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

by Peter Moskowitz, P.E. Moskowitz

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance.

Peter Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing.

A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back

Genres: Nonfiction, Urban Planning, Politics, Urbanism, Sociology, Social Justice, History

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 7, 2017

About the author

Also see P.E. Moskowitz.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and learned so much from it. Activist P.E. Moskowitz explores the gentrification of urban neighborhoods across the country with chapters dedicated to New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. They write about the people of color, particularly black and Latinx folks who can no longer afford to live in cities and their displacement, as well as about the root causes of gentrification and what contributes to it.

As someone with an embarrassingly limited knowledge of gentrification – I knew the basic premise of rich, white people flooding cities and displacing poor people, especially people of color – I felt like I learned so much from this book while still appreciating its accessible writing and smart flow between ideas and concepts. I learned so much about use and exchange values and how urban land is used to enhance wealth, how suburbanization and gentrification relate to disadvantage poor people and radical community-building (e.g., omg as someone who grew up in a suburb, I now see how isolating and awful they are, ugh), and how neoliberalism itself maintains gentrification. I won’t go into all of these ideas in this review, so check out Gabriella’s review if you want more depth as she writes about these topics with depth well. Here’s one quote I’ll pull that describes the definition of gentrification:

“Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich. The trend isn’t limited to cities: for decades conservatives in the US government have been working to deregulate industry and defund our safety nets, to turn the United States from a welfare state based on the vision of John Maynard Keynes… into a neoliberal, corporate-friendly oligarchy concerned only with increasing the share of wealth owned by the upper class.”

I appreciate this book even more because Moskowitz describes their emotional experience with gentrification and they provide tangible strategies to fight gentrification. I felt emotional reading their experience watching their own city of New York and the people they love within it fade away and get displaced by the rich. While describing this, they also acknowledged their own positionality as a white person and a gentrifier coming from a family of gentrifiers. Toward the end of the book they provide several strategies I found useful, such as fighting to raise the minimum wage, expanding and protecting public lands, regulating housing, and more. While I felt sad and defeated reading the descriptions of gentrification in this book, Moskowitz supplies us with strategies to fight this phenomenon that may elicit more feelings of empowerment, especially if we take action.

Overall, highly recommended to those like me who had not known that much about gentrification. As Moskowitz writes about, I hope that housing justice and access become topics that are more heavily discussed in the political sphere and social justice spheres broadly.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

To me, the book feels more emotional and anecdotal than investigative and informative. Gentrification is such a nuanced and multifaceted topic, I wish the book had delved deeper. What separates gentrification from simple rent rise - an inevitable side effect of a city's economic growth? Is there a case where a city (internationally or in the US) successfully balances freedom of movement with protection of the locals?

It is a book I'd be really keen to discuss with local and international friends from all around the world. It will prompt people to ask and reflect on some very fundamental questions of social justice.

[Pippen Rothingham · Rating 2 out of 5]

"This country was founded on displacement - on the idea that white men have a greater right to space, and even to people's bodies, than anyone else. That's taken the form of slavery, segregation, the genocide of Native Americans, and now, to a certain extent, gentrification."

I'm guessing that most players in gentrification - the victims and the gentrifiers - are unaware of the systems and political acts underlying what we all can see are the effects of gentrification. While Moskowitz acknowledges that gentrification is partly due to the sum of individual acts, he mostly focuses on previous political actions and business interests (often synonymous) which paved the way for gentrifiers.

This book is well-written and easy to read (if not stomach). Divided into sections which focus on 4 different cities, we get 4 distinct pictures of gentrification and plenty of anecdotal heartaches, which drive home the effects of gentrification.

Moscowitz uses an odd reference style, which makes it unclear where some of his facts are coming from. Many of his sources are secondary, so without checking out all his sources, I can't be sure of the facts. He also doesn't talk about what would happen to cities if they hadn't chosen to gentrify. One notable example is when he mentions New York City in 1975: a nearly bankrupt city that "represented the welfare state" chose to become "the first US city to employ gentrification as governance." But how could it have lasted as a welfare state if it was about to be bankrupt?

I want to hear viable alternatives to gentrification and I want to know what is happening to the people who are displaced due to gentrification. Moscowitz gives us numbers of New Orleanseans who moved to Houston and other cities, but how can they afford to live there? Is Houston avoiding gentrification? And if so, let's hear about that! Some European cities are briefly mentioned as having more checks on capitalism and therefore more housing for the low and middle-income, but there are no specifics about how to emulate that. There are a few vague call-to-action items on the last pages of this book, but I think the truth of it is that Moscowitz doesn't have an answer. He knows how to write and engage, but his focus is narrow and his solutions are few.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an academic book--it's a subjective take from an anti-gentrification activist. I think if you do not know that, the book will not sit well. I liked it a lot. It's a fascinating take on 4 cities--I actually think his stories on Detroit and New Orleans were much more interesting than NY and San Francisco (probably because those are covered a lot already). I actually don't think that gentrification is the problem--segregation is the problem---especially because as MLK said: the point of segregation is economic oppression.

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Considering how much I agree with in this book, it's a little surprising how much I hated it.

The confluence of race, class and urban policy is complicated, but the author can't resist simplifying it at every opportunity. Every opponent is a villain. Every statistic points in the same direction. Every problem has not just one cause, but a knowing conspiracy behind it. (Even when the book quotes Rebecca Solnit making the point that some of our most pressing problems are multi-causal, the author can't resist undermining themselves in the VERY NEXT SENTENCE to declare that, in fact, every problem has only one cause.) They want to blame everything on "neoliberalism," which is fine, but if you can ascribe everything from a party welcoming the Super Bowl to the unreconstructed racism of mid-century redlining to that ideology, you've stretched the definition of that word beyond any useful purpose.

