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

by P.E. Moskowitz

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.