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

by P.E. Moskowitz

History, very recent history, shows us that mounting frustration, coupled with an unwillingness by political representatives to do anything about it, leads to powerful social movements.

The answer for how to fight this phenomenon is as simple as it is daunting: we need to fight it like we fight everything else—inequality, racism, sexism. A $20 minimum wage would go a lot further in making people secure in their housing than building a couple of thousand units of affordable housing. Regulating or nationalizing some banks so that they cannot practice discriminatory lending would do more to combat gentrification than stopping any single development in a city. It’s not that local housing activism doesn’t matter, because it does. But it needs to be part of these much broader movements against racism, against police brutality, against capitalism.

It became clear that for most poor New Yorkers, gentrification wasn’t about some ethereal change in neighborhood character. It was about mass evictions, about violence, about the decimation of decades-old cultures. But the reporting I’d seen on gentrification focused on the new things happening in these neighborhoods—the high-end pizza joints and coffee shops, the hipsters, the fashion trends. In some ways that made sense: it’s hard to report on a void, on something that’s now missing. It’s much easier to report on the new than on the displaced. But at the end of the day, that’s what gentrification is: a void in a neighborhood, in a city, in a culture. In that way, gentrification is a trauma, one caused by the influx of massive amounts of capital into a city and the consequent destruction following in its wake.

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 cannot happen without this deeply rooted inequality; if we were all equal, there could be no gentrifier and no gentrified, no perpetrator or victim.

With little federal funding for housing, transportation, or anything else, American cities are now forced to rely completely on their tax base to pay for basic services, and the richer a city’s tax base, the easier those services are to fund.

Gentrification is the most transformative urban phenomenon of the last half century, yet we talk about it nearly always on the level of minutiae.

The hipster narrative about gentrification isn’t necessarily inaccurate—young people are indeed moving to cities and opening craft breweries and wearing tight clothing—but it is misleading in its myopia. Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people’s individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes.

in every gentrifying city there are always events, usually hidden from public view, that precede these street-level changes. The policies that cause cities to gentrify are crafted in the offices of real estate moguls and in the halls of city government. The coffee shop is the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve chosen to write about the four cities in this book—New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York—because each provides an important counterpoint to the media’s narrative of gentrification as the product of cultural and consumer choice. In all four, specific policies were put in place that allowed the cities to become more favorable to the accumulation of capital and less favorable to the poor. New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York gentrified not because of the wishes of a million gentrifiers but because of the wishes of just a few hundred public intellectuals, politicians, planners, and heads of corporations. By identifying these players, their policies, and their effects, I hope to make clear that gentrification is not inevitable, that it is perhaps even stoppable, or at the very least manageable.

I’ve heard the words colonization, occupation, and genocide used to describe what happened here after Katrina. That might seem dramatic to outsiders, but what else can you call a set of policies that in their effect, and oftentimes seemingly in their intent, kicked out a small city’s worth of black people? What can you call a set of policies that encourages the white and moneyed to come in their place?

To many of the black people here who have stuck it out, who have been left with little since Katrina, who feel like the city did nothing to help them back or actively dissuaded them from coming home, those words—colonization, occupation, genocide—do not feel sensational. They feel like what happened.

Gentrification is a purposeful act, not just a trend, and so it needs a definition that recognizes the actors and actions behind it. 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. This 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 (the early twentieth-century economist who believed that a robust government was necessary to ameliorate the inherent instability and inequalities of capitalism) into a neoliberal, corporate-friendly oligarchy concerned only with increasing the share of wealth owned by the upper class.

In every gentrifying city—that is, in every city where there is a combination of new coffee shops and condos, hipsters, and families struggling to hang on—you can usually trace the start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community. Usually those policies come in the form of the deregulation and privatization of urban services: transportation, education, and especially housing. By the time the hipsters arrive, the political and economic forces that paved the way for them have been at work for years.

The word gentrification was coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside. “One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.”