It's also just sloppy. The suburbs are so horrible that they require a massive ad campaign to convince anyone to live in them. (By analogy, I suppose we could conclude that without the millions spent annually to advertise the product, no one would ever buy beer.) But also the suburbs are so comfortable that he cites a goddam Buzzfeed listicle to mock the brainless ingrates who acknowledge that that living in New York can be trying. (Side note: Do you see what this book is doing to me? It's so inept it's causing me to ARGUE IN FAVOR OF SUBURBS which I'm pretty sure is what Hell is like.)

It's possible the book could work as a jeremiad. After all, there's a lot to be angry about when it comes to displacement and the corporate monoculture that's taking over our most vibrant places. But, Christ, the author is such an asshole. Everyone is stupid but them! Every politician is a corporate sellout! New York is ruined! Young person yells at cloud! I couldn't tell whether I should be annoyed or refreshed when they actually admitted that because they grew up in NY, they think they're "cooler" than everyone who lives there now. I genuinely think they expect the reader to agree.

There's a strong anti-gentrification argument to be made that would be able to survive acknowledging that a lot of smart, well-meaning city officials are forced to reckon with a tough choices, but this book is either blind to that subtlety or unwilling to trust its readers' ability to live with any complexity. Simple explanations can be compelling; this is just simplistic.

Someone should write a good book looking at the damage we've done to cities over the last half century with what Jane Jacobs calls "cataclysmic money." But this book isn't it.

[Luigib · Rating 1 out of 5]

I should have known when the San Francisco Chronicle recommended this book that it was going to be far left. As a 60-year resident of one of the cities discussed in this book, I found several crucial trends missing from this book:

1) The author focuses on certain races getting displaced and not on economic groups. Are races being targeted, or is the middle class being targeted too?

2) There is virtually no mention of EB-5 visas that allow rich people from other countries to jump to the front of the immigration line with a $500,000 contribution. Aren’t allowing wealthier people into the US cities going to distort the economic balance? Aren't the Canadian version of the EB-5's affecting Vancouver to the extent they initiated a foreigner home purchase tax?

3) There is no mention of the huge millennial generation all trying to move to the cities at one time? This is a short-term phenomenon.

4) With regards to people getting kicked out of rent controlled apartments. When people treat short term contracts a life estates, it is bound to create a disparity between the fair market value of rent and the rent paid. This is overregulation creating a problem, and then Moskowitz suggesting more regulation to resolve the problem.

5) There was no discussion of the impact on families when their children are bussed across these dense cities to attend schools out of the neighborhood. What does it do to a neighborhood when two children living next door to each other attend schools 5 miles away in different directions? Do the parents have the same involvement in their children’s schools? Doesn't busing affect neighbors interacting with each other? It is a fact that there are more dogs than children in SF and the school board has had the greatest impact on the flight of families.

Then I loved these opinions (not facts):

Pg 159: “In the outer suburbs (of San Francisco) there is no public transportation.”
Actually, there is public transportation for 50 miles in every direction but the Pacific Ocean. Where did you get this stat? Name a suburb and I will send you a public transportation link.

Pg 184: “One week they noticed the building’s trash being thrown into the park across the street, and they suspected the landlords had instructed the super to that to get the residents in trouble.” Where is your evidence? Why can we not speculate that the tenants threw the trash across the street to claim the supe did this to get them in trouble?

Pg 170 “On a single three-block stretch in Midtown, 57 percent of apartments are vacant for at least ten months each year.” I calculate there are about 2,000 blocks on Manhattan, which means the author is extrapolating a little over .01% of Manhattan occupancy rates as the rule for the other 99.9%. I wonder what would happen to the crime rate of NY if NYPD was allowed to extrapolate the crime rate of just 3 blocks and schedule manpower based on that ridiculously low sample size.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The ignorance of the lives of others is allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as 'People are starting to move to that neighborhood,' or 'No one used to go there, but that's changing.' The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance. This is what is happening in New Orleans and every other gentrifying city. If you ignore the destruction of the lives of the people who's always mattered the least, things are going great. If you acknowledge that their lives exist and that they matter, then it becomes immediately obvious something is terribly wrong. So what does it mean that we are not only ignoring these people but increasingly erasing their narratives in the name of progress?"

That's this book in a nutshell. If you live in a city or love a city, especially if it's New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, or New York you should read this.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great primer on the modern and historic issues that led to the cities left "dead" from divestment, gentrification, and neighborhood change.

According to Moskowitz, city government began to embrace the faustian bargain of neoliberalism due to our country’s faulty funding mechanisms, which essentially leave cities dependent on their tax bases for economic sustainability. Because of this, elected officials often see no means of economic development outside of gentrification (thanks, Richard Florida!), and have “turned cities into capital-producing machines...city governments have become addicted to this capital to function” (xii). I thought this whole premise was unfair, because cities shouldn’t be put in the position to only rely on property taxes for consistent funding (thanks, Ronald Reagan!)

I think New Orleans and Detroit definitely fit his framework. In stage zero of New Orleans and Detroit’s gentrification, they experienced natural and financial disasters brought on by decades of divestment. Through educational takeover of the Orleans Parish School District, FEMA’s residential takeover of evacuees’ post-Katrina relocations, and Kevyn Orr’s budgetary takeover of Detroit’s post-bankruptcy government, both municipalities were primed for gentrification by their long-standing deference to outsiders. I thought it was super smart how he connected the twin patterns of suburbanization and gentrification, which both rely on significant federal funding and housing policies benefiting well-off, whiter Americans. The deep struggles black residents in his case study cities have with tax foreclosures, excessive water bills, and subprime mortgages (Detroit); or inadequate funds for renovation and relocation after Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans); indicate that the valleys and high lands or the 7.2 and 134.8 have never been on equal playing fields in the city. Moskowitz explains that the policy decisions (often sanctioned by city mayors!) that helped white Americans escape to the suburbs and stranded many black Americans in central cities reverberate in the inequality witnessed today.

