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

by P.E. Moskowitz

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.