How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

A journey to the front lines of the battle for the future of American cities, uncovering the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification--and the lives that are altered in the process.
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px} The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It 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.

Peter Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, 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.

A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
• The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It
• A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series)
• Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area (Spectre)
• The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life
• The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change
• In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis
• The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America