I felt most convicted by his explanation of how elected officials view urban land’s “use and exchange values.” The way these values transform the “highest and best use” of urban land into the “highest and best-paying tenants” really hit home for me, as someone who’ll be employed at a real estate and economic development firm, and doing a lot of this analysis for clients. In my career as a planner and a consultant, I’ll need to grapple with the legacy of “urban planning [as] a tool not only for economic growth but also for social and political restructuring” (155), and be honest about how real estate/planning concepts of best and highest use, TOD, and other Smart Growth practices have intentionally and accidentally bolstered gentrification, discriminatory housing policies, and economic inequality in urban spaces. I hope to discover how the planning ideals I believe in can be redirected to curb stage zero’s prioritization of the wealthy at the expense of other city residents.

In addition to his more theoretical discussions of the structural causes of gentrification, he also takes several more subjective issues with the phenomenon, like many of us do! The first issue is what Moskowitz calls the “sterilization of Brooklyn,” or the way that gentrification mutes cities through changing their architectural, economic, and societal norms. The result leaves even gentrifiers unsatisfied with their homes. He believes this sterilization stems in large part from the influx of millennials, with many values from their suburban upbringings influencing their expectations of the city. These “suburban, individualistic mentalities” of new urban transplants, combined with the standardization of real estate finance and development, have led to streamlined forms of urban real estate and neighborhood redevelopment that can be easily reproduced no matter the context. This is why people move to New Orleans for its distinct artistic culture, but then want to police it out of existence (see also: U Street in DC, Graduate Hospital in Philly, or Harlem.) This is why the grittiness that transplants to Detroit or San Francisco tout as authentic is no longer anywhere to be found in neighborhoods that, as he explains, look the exact same in both cities, despite their different architectural and cultural legacies. This particular problem leads to a lack of true memory of a place was, since all “authentic” markers have been commodified into something that can raise land values.

He also contends that gentrification is the product and continuation of a political strategy that avoids service of all but the wealthiest and most powerful residents. This can be witnessed in New York City, where elite Manhattan enclaves receive more transportation investments and less zoning requirements than low-income neighborhoods; in Detroit, where downtown and midtown have become the most prioritized neighborhoods despite the severe vacancy and economic struggles of others; in New Orleans, where homeowners in black neighborhoods and black business owners are less frequently awarded renovation and support funds from the government; and in San Francisco, where the sharpening affordability needs of even its protected tenants are largely being ignored.

Finally, he takes issue with how gentrification combines with neoliberalism, when strapped-for-funds governments hand over political control to outside parties. Again, each of his case studies has their own non-governmental players making key public policy decisions: real estate professionals (NYC), Dan Gilbert and Midtown Detroit Inc. (Detroit), charter school operators and post-Katrina nonprofits (NOLA), and tech industry leaders (SF). Moskowitz explains that these actors, despite their philanthropic publicity schemes, have largely remade their various cities for their own gain, and for the loss of longtime, disadvantaged residents.

Overall, the fact that such different cities can have such similar experiences are the whole case and point of his book. I am eager to continue the class I'm reading this book in, as we discuss cross-cutting economic development solutions that can empower both stagnating and changing neighborhoods to resist these issues of gentrification.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book as a whole was neither hard nor easy to read, but there are parts that made me wince because they hit too close to home. I found it interesting overall and more or less relevant for my current job. There's a lot of info here in regards to the signs you can look for if you think your neighborhood is at risk of gentrification.

However, this book was written before the pandemic which shook all foundations and institutions to their cores, so it's hard to say how gentrification will look and what forms it will take on in the next couple of years.

We're currently living through very uncertain times, or at least my city is, and books such as this one are more like a historical document at this point than a useful reference.

[Jennifer Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book that intelligently and accurately documents this critical problem is absolutely necessary, and this book is not it. "How to Kill a City" does describe the locally-specific dynamics of gentrification in each city it addresses; San Francisco, Detroit, NOLA and NYC. If one has a particular interest in those particular locations, it may be worth picking up for that reason. However, the author's observations amount to a haphazard pile, full of contradictions, with no guiding framework other than general wistfulness and hand-wringing. On one hand, cities are bad when they are empty and abandoned. On the other hand, they are bad when white and upper-income folks move into those empty and abandoned spaces. The author reluctantly agrees that the coffee shops and groceries selling fresh vegetables are nice, but laments that the new people & businesses don't "acknowledge" what came before. You kind of know what he means by that, but it isn't very helpful or constructive. The author gives no specific prescriptions for what good neighborhood improvement would look like, nor provide any practical discussion of how upper income people and businesses might productively invest and co-habit in cities so as to create (or, historically speaking, re-create) healthy mixed-income communities.

The author is a writer, but not a sociologist or academic, so he also speaks only from his experience, which means that certain critical aspects of urban communities are completely absent; notably, schools. Schools and school quality simply don't figure into his world view, while coffee shops loom large. There is also no economic analysis of what gentrification actually is, or any documentation of the displacement that occurs because of gentrification. That is well outside the parameters of this wholly anecdotal book, but I hope that these egregious omissions were sufficient to inspire some academic out there to take on that necessary job, and that they are working on it right now.

