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

by P.E. Moskowitz

$20 minimum wage would go a lot further in making people secure in their housing than building a couple of thousand units of affordable housing. Regulating or nationalizing some banks so that they cannot practice discriminatory lending would do more to combat gentrification than stopping any single development in a city.

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.