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

by P.E. Moskowitz

“I do agree that a broken public system does not help challenged neighborhoods, and that needs to be fixed,” Mosey told me. “It’s not right. And it shouldn’t be like that. But that’s not my fault. I’m doing my job. I’m paid to do my job, and my organization does it, and we do it well.” Hardly anyone is saying there’s anything wrong with new restaurants and new stores, new buildings and better security. Most Detroit residents I interviewed were not begrudging toward the newly arrived white hipsters from the suburbs and the coasts. After all, those who came had reasonable reasons: cheap housing, the ability to start a new business, new jobs. And most native and longtime Detroiters have complex and conflicted views about downtown’s redevelopment—some even praise Gilbert for stepping in and investing in the core of the city when no one else would. It’s not the investments and new people themselves that are necessarily harmful; it’s the attention, in press and money, that’s paid to those investments and people. While Dan Gilbert is lavished with praise by the city government and newspapers, and while he and others receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives, a new rail line, and bike lanes, the rest of Detroit has learned to live without streetlights and regular trash collection, without a consistent or helpful police presence, with hundreds of thousands of foreclosures on bad mortgages (some made by Gilbert’s Quicken Loans), with the persistent t...