In general, the author is well-intentioned, but poorly served by his lack of background in urban studies, politics, economics, or a deeper engagement with the issues that he attempts to tackle. For instance, he meets with NYC's (erstwhile) deputy mayor for housing and economic development, who previously ran an investment division at Goldman Sachs, and he doesn't mention this, but does call her a progressive. Really? By what standards? The author then proceeds to take much of what he gleaned at that interview at face value. He mentions "rent control" in New York, which is irrelevant to policy debates, since Rent Stabilization has been in effect since 1969, and rent control applies to less than 1% of the City's housing stock. He flatly dismisses the possibility of rent reform in Albany...which happened this year. In the concluding chapter, he mentions the City's public housing (NYCHA) as a proof of the success of public housing...come again? Even a casual follower of local NYC news knows that NYCHA is billions of dollars in debt, with deplorable living conditions and deferred maintenance caused by decades of inadequate funding for repairs and capital improvements. In these and other instances, the author is clearly drawing conclusions based on what he was told rather than engaging in independent critical analysis. The author is deeply concerned about his topic, and that feeling really comes through, which is very sweet, but he really is maddeningly clueless.

I read the book in hopes that the inevitable final chapter would provide some concrete recommendations, suggested by the author's explorations, but sadly, no. By the author's own admission, the conclusion is a rehash of three other books, all of which happen to be problematic, but I'm not writing a review of those books. Suffice it to say that they are all well known in the field, and one can read those instead of "How to Kill a City" if one is so inclined.

One book I will mention in the context of "How to Kill a City", since it is current and I also read it this week, is "Evicted", by Matthew Desmond. Towards the end, he says that he chose to focus on Milwaukee, a typical American City, and that he pointedly avoiding certain large cities which are often studied because they are in fact, atypical outliers; the examples he gives are New York, Detroit, and San Francisco. These three atypical outliers are three of the four cities discussed in "How to Kill a City". While Evicted is concerned with a different phenomena of poverty, it's not altogether unrelated to gentrification, so the point is well taken. It's fine to write about these cities which capture the American imagination, but it's also important to understand that they aren't really representative. "How to Kill a City" approaches an understanding of this fact by documenting shifts and changes specific to each city and certain neighborhoods, but it never arrives at any larger truths or useful conclusions. I look forward very much to reading the book that does.

[Lada Moskalets · Rating 5 out of 5]

 Не всі хіпстерські кав’ярні однаково корисні. Книжка для тих хто любить пити крафтову каву і мріє зняти студію на Кройцбергу чи Вільямсбургу, але не замислюється про загальний процес джентрифікації та його наслідки для бідніших людей. Автор бере чотири міста - Новий Орлеан, Детройт, Сан-Франциско і рідний йому Нью-Йорк та дивиться як, попри різні передумови до джентрифікації, кожне з цих міст зіткнулося з усуненням біднішого населення в кращому випадку в гетто, в гіршому - у інші міста. Престиж будиночка на передмісті відмирає і молоді американці знову хочуть жити в містах. Основна теза автора - джентрифікація це організований і значною мірою керований процес, який виник за умов, коли містами керують як корпораціями. В неї є свої закони, за якими можна передбачити який з районів міст спершу стане місцем кав’ярень і барбершопів, а потім осередком дорогого житла, недоступного хіпстерам.
Автор критично ставиться до загальноприйнятих історій успіху, на кшталт Детройта і показує, як джентрифікація використала старі расові поділи. Ті хто можуть собі дозволити житло в центрі міста і велосипеди за 700 доларів ніколи не перетнуться з мешканцями бідних кварталів, бо їх розділяє навіть транспортна система. Виявляється в історії американських міст повно темних та неприємних моментів, коли афроамериканцям чи євреям доступ до певних кварталів був закритий цілком.
Джентрифікація, в такий спосіб, стає новою колонізацією. Раніше білі мужні чоловіки приходили на дикий захід до диких індіанців і приносили цивілізацію у вигляді ферм та залізничних доріг. Зараз вони ж приходять до непоказних районів міст, спершу з кавою і велосипедними доріжками, а потім зі скаженими цінами на житло, яких не зможуть собі дозволити навіть хіпстери-першопрохідці.
Що автор пропонує? Контроль над ринком житла, активізм і підтримку всіляких некомерційних ініціатив, що дозволяють будув��ти спільноту свого району.
Я би радо почитала щось таке про європейські випадки, хоча, як книжка підкреслює, що джентрифікація це здебільшого американська історія.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

book that rewires your brain a bit. a call to arms for a robust urbanism movement, and also just really interesting and shifted my perspective on gentrification significantly

[D.L. Mayfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so compelling--all of the complexities and facts and policies are there, but intersperse with the stories of living, breathing people who are being displaced. I have read a fair amount on gentrification, and this is the book I would put in people's hands.

[Celine Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Gentrification', Moskowitz writes, 'is the most transformative urban phenomenon of the last half century, yet we talk about it nearly always on the level of minutiae.' This observation is essentially why I wanted to read this book—because most discussions of gentrification seem to be about the minutiae: $15 farm-to-table pizza instead of dollar slices, $6 boba shops…then somehow related to this is poor communities and racial minorities being pushed out of cities? Whenever gentrification is talked about at the level of minutiae, then its results start to seem inevitable, like the weather; and its negative effects become hard to pin down. So I was quite interested in this book, where Moskowitz discusses gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and NYC and tries to explain how it happened and how communities—especially activists—are responding.

The first (and maybe most important insight) I got from this book is that gentrification is not about 'some ethereal change in neighborhood character', and it's not about a bunch of individual well-off people deciding to move to a newly cool city. Moskowitz argues that gentrification is about a deeper idea of what cities should be: 'reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.' The book centers the struggles of poor communities and communities of color, but Moskowitz points out that gentrification ultimately comes for us all, as cities get more unaffordable and, frankly, more boring.

