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

by P.E. Moskowitz

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.