While describing the gentrification of four cities (New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York), Moskowitz shifts the focus from the gentrifiers to the displaced communities, from hipsters and bike shops to diverse working class residents and declining public services. Gentrification always comes at the expense of existing communities, even when gentrifiers move it to largely abandoned areas such as downtown Detroit.
Moskowitz makes a convincing case that gentrification is an inevitable consequence of neoliberal governance and rising property values, and that the process has accelerated since the 1980s as city governments have had to depend increasingly on maximizing land values (and property tax revenue) due to a severe decline in federal and state support. The gentrification of cities is the latest incarnation of the same process that lead to the development of post-war suburbs.
The author writes with a tone of righteous anger, which is justified even though I would prefer a more measured assessment of the systemic issues. I wish he had more to offer in the way of solutions; after spending a couple of hundred pages convincing me that it's an inevitable consequence of our current methods of governing, he has just four pages of traditional liberal policy suggestions. Throughout the book, as Moskowitz laments the deleterious impact of investment in troubled areas, I kept wondering about alternatives: How do we revitalize poor communities without triggering gentrification?
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