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

by P.E. Moskowitz

Max Gordon, sleekly dressed in a green polo, tight jeans, and a watch made in Detroit by Shinola (another new high-end manufacturer in town; their bikes start at $1,000, their watches at $500), is one of new Detroit’s and Gilbert’s true believers. He told me that the thousands of young people moving to Detroit’s downtown were not simply a trend but a movement.

When asked about gentrification, Max dismissed the word as divisive.

Of course he did

Zak Pashak, while a little more toned down in his rhetoric, nonetheless agreed that Gilbert’s critics, and critics of Detroit’s redevelopment in general, ought to ease up. After all, development, even if it comes with “suspend[ed] democracy,” as Dan Gilbert once put it, is better than no development. “I think Gilbert is fantastic,” Pashak said. “You couldn’t ask for a more benevolent billionaire. But a lot of the people are just against change. That’s why I don’t like the word gentrification. Detroit needed change.”

Said by a man who wasn’t forced to relocate in his senior years to places that are inconvenient and further away from essentials

asked if he ever felt as if two Detroits might be emerging—the new Detroit, in which people can afford $1,200-a-month studio apartments and $700 bicycles, and the other Detroit, where the per capita income is about $15,000 a year. “We’ve got to make sure the people here are being lifted up from the rising tide,” Pashak said in response. The reality, though, is that the rest of Detroit is still struggling economically. And for those who lived around Capitol Park before this latest wave of redevelopment, the new Detroit has been anything but a boon.

How can you write this and then call ppl like Pashak pawns??????!

Across the park sits another luxury rental building. That one, owned by Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock, once housed artists. They too were evicted a few years ago. Both evictions caused protest in Detroit. But the evictions, according to Pashak and Gordon, are the price of progress.

“Everyone here had the best of intentions.”

Detroit did not gentrify because of the whims of people like Pashak. Pashak and his friends are the pawns of a much larger strategy of redevelopment.

This is bullshit! They chose to play the game, they aren’t pawns. They are reaping LARGE financial benefits of the system and this line right here is trying to make them look blameless when they in fat are not