Review: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz

I attended a trade show in New Orleans or Baton Rouge a year or two after Katrina. There's plenty of down time at trade shows when I would exchange small talk with the people manning neighboring booths. One person shocked me by telling me that the flooding had the silver lining of cleaning out the city. I didn't understand at the time that what he meant was that it would facilitate capitalists' exploitation of the space previously occupied by displaced black residents of the city, whom he and policy makers at all levels viewed as expendable at best and liabilities at worst.

Peter Moskowitz's book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood wants people to understand the following:

• Gentrification isn't an inevitable or natural process. Students of capitalism have long ago noted why, if unchecked, it would occur, but human societies don't have to choose to follow capital's dictates.
• In the United States, racist policies have ensured that the negative impacts of housing crises fall on black and brown people.
• Policy makers at the federal, state and municipal levels have adopted gentrification & suburbanization as vehicles for economic growth and have subsidized these processes.

Peter Moskowitz guides the reader through processes of gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York. In each of these cities, he shows how humans decided that the increase in exchange value for those with money would be worth the decrease in use value for the people who would either be forcibly displaced by law (eminent domain & "broken windows" policing) or natural (read "unnatural") disaster or deteriorating living conditions due to elimination of public services or who "voluntarily" left (like the Palestinians!) because they could no longer afford to pay rent.

Meet your neighbors. Join a tenant union. Disrupt zoning meetings. Support public services. Above all, know that it doesn't have to be this way.

Check out the book from your local library.