There go the neighborhoods
Midway through “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” one of the most influential books on urban ecology, Jane Jacobs sounded an alarm. Writing from the West Village, the book was in part a love letter to her neighborhood, which worked, she argued, because it was quirky and diverse, a swirl of tight-knit humanity that looked out for each other.
But that could all change. “First, we must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not failure,” she wrote. People would gravitate to a neighborhood like the West Village, causing rents to rise. Soon the area would be filled with the “winners of the competition” who “form a narrow segment of population of users.” The quirk disappears. “Both visually and functionally,” she predicted, “the place becomes more monotonous.”
The book was published in 1961, amid white flight and disinvestment from urban cores; some readers might have wondered what Jacobs was so worried about. Now, of course, we know. Today, the West Village is 90 percent white, with a typical one-bedroom apartment fetching $4,000 a month. It is safe and sparkling and dreadful. The small townhouse where Jacobs wrote her defining work is now a real estate office.
Peter Moskowitz grew up several blocks from Jacobs’ townhouse, in an apartment his parents bought for $90,000 in the early 1980s. This afforded the 28-year-old a ringside seat to the final stages of West Village’s gentrification, and raised a central question for the young journalist. “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,” he asks, “what does that say about the future of American cities?”
The answer — not good — can be surmised from the title of Moskowitz’s book. “How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood” deals with that impossible-to-miss phenomenon: white people dressed in tight pants and flannels, crowded into the same slowdrip coffee spots, celebrating the diversity of a city with people who look very much like themselves. But Moskowitz goes deeper, chronicling the tales of those forced out and revealing how the current wave of displacement was made possible by an earlier trend, the exodus to the suburb, which, by design, produced the same sets of winners and losers.
Suburbs were billed as retreats from the chaos and danger of the city, often code for people of color. In New York City, master builder Robert Moses — a frequent target of Jacobs — commissioned hundreds of bridges that connected the city to the suburbs, making sure the clearances were too low to accommodate public buses, the better to keep out poor people. The federal government built highways and subsidized mortgages, steering those mortgages toward whites as a matter of policy. Grosse Point, just outside of Detroit, screened potential homeowners via a point system, with deductions made for “degree of swarthiness.” (Jews needed a local to vouch for them; blacks were barred entirely.)
Apart from being born out of racism, the suburbs were “a peculiar idea,” Moskowitz writes: “The idea of moving further away from one’s work to isolated communities in the middle of nowhere was a hard sell.” Now, attention has swung back to the cities, where the greatest profit can be found in the disinvested neighborhoods of the past. Moskowitz quotes a geographer, Neil Smith, who concludes that “gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement all right, but a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people.”
Moskowitz reports from four rapidly changing cities — New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York — where this capital infusion, billed as progress, has come for many to feel like something else. “I used to be hella friendly,” one Mission resident, Anabelle Bolaños, tells Moskowitz. She was happy when new trees were planted or another street beautification project launched. But then her neighbors began to disappear and she “started to feel like I was taking the smallpox blankets.” Those pushed out find themselves in sterile, eerily peoplefree environments, without access to public transportation or social services. Urban poverty has proved hard to solve. Suburban poverty will be harder.
Moskowitz is a talented and impassioned writer, though he occasionally overheats, as when he describes the suburb as a “necessary project” in maintaining a “hypercapitalist, individualistic, patriarchal, and racist society.” But more often he pokes, prods and listens. He finds holes in official stories and gifted storytellers among people who have been steamrolled. In Detroit, he visits a new high-end bike shop, located within a downtown area known as the “7.2.” The name refers to the size of the territory — a 7.2-square-mile stretch that private industry and government have targeted for investment and increased city services. The rest of the city, all 134.8 square miles of it, receives no such help.
An employee of a prominent Detroit developer tells Moskowitz that the benefits would trickle down soon enough to longtime locals. “Nothing happens overnight,” he says. Asked what he would say to those who feel left out, he replies, “I would say wait and hope.” Wait and hope. Whatever city you might live in, that’s a sure way to kill it.