Some key points I found especially striking:

Why are cities gentrifying? Moskowitz ties gentrification to two things:

First: In the past few decades, cities have received less money for the federal government, forcing them to rely even more on property taxes. This inevitably leads to investing less in poorer communities and social services, and more in things that will increase real estate development—and real estate prices—in the city.

Second: Moskowitz notes that gentrification happens when developers can make money by redeveloping a cheaper area into an increasingly expensive area. These cheaper areas are typically areas that have been under-invested in, and this is tied to historical racial inequality that has led to whiter areas receiving much better infrastructure and housing/business subsidies than Black neighborhoods. 'If gentrification requires cheap real estate,' Moskowitz writes, 'before areas can be gentrified they must be divested from, and the history of American housing is largely the history of a purposive concentration of African Americans and a subsequent disinvestment in their lives.' Detroit and New Orleans are especially interesting case studies here—Moskowitz discusses how infrastructural investments/funding in both cities are concentrated in gentrified areas that are much whiter than the rest of the city.

The above connects to a subtle and interesting point Moskowitz makes about the suburbs versus cities. Suburban communities have historically received more investment and funding than urban communities. More recently, however, the suburbs (previously favored by white and wealthy communities) are declining in esteem, and more people are choosing to move to the cities. Now it's cities that are increasingly white and wealthy spaces, and poor communities and communities of color have to move out to the suburbs to find affordable housing. This is a nice corrective to a superficial urbanism that goes 'suburbs are terrible, cities are better!' on purely aesthetic terms. Moskowitz points out that the inequalities that produced the suburbs are now operating today in the gentrification of cities: 'The suburbs were the prototype for gentrification, not aesthetically but economically. Suburbanization was the original American experiment in using real estate to reinvigorate capitalism. Gentrification can be understood as a continuation of that experiment—suburbanization part two.'

Loved this book overall (and the footnotes are invaluable!). It sharpened my understanding of gentrification and its political causes. It's an especially valuable read as the housing crisis (or what Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal would argue is a tenants' rights crisis) grows more acute every day, and it becomes more and more urgent to ensure affordable housing is accessible to everyone.

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

The gist: a hyper-gentrified city isn't one you want to -- or can -- actually live in. Moskowitz does a deep dive on four cities grappling with varying stages of gentrification and upheaval: New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and NYC. The glass-encased condos spring up, the stores and restaurants that make a neighborhood interesting close down, non-hyper-rich people suffer. I thought the sections on NYC's Greenwich Village, once an artist and activist enclave and now basically a bland playground for the rich, and Detroit were especially interesting, for different reasons. That's where the questions popped up for me: Detroit's downtown revival has been remarkable and yes, it's at the expense of vast sections of the rest of the city, but is the alternative of letting the downtown stay vacant really any better? Anyway, very thought provoking read that makes things like the nuances of tax incentives really accessible. Would make a great book club discussion.

[Emma Strawbridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty solid book! I liked the case study for four cities and i thought it was really important to have the “what do i do” section at the end. obviously i wished moskowitz had talked about philadelphia more but it wasn’t his top city, and i think the ones picked were great because they were all different in very specific ways. also super interesting to read about this in the context of my anthropology reading. sooooo interesting!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short primer on gentrification 101 with a very broad overview on San Francisco, NYC, New Orleans, and Detroit. Some of the research feels a little cherry picked - although I didn’t go validate the author’s sources. Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but overall I felt like this was a worthwhile read with some nuggets of insightful perspective.

I’m interested in finding a similar book published post 2022 to read and compare how each respective city’s housing was affected by the pandemic.

[Dustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some, this book will not be radical. For some, the problems with gentrification and their causes will be gobsmackingly obvious. If that's you, may still enjoy this book, because it's well-written, well-researched and will be likely teach you how to make better arguments about what you feel.

But, for some of us, like me, who have been so busy railing against the insanity of the suburban experiment to realize the downsides of radical densification and gentrification, this book was a real eye opener. Moskowitz taught me more about what cities are, what they could be, and what they should be more than any book on this topic since Jacobs' inimitable Death and Life. Perhaps even than my Masters degree in urban planning did - at the very least it made me question or even change a lot of what I had been taught.

If you feel like the rent is too damn high, you should read this. And if you don't? You NEED to read this.

[Dorothy Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been a resident of, and consider to be home, two of the cities profiled in this book (New Orleans and San Francisco). This book is a fascinating and insightful read that does an excellent job of intertwining urban housing theory and history with anecdotes, both heartbreaking and inspiring, of people at every end and perspective of gentrification systems. Developers and politicians are humanized, as are the poor and displaced, making clear the message that gentrification is a series of larger systems and actions that, nevertheless, ordinary people play a part in and have the potential to disrupt. I walked away from reading this book with strong righteous anger, but also with renewed hope that there are realistic solutions that can continue to grow connections and community, and value and protect the people that make cities special and great.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great example of a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up solely on my own recognizance. However, it’s the January pick for the Rad Roopa Book Club, and I was intrigued. Well, actually, I wanted to know how to kill a city, should the need ever arise. That’s what P.E. Moskowitz covers in this aptly named book—though I get the feeling they are more interested in fighting against gentrification, and I suppose that’s a good thing.