Today, many development deals are initiated by foreign investors, and many neighborhoods are affordable only to the global elite. Buildings spring up that are meant less to house people and more to house the wealth of millionaires and billionaires. In a stretch of Midtown Manhattan, which has recently become filled with sky-high multimillion-dollar condo buildings, a New York Times investigation found that 50 percent of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year. In other words, the fifth and last phase of gentrification is when neighborhoods aren’t just more friendly to capital than to people but cease being places to live a normal life, with work and home and school and community spaces, and become luxury commodities.

at the end of the day gentrification isn’t about culture, it’s about money. Gentrifiers may be seeking art, emancipation from suburban norms, and a sense of discovery, but the entire process would grind to a halt if it weren’t profitable. Developers don’t build condos to lose money or support the arts. They don’t pressure cities to rezone entire neighborhoods because they believe in inner-city liberation.

For the past half century, as the federal government has repeatedly slashed funds for everything from public housing to neighborhood development, anti-poverty programs to public transit, cities have been left to fend for themselves. And that’s pushed many into “entrepreneurial” and neoliberal forms of government—encouraging the growth of businesses and industries that in turn encourage the attraction of high-income and upper-middle-income families into cities. Through their taxes, those families help pay for the basic necessities of cities that used to be funded by the federal government.

Federal spending on cities has been declining for decades, but it was President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 with a mandate to slash budgets, who really sealed the fate of many urban centers. Reagan cut all nonmilitary spending by the US government by 9.7 percent in his first term, and in his second term cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by an astonishing 40 percent, hobbling cities’ abilities to pay for public housing. The Department of Transportation also had its funding cut by about 10.5 percent during Reagan’s first term and 7.5 percent in his second.

In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead.

what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements. Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement.

in 2007, with its first white majority in more than two decades, the City Council finally voted to knock down the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard), that means 12,381 people, 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two decades, most right after Katrina.

As Jane Jacobs wrote, “We must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not failure.”

Detroit is 83 percent black, but the new Detroit—the one that gets all the attention and press—is overwhelmingly white. Research by Wayne State University grad student Alex B. Hill found that 69.2 percent of the grantees of nonprofits, fellows at various nonprofits committed to revitalization, and those chosen to take part in tech and business incubators were white.

Anti-gentrification activists are quick to point out that more and better transit options aren’t in and of themselves bad for a city sorely lacking them. Transportation advocates have for years been trying to get Detroit to take public transit seriously. But when you consider that Detroit is 142 square miles—bigger than Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan combined—and that all its new transit is located within the 7.2 square miles that make up the city’s gentrifying core, the question must be asked: who exactly is this transportation for?

In the parlance of new Detroit, Zak Pashak isn’t just creating expensive bikes, he’s making sure people here are being lifted up by the rising tide of bicycle manufacturing. Phil Cooley isn’t just a profiteer, he’s participating in the burgeoning democracy of Detroit. Dan Gilbert’s favorite business phrase—“Do well by doing good”—seems to be the official slogan of the new Detroit, embraced by hundreds of young white entrepreneurs who believe they’re not only making money but helping rescue an entire city.

Detroit has been in need of revitalization for decades. Its population has been shrinking since the 1950s. Black people in the city have been working that entire time to try to keep Detroit from falling apart. Why, some have asked, is it that the country seems to pay attention only when the white people show up?

“Everybody’s black,” one activist remarked to me as she helped foreclosure victims find their way around the building. “Who is the criminal mastermind who put this together? This doesn’t just happen. Something at this scale doesn’t just happen.”

gentrification could not happen without something to gentrify. Truly equitable geographies would be largely un-gentrifiable ones. So first, geographies have to be made unequal.

The United States has a long history of dispossessing the poor of adequate housing through explicitly racist planning and housing policy. If gentrification requires cheap real estate, 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.

