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

by P.E. Moskowitz

The effect of decades of segregation is that black Americans are poorer and less likely to achieve success than whites. In Stuck in Place, a study of the apartheid-like conditions of black America, New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey found that over the last half century there has been virtually no improvement in the income of African Americans. While white children today who come from middle-class families can expect to earn on average $74,000, $20,000 more than their parents, black children can expect to earn $45,000 a year—not only significantly less than white kids, but $9,000 less than the average earned by black people in the middle class a generation ago. Half of middle-income black kids fall down the economic ladder compared with the previous generation, while only 14 percent of white kids do. Sharkey argues that there’s only one possible