How to Kill a City Quotes

“Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“How do you solve a problem as old as the United States? Gentrification may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but as geographer Neil Smith notes, it's really just the continuation of the 'locational seesaw' - capital moves to one place seeking high profits, then, when that place becomes less profitable, it moves to another place. The real estate industry is always looking for new markets in which it can revitalize its profit rate. Fifty years ago that place was suburbs. Today it's cities. But that's only half the explanation for gentrification. In order to understand why cities are so attractive to invest in, it's important to understand what made them bargains for real estate speculators in the first place. It may sound obvious, but gentrification could not happen without something to gentrify. Truly equitable geographies would be largely un-gentrifiable ones. So first, geographies have to be made unequal.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“The hipster narrative about gentrification isn’t necessarily inaccurate—young people are indeed moving to cities and opening craft breweries and wearing tight clothing—but it is misleading in its myopia. Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people’s individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes. As”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Gentrification is often presented as a sort of corrective to the suburbs: instead of white flight and unsustainable cookie-cutter planning, we get dense, urban, and diverse cityscapes. But gentrification is simply a new form of the same process that created the suburbs; it's the same age-old, racist process of subsidizing and privileging the lives and preferred locales of the wealthy and white over those of poor people of color. The seesaw has just tipped in the other direction. Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over, or that cities are becoming more diverse. All it means is that our geography of inequality is being redrawn. Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation. The borders around the ghettos have simply been rebuilt.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“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.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“If we are serious about moving toward a saner housing future, the options in terms of federal policy are relatively clear: we can prevent land from being subject to market forces, either through government ownership of land (housing projects) or through heavy regulation (rent or land-price control), or we can prevent the ever-increasing value of land from displacing people (programs such as Section 8 vouchers would fall in this category of solution). Instead, we do almost nothing and hope the market works it out. Without major new regulations, we can expect what's happening in San Francisco to continue in virtually all major US cities. In the same way that the suburbs were once inaccessible to the poor, in the near future American cities will become gilded jewel boxes, and the exodus of the poor to the suburbs will continue unchecked - that is, until the rent gaps in cities become too small to make gentrification profitable, and a new form of spatial filtering begins.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“This is capitalism's constant urban conundrum: what makes cities profitable is inherently at odds with the needs of the poor and middle classes (who are needed for a city to function), and centrally located land has inherent value if it can be made amenable to the rich. Gentrification may be a new expression of this conflict between land value and the needs of the poor, but it's a problem as old as capitalism itself.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“When we think of gentrification as some mysterious process, we accept its consequences: the displacement of countless thousands of families, the destruction of cultures, the decreased affordability of life for everyone. I hope this book is a counterweight to hopelessness abut the future of urban America that enables readers to see cities are shaped by powerful interests, and that if we identify those interests, we can begin to reshape cities in our own design.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Though the governments of Sweden, Hong Kong, and Germany are by no means anticapitalist, they have accepted a truth that few in the United States are willing to grapple with: unregulated capitalism cannot provide a complete solution to the housing question.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“The central cause [of gentrification] is that we’ve turned cities into capital-producing machines, and city governments have become addicted to this capital to function.”
― P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“People are just tired. They’ve fought, and they’ve sometimes won, but they’re tired, she said. Developers don’t get tired. Money doesn’t get tired.”
― P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“The FHA manual was perhaps the single most detrimental document in the history of urbanism in the United States. With a few lines of anti-density, racist planning policy, the federal government essentially forced the creation of the suburbs and the near-complete disinvestment of the inner city.”
― P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as “People are starting to move to that neighborhood,” or “No one used to go there, but that’s changing.” The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance.”
― P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Katrina opened a window that allowed us to peer into the real America, but as soon as the disruptive event was over, that window closed, and the country’s consciousness went back to its usual state of ignoring the fact that black people, especially low-income black people, are daily denied democracy and equality in this country.”
― P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“The one silver lining of our sad political reality in 2018 is that we’re learning to rely less on the powers that be and more on ourselves to make change.”