Neighborhood improvement associations, now considered benign bodies concerned with the beautification of neighborhoods, were most often established in Detroit and elsewhere to help keep black people out of rich white areas. Detroit real estate agents helped segregate the city too. As in other places, they followed the code of ethics specified by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and until 1950 that code stated that realtors should “never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any industry whose presence will be clearly detrimental to real estate values.”

The FHA manual was perhaps the single most detrimental document in the history of urbanism in the United States. With a few lines of anti-density, racist planning policy, the federal government essentially forced the creation of the suburbs and the near-complete disinvestment of the inner city.

It would be easy to dismiss the guidelines as clumsy or a product of less enlightened times, but the FHA knew exactly what consequences its practices would have. In a 1939 memo about Washington, DC, FHA officials admitted the guidelines would end up concentrating poor African Americans in city centers and moving richer whites out to the suburbs: “The ‘filtering up’ process [white people moving to the suburbs], and the tendency of Negroes to congregate in the District, taken together, logically point to a situation where eventually the District will be populated by Negroes and the surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia by white families.”

If black Americans had been able to achieve the same kind of success through housing that whites had, gentrification would not be such a race-based phenomenon. Instead, the intentional destruction of black urban life has become the canvas on which gentrifiers now paint. Over and over again, media organizations, hipsters, and artists refer to Detroit as a “blank slate.” That ignores not only the 700,000 other people who still live there but also the historical reality that the “blank slate” was created through decades of brutal racism. The fact that gentrifiers are often taking advantage of the cheap rent caused by racially restrictive housing policy also complicates the narrative gentrifiers and the mainstream media like to perpetuate about being saviors to decimated urban areas.

Gentrification is often presented as a sort of corrective to the suburbs: instead of white flight and unsustainable cookie-cutter planning, we get dense, urban, and diverse cityscapes. But gentrification is simply a new form of the same process that created the suburbs; it’s the same age-old, racist process of subsidizing and privileging the lives and preferred locales of the wealthy and white over those of poor people of color. The seesaw has just tipped in the other direction. Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over, or that cities are becoming more diverse. All it means is that our geography of inequality is being redrawn. Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation. The borders around the ghettos have simply been rebuilt.

Joe and Jimmie had observed that the newcomers tended to see the city as a series of commodity choices (tacos? beer? ramen? a condo in the Mission?) and saw none of the gritty weirdness underneath their noses. But you could tell, neighborhood by neighborhood, that they were taking over, now ubiquitous enough to become the norm, compared to which everything else becomes a deviation.

For an outsider, it’s hard to get what’s at stake in a place like San Francisco. As a gay guy from New York, I can look at the gay bars in the Castro, an area of the city historically home to a large gay population, and think, “This is an okay gayborhood.” But if you’ve lived here for thirty years, your first thought might be, “This used to be a hotbed of political radicalism, and now it’s gay Disney World.” If you’re me, you might walk through the Mission, eat some tacos, and think it’s a cute neighborhood. You might not know that right above the taco shop is an apartment building where families are paying $1,000 a month for a room that’s ten feet by ten feet. You might not know that activist artist collectives such as Las Mujeres Muralistas painted vibrant portraits of working-class struggles and working-class beauty in the 1970s and that many of those artists have now left.

What happens to a city when artists, teachers, lawyers, and anyone else making less than $100,000 cannot afford to live in it?

A proposed 1.5 percent tax on tech companies that would have raised millions for affordable housing was killed even before it made it out of the Board of Supervisors’ finance committee. San Francisco has decided not to bite the hand that feeds it, even if that hand is also signing its eviction papers.

