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

by P.E. Moskowitz

But at the end of the day, that’s what gentrification is: a void in a neighborhood, in a city, in a culture.

Gentrification is not about individual acts; it’s about systemic violence based on decades of racist housing policy in the United States that has denied people of color, especially Black people, access to the same kinds of housing, and therefore the same levels of wealth, as white Americans.

Gentrification is also the inevitable result of a political system focused more on the creation and expansion of business opportunity than on the well-being of its citizens (what I refer to as neoliberalism).

Gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital (both in terms of city budget and in terms of real estate

profits) above the needs of people.

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.

Cities do not gentrify unless the process is profitable for real estate developers.