Part geographical rumination, part political manifesto, How to Kill a City is a tour through four major American cities and how gentrification has come for each of them. Moskowitz begins in New Orleans, examining how state and local officials used the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to enact policy that would encourage gentrification, development, and attract “the right sort” (read: white people) to the city. From there they take us to Detroit, which has been hollowed out by recession and foreclosure. Next up, San Francisco, where the tech bubble has priced millennials out of owning houses some of them grew up in. Finally, Moskowitz’s milieu of New York City, which has waged a decades-long campaign of gentrification across multiple boroughs.

Along the way, Moskowitz explores what gentrification is, according to various sources, how it begins, and the forces that drive it. Their thesis is simple: gentrification is a local effect, but the cause is national and even global, so the solutions have to be a similar combination of these levels of community and government. Boots-on-the-ground activists are essential but if fighting by themselves are in for a losing battle. Rather, Moskowitz points out the need for policy change that recognizes how gentrification works and especially how it affects marginalized and vulnerable groups.

I’ll demonstrate with one example from the book: real estate development. In many cities (I know this is true here in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver), housing prices are on the rise because developers or other wealthy owners buy up houses, condos, and apartments and then leave them vacant for most of the year. And the ones that are occupied are leased, often without rent control. As a result, people are being priced out of their homes in the cities, putting pressure on them to move to suburbs—and without robust public transit into the city from the suburbs, people often have trouble affording to even work in the city.

As I read, I pondered how gentrification manifests in my own city of Thunder Bay. It’s a tough one, because I can tell it is operation, but I don’t think it’s as evident as it is in larger cities. Thunder Bay’s commercial districts tend to be dense and clustered, and while there are residential neighbourhoods that abut them, we have a lot less urban infill at the moment. We’ve always had a lot of chain and department stores, with local businesses eternally clinging to life as we lurch from one economic hardship to another. So it was challenging for me to apply Moskowitz’s teachings to my own city—something to think about, and perhaps watch out for.

Then again maybe, as Moskowitz themself reflects, maybe I am a gentrifier. I fit the economic demographic of being a white, middle-class, white-collar worker … but again, the neighbourhood is what I struggle with. I’m in a more expensive yet still heterogeneous area of town, heavily residential yet one where walking barely two blocks can put me among houses that are hundreds of thousands of dollars’ difference in value to my own.

Although How to Kill a City acknowledges outright the links between gentrification and racism, I would have liked to see more discussion of colonialism in this book. After all, the land American cities are built on is stolen from the Indigenous nations who predate European contact. The first European settlers were, in a sense, the original gentrifiers, and I think it’s worth examining how present-day settlers like myself benefit from our privilege even if we are not personally in the midst of a present moment of gentrification.

Similarly, while not quite in the scope of the book, How to Kill a City got me thinking about gentrification in Europe. Moskowitz briefly mentions London, where gentrification as a term was coined. So it’s not a phenomenon unique to North America by any means. Yet I wonder how conditions in Europe—differences in population and transport density, differences in culture, as well as states with a heavier lean towards socialism—change the face of gentrification. Again, something to think about.

That’s about where I come down on this book: it gives me a lot to think about. It’s firm and opinionated without being strident, yet it also admits different points of view—Moskowitz interviews developers and other gentrifiers who emphatically endorse what they are doing in these cities, and then Moskowitz presents the points of view of activists and those who oppose gentrification, with whom they clearly sympathize more. Still, I appreciate the attempt to explore this issue from different angles.

Gentrification is ultimately about space, and space does not have to be limited to the physical. I’ve seen people discuss the gentrification of online spaces as well. So I like how this book has me thinking about our relationship with space, physical or not, and especially how I move through it as a white person. I’m thinking about relationality, how I relate to these spaces, to the people and objects within them, and how these things in turn relate back to me.

How to Kill a City is a concrete and careful look at an important contemporary issue. While there is room for more breadth and depth than is on offer here, this book feels like a good starting point on a journey to unpacking one’s own role in gentrification and learning about how policy influences gentrification throughout North America.

Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The minute my friend Jason told me about How to Kill a City I was on it like a duck on a June bug. The book takes a look at four major cities in the US that have been thoroughly or partially transformed through gentrification over recent years: New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, & New York. I have ties to three of the four: I spent the first seventeen years of my life in Detroit, lived in New York City in the late 90's for four years, and have had family and friends living in San Francisco since the 80's. So I've seen a lot of the changes Moskowitz describes up close and personal (actually read the section on Detroit while visiting Detroit last week).

I think the book is strongest when Moskowitz focuses on factual documentation. He presents a lot of troubling evidence that the powers-that-be in our country, in their fealty to late-period capitalism and development, do not view affordable housing with any sense of it being a basic human right (not unlike healthcare, but that's a whole other thorny subject). When Moskowitz gets more subjective, especially in a short section dedicated to bemoaning the radical changes to the West Village neighborhood of New York where he grew up, he undercuts his arguments with often heated words, which, while generally justified, tend to tip over from investigative & scholarly into broadside territory. I tend to favor a little authorial distance in books such as this—the facts he presents are damning enough, anyway. I've seen some reviews from other Goodreads reviewers who, being more skeptical of the evils of gentrification, use Moskowitz's ire as justification that he's too close to the issue to be objective, overly emotional, etc. There are also places where Moskowitz's text could have used a copy editor's eye—his punctuation is a little wonky here and there.

But Moskowitz is smart and thorough enough to overcome these flaws and he gets all of his salient points across. He is particularly spot-on about Detroit. When I was there I was thrilled to see some parts of the city burgeoning (trust me, the city had needed some serious-assed burgeoning for decades now)—but all along I knew that these bright new enclaves were never going to add any meaningful improvements to the city and its longtime residents beyond their limited parameters. There weren't physical walls surrounding these gentrified areas but you felt/sensed invisible barriers anyway. The stratification between the haves and have-nots is acute in Detroit (whereas in SF & NYC it's like the have-nots aren't even living in the city anymore—they've been pushed out to the suburbs because the rents in both cities are mostly astronomical). The Midtown section of Detroit felt more colonized than anything else.