This mentality is what New York–based writer and activist Sarah Schulman has called “the gentrification of the mind.” As our cities’ landscapes have changed, we have too, increasingly viewing ourselves not as community members with a responsibility to each other but as purchasers of things and experiences.

gentrification today goes beyond an accounting trick. It’s become a theory of governance that places the needs of capital over people. One could argue that a poor city such as Detroit might need gentrification to fill its budget gaps. But what about San Francisco? The city doesn’t need to keep attracting rich people; it was not in economic crisis before the tech wave crashed on its shores. The city’s budget was already relatively balanced before the tech boom. Yet city administrators keep zoning for more condos and more high-rise office buildings and handing out tax breaks to companies; its mayor keeps courting the big tech players at conferences and in corporate boardrooms as if San Francisco were desperate for their money, even though the city is expected, at least by one estimate, to have a $10 billion budget surplus by 2017. This is the city as growth machine.

In Urban Fortunes, their foundational work on the economies of cities, urban theorists John Logan and Harvey Molotch argue that the people running American cities no longer care about affordability, a city’s ability to educate children, or the happiness and health of its residents; rather, they are only interested the amount of money a city is able to generate.

Gentrification may be a new expression of this conflict between land value and the needs of the poor, but it’s a problem as old as capitalism itself. Friedrich Engels essentially predicted gentrification in 1872: The expansion of the big modern cities gives the land in certain sections of them, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often enormously increasing value; the buildings erected in these areas depress this value, instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with centrally located workers’ houses, whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses, and public buildings are erected.… The result is that the workers are forced out of the center of the towns towards the outskirts.

Rather than the effect of individual or institutional actions, gentrification is a logical consequence of a system in which real estate is viewed as an unrestrained commodity. In cities that function as growth machines, where economic growth is prized above all else, the needs of the poor and middle class are eclipsed by the desire to inflate the value of land.

Late nineteenth-century theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg hypothesized that under capitalist economies, cities would inevitably be used as ways to absorb capital—that in systems in which there is surplus money floating around (i.e., a society with rich people), cities become a mechanism, like luxury goods, to open the pockets of the rich. Luxemburg saw grand architecture, monuments, parks, and beautiful streetscapes as ways to attract the rich and beef up a city’s tax base.

What would happen if gentrifiers saw themselves not as consumers but as active members in a community, or as actors in a larger system, able to fight against what enables their presence to be a harmful one?

In nearly every other industrialized nation besides the United States, there is near-consensus that purely private land markets will not meet the needs of the poor, and so measures have been taken to ensure that at least some land remains off the market or subject to regulations that make it affordable. In Hong Kong, for example, which has economics that mirror those of other global cities such as San Francisco and New York, 60 percent of all new construction has been set aside for low-income people. In Sweden, local governments have much greater control over land use decisions. In Stockholm, virtually every piece of undeveloped land is owned by the municipal government. In Berlin, which is gentrifying relatively rapidly for a European city, legislators recently approved a law capping new tenants’ rent at a maximum of 10 percent above the area’s average rent, so landlords cannot inflate rent as soon as an apartment becomes vacant, and have little incentive to evict long-term tenants. Though the governments of Sweden, Hong Kong, and Germany are by no means anticapitalist, they have accepted a truth that few in the United States are willing to grapple with: unregulated capitalism cannot provide a complete solution to the housing question.

Anabelle Bolaños said she used to welcome every tree planting in the Mission, greet every street beautification project as a chance to make her neighborhood nicer. The Mission could use more trees, she used to think. “I used to be hella friendly,” she said. “Then I started to feel like I was taking the smallpox blankets.”

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. The suburbs are also a good reminder that housing, planning, and economic policy in the United States is deliberate, and that its main purpose is to produce money, not adequately house people.

Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over. They will still exist. But because they are no longer as profitable as cities or as desirable for the wealthiest Americans, who now populate cities, suburbs have become the leftover spaces in which we house the poor and the middle class. The suburbs are being reused, reconfigured, and repopulated. They are becoming poorer, and that has wide-ranging implications for policy and the lives of lower-income people.

The suburbs were not built for poor people. Really, they were not built for anyone. They were built to reinvigorate capital. But they were especially not built for poor people, for people who rely on community, nonprofit service providers, and public transportation. They were built for a life of secluded individuality.