― P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“After years of living in New York and feeling depressed about its state, I finally decided to stop feeling sorry and start feeling activated. Recently I made a concerted effort to get to know my neighbors. I made sure to say hi in the halls. I emailed them when I had a question. I started offering people in the subway help with their heavy items. I filed a petition with the city to determine if the building I live in is meant to be rent-stabilized. It's unclear what the result of that will be, but it made me feel more connected to the place where I live. I began attending meetings about gentrification. These weren't just things I thought of as good deeds, but a way to help reorient myself in the city. Separately they felt insignificant, but together they helped me see myself, and my city, as connected entities that are capable of changing each other. I've begun to appreciate New York more now, and so I am more willing to fight for it. The question I still have is whether it will ever be enough. Or will the city keep changing so fast that it will not matter how many individuals attempt to put the brakes on that change or dictate how and why change happens?”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“If we all conceptualize the reality and possibility of the city uniquely, how can we be on the same page when it comes to building an equitable future? To the person just moving to New Orleans, all the white hipsters biking around the Bywater is not the sign of the displacement of 100,000 black people; to someone moving to Williamsburg now, the glass condos are as much a natural part of the cityscape as anything else. In this way, gentrification suppresses and displaces memory, and makes it harder to build lasting justice. This ignorance benefits the powerful - a new resident who has no memory of the old Mission District in San Francisco is much less likely to protest what others may see as its destruction when a condo comes along. So if we are committed to fighting for an ungentrified future, the first step is to build consensus about what a city should be.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“In the United States, housing is not considered a human right, and the ability of people to live in a given place is subject to the whims of the market. Challenging this may sound like a radical proposition, but it is radical only in the United States, in the same way universal health care is a controversial concept only here. Most other industrialized countries have realized the market will not provide for low- and middle-income people, and so their systems have made adjustments, The United States lags behind.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Brooklyn, like the West Village, again makes me think of gentrification's ability to erase collective memory. I cannot imagine what people who aren't from New York think when they move to Brooklyn. Do they know they're moving into neighborhoods where just ten years ago you wouldn't have seen a white person at any time of day? Do they know that every apartment listed on Craigslist as 'newly renovated' was once inhabited by someone else who likely made a life there before the ground under their feet became too valuable? It's hard not to feel guilt living here, and I wonder if other gentrifiers feel the same way. I represent the domino effect. I was priced out of Manhattan, but I know my existence in this borough comes at the cost of the erasure of others' cultures and senses of home. I know the woman with the Gucci bag in the West Village elicits the same kind of angst within me as my presence does for a native Brooklynite. I try to stay away from the hippest joints and I try to support long-established businesses, but I often fail at doing these things, and I know that even when I'm successful at trekking this increasingly narrow path, I've only done so much. Brooklyn, like the West Village, is irrevocably changed, and I know I'm part of that.

The question is, how do I stop it when the process is so much larger than me and has already progressed so far? Mass displacement means that there are fewer and fewer people coming to Brooklyn now know only that it's hip and expensive and has good brunch. As Sarah Schulman writes, gentrifiers 'look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world.' It's a circular logic that dictates Brooklyn is Brooklyn because it's Brooklyn - the brand mimicked by hipsters all over the world and mocked in hundreds of tired late-night parodies. What gentrifier sees Brooklyn not as it is but as the consequence of a powerful and violent system?”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Given the extreme illogicalness of the suburbs - the fact that only with hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives did it make sense for so many Americans to move out of cities and to the suburbs - it seems predictable that their drawbacks would manifest relatively quickly, and that those who could afford it would eventually find other ways of living. That's exactly what's happening: children raised in the suburbs have decided their lives would be better elsewhere, and if they have enough privilege, they have mostly decided to settle in city centers instead.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“What happens to a city when artists, teachers, lawyers, and anyone else making less than $100,000 cannot afford to live in it? Where will the people making coffee for the tech workers in the Mission live if only 4 percent of one-bedrooms in the neighborhood cost below $2,500 a month, making the area essentially off-limits to working-class people? Rebecca Solnit calculated that back in the 1950s and 1960s artists had to work about sixty-five hours a month at minimum wage to afford an apartment. San Francisco's minimum wage today is high for the United States, at $12.25, but a $2,500 apartment (which is on the very cheap end these days), would account for about 200 hours of minimum-wage work. That's more than a full-time job, just to pay the rent.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Outlandish subsidies for multimillionaires isn't a phenomenon seen only in Detroit. Michigan gives away 30 cents of every government dollars to private companies. And in other cities, stadiums and ballparks are routinely paid for by governments, all with the hope that they'll help stimulate revitalization, even though economists nearly unanimously agree that spending public funds on private stadiums is one of the least efficient ways for governments to spend money. But the strategy is perhaps particularly troubling in a city where garbage collection, street repair, and streetlights are considered privileges.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“This is what gentrifiers and gentrification boosters often fail to grasp about gentrification: it's not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else's loss. Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival. Gentrifiers might even have noble intent - to become a part of a community, to help better a community, to fight for political change. Or they might just be there fore the cheaper rent. Either way, it is rare to see gentrifiers take a full reckoning of history and recognize that their presence is often predicated upon the lessened quality of life of someone else, the displacement of someone else, or, in the case of New Orleans, the death of someone else.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“To fight gentrification is to fight American thinking.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“But the city began spending on different things, turning away from social programs that help the poor and toward ones that help the rich—namely, subsidizing redevelopment. The near-bankruptcy made New York the first US city to employ gentrification as governance.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Hipsters are fine with coffee but eye boutiques and banks with suspicion, yuppies are fine with the boutiques and banks but see landscapes radically altered by development as cultural losses, and developers such as Pres Kabacoff are fine with those landscapes as long as they don’t inspire protest.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood