CityReads│How to Kill Jane Jacobs's City?

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How to Kill Jane Jacobs's City?

Gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital above the needs of people.

Peter Moskowitz. 2017. How to Kill a City：Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, New York: Nation Books.

Sources:https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/gentrification-moskowitz/519057/

https://juablog.com/2017/12/13/book-review-preview-how-to-kill-a-city/

Gentrification is the most transformative urban phenomenon of the last half century in America. The term gentrification means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance.

West Village in New York, once portraited as exemplary urban community of diversity and equality by Jane Jacob in her pro-urban treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, has undergone gentrification since the 1980s. The Village Jacobs wrote about is all but gone. If the neighborhood once heralded as the best example of a place that fosters diversity and equality could become one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States and one of the least diverse in New York, what does that say about the future of American cities? And what happened to the people who were left out of the new and rarefied West Village?

In his book, How to Kill a City：Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood,  journalist Peter Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing. How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back

Moskowitz’s parents moved to New York in the 1980s and he grew up in West Village, just a few blocks from where Jane Jacobs wrote her book. When Moskowitz returned to New York after college, he could neither recognize the neighborhood nor afford the rent. So he had to look in the outer boroughs. For a year he lived with his boyfriend in Astoria, Queens, then in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, then at the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick.

However, in each place he could tell something similar was going on. Ironically, he was in some ways a victim of the process, priced out of the neighborhood he grew up in, but I was also relatively privileged in his new neighborhood. He is both the gentrified and the gentrifier.

Moskowitz pens a provocative book arguing that gentrification — in virtually all of its dimensions — destroys communities. The forces of gentrification are destroying the social diversity of neighborhood life.

“Gentrification is not a fluke or an accident. Gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital (both in terms of city budget and in terms of real estate profits) above the needs of people.

…that’s what gentrification is: a void in a neighborhood, in a city, in a culture. In that way, gentrification is a trauma, one caused by the influx of massive amounts of capital into a city and the consequent destruction following in its wake.

There’s a losing side and a winning side in gentrification, but both sides are playing the same game, though they are not its designers.

Gentrification is not about individual acts; it’s about systemic violence based on decades of racist housing policy in the United States that has denied people of color, especially black people, access to the same kinds of housing, and therefore the same levels of wealth, as white Americans. Gentrification cannot happen without this deeply rooted inequality; if we were all equal, there could be no gentrifier and no gentrified, no perpetrator or victim. Gentrification is also the inevitable result of a political system focused more on the creation and expansion of business opportunity than on the well-being of its citizens (what I refer to as neoliberalism).

With little federal funding for housing, transportation, or anything else, American cities are now forced to rely completely on their tax base to pay for basic services, and the richer a city’s tax base, the easier those services are to fund. That can mean attracting the wealthy to cities, actively pushing out the poor (who are a drain on taxes), or both. The latter seems to be the preferred one in most cities these days

I’ve chosen to write about the four cities in this book—New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York—because each provides an important counterpoint to the media’s narrative of gentrification as the product of cultural and consumer choice. In all four, specific policies were put in place that allowed the cities to become more favorable to the accumulation of capital and less favorable to the poor. New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York gentrified not because of the wishes of a million gentrifiers but because of the wishes of just a few hundred public intellectuals, politicians, planners, and heads of corporations. By identifying these players, their policies, and their effects, I hope to make clear that gentrification is not inevitable, that it is perhaps even stoppable, or at the very least manageable”.

Moskowitz tells of how gentrification has swept through some of America’s biggest cities, writing case studies of Detroit, San Francisco, New York, and post-Katrina New Orleans. In each city, there are specific problems and circumstances that helped the process along, but it’s striking how similar the choices made by politicians, business leaders, and developers and their effect on poor really are across the country.

Gentrification, in each of these cities, dismantles and displaces existing neighborhoods and communities in order to make way for new residents who are mostly whiter, and always richer, than those who predate them. And the same choices seem to be made again and again.

While Moskowitz includes the important stories of those who called a neighborhood home long before coffee shops and luxury condos appeared, it’s his outline of the systemic process of displacement that is the most devastating.  He convincingly shows how the choices that a city and its government make in the name of a booming economy assign value to some residents and not others: From choices on where and how to fund affordable housing, to invest in public schools, to support new local businesses, but not old ones, the process that goes by the name “revitalization” is often something more pernicious.

In How to Kill a City’s section on New Orleans, Moskowitz highlights the uneven treatment of poor neighborhoods and rich ones in the post-Katrina period, noting that some who saw a need for economic revitalization have said that the storm cleared out some of the less desirable neighborhoods, leaving room for them to be rebuilt without as much concentrated poverty and blight. But they were also being rebuilt more slowly and in a way that ultimately left their previous residents adrift. On top of that, Moskowitz writes, changes to the city’s basic services, particularly its school system, disadvantaged poorer families, who were burdened by undue amounts of paperwork. The city also dismantled the teacher’s union, which had helped build part of New Orleans’s black middle class.

In his chronicle of Detroit, Moskowitz shows how gentrification differs in a city that is steadily emptying out because of economic hardship rather than a natural disaster. He notes that in a 2010 attempt to recast the city as an urban center on the rise, rather than one facing a staggering financial failure, the city’s mayor, Dave Bing, proposed shrinking the boundaries of Detroit in order to focus on the downtown area while cutting out the struggling outer ring. The idea, though it was shot down, has had long-lasting implications for how people conceptualize the city, Moskowitz argues, with developers, city planners, and corporations focusing most of their energy and money on a relatively small section of it. “The new Detroit is now a nearly closed loop,” he writes, “It is possible to live in this new Detroit and essentially never set foot in the old one.” And after filing for bankruptcy, the city’s government has had less power to plot out the city’s future, leaving it in the hands of developers and nonprofits, who may still have a somewhat limited view of what qualifies as Detroit.  

San Francisco and New York, in many ways, have problems and opportunities that are the opposite of Detroit’s. Instead of wanting to gin up economic growth in concentrated areas, residents there are struggling to contain it. As San Francisco becomes a hub for bigger, richer companies and their employees, the displacement of longtime residents has vastly outpaced any efforts at maintaining or creating affordable housing in the city. And despite stable economies, liberal leanings, and high involvement in municipal politics in both New York and San Francisco, policies that could potentially help poorer residents have been much slower to come and less robust than the influx of new private capital that devours neighborhoods and displaces residents. In just about every city Moskowitz examines, he finds that choices by city and state governments limited the creation of affordable housing and changed public-housing policies, giving poorer residents little refuge in increasingly expensive cities.

Ultimately, Moskowitz says that a big part of the problem when it comes to the unremitting pace of gentrification is that it is a process that often involves the investments and decisions of the private entities, including developers and big corporations, that decide to set up shop in new neighborhoods. In some ways, that’s great for areas that are floundering, but when city leaders become too reliant on the plans and dollars of the private sector, the people who had been living and working in these neighborhoods all along have no one to look out for them and the lives they’ve built. Private organizations have different interests and responsibilities when it comes to making plans to spruce up a neighborhood. And that can mean that their investments don’t happen an egalitarian manner, or benefit a diverse group of residents.  

Regarding this point, Moskowitz writes:

“Believing that hipsters can reverse the consequences of late-stage capitalism is a more attractive thought for city planners in cash-strapped cities than realizing that many American cities are, for now, screwed thanks to postindustrial decline and growing inequality. Gentrification may provide a new tax base, but it also reshapes what cities are, turning them into explicit supporters of inequality, reliant on it to self-fund, yet still unable to meet the needs of their poor. A real solution to the economics of American cities would require more work—more taxes, more laws, more intervention from the federal government. Those things are hard. Gentrification is easy”.

Moskowitz says that while gentrification is a problem in just about every developed country in the world, its propensity to become a full-blown crisis in American cities has a lot to do with insufficient housing regulation. “In nearly every other industrialized nation besides the United States, there is near-consensus that purely private land markets will not meet the needs of the poor, and so measures have been taken to ensure that at least some land remains off the market or subject to regulations that make it affordable.”

And in that vein, Moskowitz has some ideas for  how to lessen the sting of gentrification: expanding and protecting access to public lands and giving residents more of a voice in the city via community boards and similar organizations, to name two possibilities. Moskowitz also wants cities to heavily regulate housing and to raise taxes, wages, and spending on the poor. He doesn’t expect that all, or most, of these plans will come to fruition. But implementing any of them, he writes, would constitute progress.

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