Peter Moskowitz

I read this book because the problem of gentrification continues to plague my hometown and my businesses.

- rising housing costs make it difficult for my employees to live near my stores
- market rate assessment makes property taxes on my businesses grow and grow
- political expediency shifts the burden of taxation on to small businesses trying to operate in the city core
- new developments bring higher quality of retail space to the neighbourhood, but this retail space is virtually out of the budget of new and undercapitalized merchants

To keep low income individuals and families in the city core the author recommends more of existing measures:

- more public subsidized housing
- continued rent controls
- raise taxes on the rich and the minimum wage for the poor; ie redistribute the wealth in society
- zoning in cities should reduce the incentives for developers to destroy old neighbourhoods

Yesterday my wife and I visited the decrepit Kensington Market and enjoyed tacos and quesadillas at a really low end food bar operated by new Canadians likely from Peru.

The food and the ambiance were great. We both felt grateful that we could still find a place like this in our city.

Only a few blocks away a neighbourhood landmark, the crappy Honest Eds store had been bulldozed and a 20-story luxury condominium took its place in the beautiful Annex district.

Arghhh!!

The sight of it made me want to puke and ban all Russian funny-money from my city.

I hope the development included some affordable housing.… (més)

I've always tended to think of "gentrification" as one of those trivial things that right-on people get unduly upset about — pavements thronged with oversized baby-buggies and dusty secondhand bookshops being crowded out by gleaming wine bars. But Moskowitz reminds us that, at least in US city centres, it's a lot more serious than that. Where local authorities have little power to regulate housing and rent controls don't exist or are easy to circumvent, gentrification quite simply means poor (i.e. mostly non-white) people being priced out of the housing market and — in a bizarre reversal of the "white flight" of the mid-20th century — being forced to move out to suburban areas where there are few jobs and no public services to support them.

The political culture in the US means that public authorities are judged primarily by their ability to keep taxes low, so the "successful" mayors are those who get into bed with property developers and replace their housing projects with up-market condos, hotels and conference centres (preferably including monorails or vintage trolleys). If poor people leave the city as a result, who cares? Once they are gone, they don't appear in the statistics any more, and we can save on schools, buses and health care. Moskowitz quotes New Orleans as the most glaring example of this: after hurricane Catrina, thousands of the former (Black) residents who had been displaced from their homes never returned to the city, and no-one made any serious attempt to find out where they had gone and whether they had found anywhere to live and work.

Moskowitz probably isn't the most neutral observer of this kind of process, but he makes a convincing and scary case that something very nasty is going on just out of most of our sight. Even when local people have the skills and experience to resist it, there isn't much hope of stopping it long term, until Americans start running their cities the way Europeans do. Which is unlikely, given the way European cities are going these days. We're more likely to find European mayors talking longingly about the good example of San Francisco...… (més)

A very timely and interesting expose of gentrification and how it affects four major cities in the US (New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York City). I believe that the author does a good job of explaining many of the reasons for which gentrification is occurring; he does not lay the blame solely at the feet of city governments who give handouts to wealthy developers, he does not blame millennials (who are apparently ruining cities, too, among all of the other things they are ruining) for moving to the city in droves (who can blame them? I grew up in a small town and wanted nothing more than to escape to a city one day). I was additionally glad that he kept his New York City ego in check and did not act as if "his city" is the center of the known universe. Definitely an important read at this moment in history.… (més)