My mission after reading this is to make sure to engage more deeply with my community and more than anything to vote for political candidates who are seriously committed to providing affordable housing and to limiting development to a reasonable degree—and not just mentioning these issues on their leaflets as if checking off items on a grocery list. I don’t want to see my city of Minneapolis going any further down the same terrible path that other cities such as Seattle and Portland have already gone. We're definitely on the cusp of major changes: a microbrewery and a fancy coffee shop have just opened down the street from me, right next to each other. They're nice to have nearby, but I'm also aware that their presence may well be a harbinger of other things to come. Anyway, People should read this book, there is a lot to chew on. I expect there will be more such books as the demographics of our cities continue to change. Four out of five stars.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for being really well written and interesting! Made me feel like maybe I could be an academic and spend all my time reading books and thinking about things.

I've been thinking about housing more and more in the last few years as the nyc housing crisis started personally affecting me heh. This book outlines the systems and decisions and planning that goes into gentrification generally (with specific overviews of New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and NYC) and it's complicated and gentrifiers are kinda at fault but also a lot of wealthy powerful people had to change policies first to make it possible on this scale. Learning about this felt like a salve to my shame of gentrifying PLG... But Moskowitz also doesn't pretend like gentrifiers don't have responsibility either, reflecting how they are gentrifying in brooklyn after being priced out of west village. complicated.

Main takeaways for me:
- gentrification comes in increasing levels of class replacing each other = Poor/POC -> Queer white -> hipster -> yuppie -> just straight up wealthy
- gentrification transforms homes (places where ppl live and have community) into commodity (property used as capital/investment, not even necessarily lived in, like those empty skyscrapers in manhattan owned by russian oligarchs etc)
- suburbs were an idea invented (they were invented! suburbs haven't always existed!) to reinvigorate the economy/construction industry but also in a really racist way where the govt only gave loans and funding to white neighborhoods, hence "white flight"

Moskowitz def demonized suburbs as unnatural and basically evil, and historically they are in a lot of ways, but i'm taking a grain of salt w that since M is a city kid who's never lived in a suburb and it's hard to hear aspects of your childhood bashed on by someone who didn't experience it bleh

which leads me to..
topics this book made me consider that I want to learn more about:
- suburbanization and white flight
- history of homeownership
- why are people racist
- M describes walkable, mixed-use(residential/commercial), diverse and denser packed areas as ideal community living. i wanna explore this idea more- what are the benefits of non-city living?? what about nature??? outside the scope if this city book, but can't help but reflect on (read: feel defensive about) my rural upbringing and how it doesn't fit into much of the conversation. I wanna read a book by an early colonist of my hometown c. 1890 (what were they thinking? how does it relate to urban issues?)

I liked in the end, after an overview of policy changes they think would help, how Moskowitz talked about being neighborly and trying to say hi to ppl in their apt building and help ppl carry things down the subway stairs - very relatable gentrifying experience, like I know I shouldn't live in this neighborhood but I am, so I'm going to try to be present and involved and not just wallow in shame but engage w community! It's not a fix but it's better than walking around with your head down.

Great read.

[Emily Deen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had a feeling this would be a difficult book to read as a white person who is about to move to Brooklyn and boy was I correct ! Basically 220 pages of challenging me to think about what my presence in a city like New York means for people who no longer live there and people who still live there and have for decades. There was a quote that said it’s hard not to feel guilty living in a place like Brooklyn- which is something I sensed before reading this but now have a much better understanding as to why. I love learning about cities and this was a really fascinating look into 4 cities I was pretty unfamiliar with before. He also talks about suburbanization a little bit which was interesting bc I finally felt like someone put into words why the suburbs are the worst lol. Overall this was hard to read and felt pretty doom and gloom-y but I’m glad I read it and it made me want to learn more about housing in America

[McKenzie Watson-Fore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated Moskowitz’s book, and I think it’s a significant contribution to mainstream books currently available on the topic of gentrification. How to Kill a City is probably the most direct, wide-reaching, and accessible work I’ve read on the topic. I intentionally read it immediately after Rothstein’s heavy academic tome, The Color of Law, not to compare but as a complementary piece.
Moskowitz’s book is heavily researched both in terms of supportive scholarship and life experience, ethnographic journalistic research. The book is undergirded by Moskowitz’s love for his shape-shifting hometown of NYC, personal story of familial displacement from rising rent prices and cultural shift, and the work of early urbanist Jane Jacobs.

The book was scattered throughout with personal touches, the occasional shadows caught in mirrors evincing Moskowitz’s presence and personhood. A gay white man, I was moderately impressed by the un-self-conscious way that Moskowitz referenced and relied on his own lived experience while also subtly (and other times, overtly) taking stock of his own privilege and the way his whiteness and middle-class socioeconomic standing framed his perspective.

Moskowitz is clearly an experienced journalist, citing statistics and quoting sources as ways to expand upon and ground the stories of interviewees he meets in his four profiled cities: San Francisco, New Orleans, Detroit, and New York. To some extent I was disappointed by specificity of his focus as restricted to these cities. I trust that Moskowitz chose these cities because they all have very particular legacies of housing, but as someone in a city rarely profiled except by those that live in it, I often wonder how much I can extrapolate the insights from other cities into mine. (Given that I live in Houston, the only major American city with no zoning—and Moskowitz makes clear that zoning is a major tool for the way cities control redevelopment—I can only extrapolate the stories of other cities so far.)

