steroidal global capitalism, international investment plays the leading role, and the people who spend the most time in a neighborhood and the people who spend the most money there are increasingly discrete groups."
"Each of us defines gentrification in accordance with our own relationship to a piece of land, a neighborhood. And as is the case in all meaningful relationships, our feelings are conflicted; our actions, contradictory. We have hopes for what the land may bring us--profits, security, community--and we have fears about what it can do, and what it might become...It is not unreasonable to argue that the people that spend the most time participating in a neighborhood should also be the people who bring most of the money to that neighborhood. But in this era of steroidal global capitalism, international investment plays the leading role, and the people who spend the most time in a neighborhood and the people who spend the most money there are increasingly discrete groups."
December 15, 2017
Maybe more of a 3.75? I️ really loved the variety of interviews and the author does a great job of framing the different sections, but I️ wish there had been an introduction with demographic and economic context, or even just a bibliography where I️ could have gotten that information.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews