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

by P.E. Moskowitz

Poverty is still by and large considered an urban issue, and so the poor live relatively under the radar in their new geographies, disconnected not only from meaningful community but also from many of the services they relied on in the city. We do not know how this affects people—how the suburbs add to stress, how they change the ability of people to organize social and political movements. Suburban geography is not built for protest; it is not built for collective action.

For the first time in US history, the majority of poor people in metropolitan regions live in the suburbs.

Joseph McCarthy, the senator who became famous by going after Hollywood liberals he suspected were communists, actually first made a name for himself by linking multifamily housing in general and public housing in particular with communism. When the federal government funded a housing project for veterans in 1948, he said they’d just paid for “a breeding ground for communists.”

The suburbanization of the United States pushed whites into a privatized, anti-communal form of living, encouraged more traditional gender roles (women as housewives, men as breadwinners), and reified racial boundaries—keeping white people separate from black people, Latinos, and other ethnic groups. In place of collectivism or urbanism, the suburbs offered consumerism—a life in which meaning is built through buying things.

Even today, the suburbs remain such an illogical system of living that they require immense subsidy in order to function (and they still function poorly). For the privilege of enduring traffic, air pollution, isolation, and monotony, Americans subsidize the suburbs to the tune of $100 billion a year. Without massive highway funding as well as fuel and mortgage subsidies, the suburbs could not exist. These subsidies to the suburbs have given us the twin illusions that the American city was in some sort of natural tailspin for decades and that the suburbs are inherently more desirable, when in reality the suburbs are just better funded.

Gentrification has a way of creeping up on you. The white, hippieish middle class doesn’t notice when the black queer kids go missing; the professionals don’t notice (or don’t care) when the hippies leave; the rich don’t notice when the young professionals leave. And then you’re left with the Village today: an upscale mall for international oligarchs.