He’s looking at gentrification in our contemporary political moment, part of what makes the book so appealing to people who don’t have an extensive background in studying housing policy or the systemic frameworks that shaped the geographic of race and socioeconomics today. Allowing his interviewee’s insights or discoveries within his subject cities to prompt further background, Moskowitz skillfully uses his contemporary topics to open up explorations of the historical background, giving accurate and accessible synopses of housing policy such as the FHA and VA mortgage loans, redlining, and New Deal-era public housing.

I haven’t encountered many others who surpass Moskowitz in his thoughtful consideration of why the suburbs worked. This is an author who believes in the logic of cities, who sees diversity and weirdness as oft-unrecognized quality-of-life determinants. He says that the suburbs were a hard sell – who in their right mind would want to move out to the desolate nether-regions of a city’s edges, living in cookie-cutter homes without the benefit of Jane Jacob’s sidewalk life or urban color? – and he demonstrates how cities subsidized this process because it was profitable.

The conceptual framework of the book is to argue that cities have chosen to prioritize the creation of capital over the needs of human beings. I don’t hear this discussion very often outside of books, despite its seeming obviousness once you internalize the ramifications of such a shift. Essentially, Moskowitz is arguing for the same elevation of chrematistics (a financial, capitally-oriented system) over a true economy (Greek word oikonomia: a system concerned with the care and keeping of households and communities), which Wendell Berry talks about [mostly in his book What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth]. Moskowitz calls this neoliberalism.

Particularly with his exposition of the privatization of downtown and midtown Detroit, Moskowitz makes a convincing case that this capitalist orientation has been the downfall of cities as havens for the vulnerable and marginalized. Along the way, Moskowitz shares countless gems – names of other urban theorists, anecdotes about the history of urban planning, other books and concepts to check out – with his audience. The ‘locational see-saw’ was one phrase I found really intriguing; he also repeatedly refers to Sarah Schulman, author who coined the term ‘gentrification of the mind.’

How to Kill a City is a solid work of scholarship and public interest. In his final chapter, Moskowitz proposes a laundry list of strategies to half gentrification. Having spent the book demonstrating that gentrification is not about the individual, autonomous choices of hipsters and yuppies but about government policy and spending, his strategies are appropriately focused on policy and governmental spending: subsidies, tax cuts, rent protections.

Though hopeful in his anecdotes of community organizing and collective resistance, it’s a hard note for me as an individual reader to end on. I read this book while walking the streets of my neighborhood: where our neighborhood activist group struggles for internal cohesion and clarity, where each day as I walk to work I observe the progress of new construction on single family homes and goofy-looking townhouses.
In terms of education (which is power), Moskowitz’s might be the best primer that I’ve read on the subject, one that I would eagerly recommend to family and friends hoping to learn more in a balanced, researched, “objective” way [one criticism of the book is that sometimes Moskowitz employs so much done-with-gentrification sarcasm it’s hard to make out his actual point, but this is rare].

In terms of what to do with this knowledge after finishing it, the book can’t dictate that.

[Rxmee · Rating 5 out of 5]

yuh yuh yuh i HIGHLY recommend this book & grateful for a framework to better understand gentrification as systemic violence rooted in inequality & affected through intentional policy

in sum, moskowitz describes gentrification as reorientation of the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide services & housing for poor and middle class & toward spaces that generate revenue for the rich (and for funding the city through taxes). so much of what i previously read about gentrification is centered around the individual (the godforsaken hipster) who while is COMPLICIT in gentrification, is not the driving force. instead, long standing racist housing policies, sweeping cuts to federal funding of city budgets, and economic strategies adopted by city's to attract and keep capital are the real engine of gentrification.

the book is structured into four sections with case studies on new orleans, detroit, sf, and nyc and is interspersed with history / analysis and real stories of both displaced residents and real estate capital moguls. in that regard, if you liked "evicted" you'll probably like this too!

it's pretty easy to read, and the author (i don't think) is an academic, so there's probably more rigorous material on the subject, but i'm probably not going to read an urban policy textbook soon so !

[CKB]

Who knew, gentrification doesn’t just happen when cute cafes and hipsters with mustaches and raw demon jeans start moving into the neighbourhood? It’s often the systematic destruction of communities and culture and urban spaces and the quality of life for low to middle income families to maximise profit over anything else. It’s perverse and often racist and it doesn’t look like it will be stopping anytime soon.

[Mary Eschenbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 *

[Justice McCray · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent narrative that delves into how the US got into the housing crisis it’s in today. This is a tangible and digestible explanation of gentrification through the political, historical, and intentional events of four major cities. This book made me angry and broadened my understanding of the inequities in housing, but I think it’s also a necessary resource and guide to anyone that wants to combat the violence of gentrification. I highly recommend this one.

[Christopher Moltisanti's Windbreakers fan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It should be a required reading for everyone who is living in big cities, specially white affluent kids who often use the term as “gentrifier” to describe themselves, but completely unwilling to understand the process of gentrification itself. Many are ignorant about the history of the neighborhoods and the crippling effects their presence is having on poor people living in those neighborhoods for generations. Moskowitz points out the many factors of gentrification, such as the developer's greed and cities negligence of working class black and brown people, white kids getting bored in suburbs and start moving into the cities that are traditionally occupied by black and brown people due to segregation and white-flight after WWI. Moskowitz also uses personal stories of the victims to make their struggles more humanizing and ties the tragic effect of racism in housing, government agencies, and white people for decades made and making cities un-inhabitable for black and brown people.

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I think should be required for every reading for every American!!! I think people need to know more about gentrification and how it affect minoritized communities. This book breaks down what gentrification is and the author shared stories of those who were affected by gentrification