INTRODUCTION

Gentrification is all around us. It’s in the neighborhoods we walk

through, the conversations we have, the blogs we read. It’s in the
clothes we wear (boutique or chain) and in the food we eat (organic
or conventional). It’s reflected in the walls of our homes— sheetrock
indicates new construction, while unpainted brick expresses authen-
ticity— and in the gardens we plant on vacant lots (an example of “re-
claiming” the inner city from abandonment). It’s in the decision to
bike, take the subway, or drive to work. Gentrification is arguably in
every breath we take: Is it a dirty breath of air polluted by a dying
manufacturing base? Or is it a clean one because you live in a city with
a postindustrial office economy?
Most of the thoughts and conversations we have on the topic, how-
ever, reflect a simplistic understanding of the phenomenon. It’s easy
to think of gentrification as something that happened when people
who are richer than we are move into our neighborhood and destroy
its charm. Except, five or ten or even twenty years earlier, when we
moved into this neighborhood, someone else may well have thought
we were the ones destroying its charm. We were the ones who didn’t
patronize the bodega because it didn’t stock organic milk. We were

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 2 inTrodUCTion

the ones who didn’t go to the laundromat because we had our own
washing machines. If you go far enough back, you will arrive at some
point in the 1950s, as white middle-class flight to the suburbs was
reaching its peak. While those with means were moving out of the
city, a few prescient beings decided to move back in. They renovated
brownstones, passed historic preservation legislation, and fought off
urban renewal schemes. In contrast to suburbanites, they were look-
ing not just for a home, or a good school for their kids, or a shopping
strip where they could get their groceries. They liked what cities had
to offer in terms of proximity, vibrancy, and diversity. They wanted,
like Goldilocks, a “just right” neighborhood: one that was not too
expensive, not too dangerous, not too far from their jobs.
As time has passed, these “just right” neighborhoods have become
increasingly wrong due to their own popularity. Now, more than
50 percent of households in New York City pay what’s officially con-
sidered “unaffordable” housing costs. In San Francisco, the percent-
age is even higher. And the rate of gentrification is accelerating. Gov-
erning magazine determined that between 1990 and 2000, fewer than
one out of every ten poor neighborhoods gentrified; the following
decade, that number grew to two out of every five. And that’s nation-
wide: in celebrity cities like New York City; Portland, Oregon; Min-
neapolis; Seattle; Washington, DC; and Austin more than two out of
every five poor neighborhoods, and sometimes three out of every
five, gentrified.1 Along the way, central cities have lost thousands of
African Americans and Latinos, numerous mom-and-pop stores,
and many rooming houses that served as housing of last resort for
poor, single, unemployable men, especially those with mental health
problems. In some ways, the back-to-the-city movement, as it was
called in the 1950s, brought too many people back to the city. It has
ended up destroying many of the traits that attracted middle-income
professionals to urban centers in the first place: diversity, affordabil-
ity, and authenticity. In the 1920s and ’30s, sociologists developed
what might be called the donut theory of urban development. Univer-
sity of Chicago Professor Ernest Burgess placed the central business

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 inTrodUCTion 3

district in the center, surrounded by a ring he called the purgatory of

“lost souls,” filled with vice and squalor, surrounded by successively
better-off rings.2 Now, our cities are becoming like Boston Creams,
the centers rich and pampered while the exteriors are plain and hard
to get through.
Meanwhile, gentrification has become a tremendously polariz-
ing issue. In East Austin, bandana-wearing protestors gather regu-
larly outside a café located where a piñata store once stood, at least
once resulting in bloodshed; in Seattle, the city council attempted to
impose a “head tax” on major employers to raise money for afford-
able housing, but backed down after Amazon and other corporations
poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into an opposition cam-
paign; in Los Angeles, a group has taken aggressive measures, such
as online trolling, to tell an art gallery and a real estate bike tour that
they are not welcome. And in numerous places, rent-controlled ten-
ants have been harassed, threatened, discouraged, and evicted if their
units could fetch more on the open market. There is no sign that the
pace of gentrification, nor the vigor of the backlash, will subside
soon.3

GENTRIFICATION, DEFINED
One tongue-in-cheek definition of gentrification is that it’s something
that happens when people richer than you move into your neighbor-
hood. In other words, people tend to see themselves as victims of gen-
trification more frequently than perpetrators of it, and only protest
when it threatens their ability to remain. It is a very subjective term,
which is one reason I have adopted a very simple definition: gentrifi-
cation is the process by which a low-income neighborhood becomes
a wealthy neighborhood. (To qualify, the neighborhood’s median in-
come has to move from less than the median of the surrounding met-
ropolitan statistical area, to more than the area median). Some other
definitions of gentrification also consider whether housing prices in-
crease, or the ethnic and racial make-up of a neighborhood shifts, or

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 4 inTrodUCTion

the education level among residents changes. I do not see a need to

complicate the definition, since higher rents, more education, fewer
people of color are all ancillary effects.
(Another term worth quibbling about is “middle class,” which I
tend to avoid. I prefer middle income to designate people in the third
quintile of the income range of a particular Census-defined metro-
politan area; upper middle income, and upper income refer to the fourth
and fifth quintiles, while low income and very low income refer to the
second and first quintiles, respectively.4)
I use the term gentrification widely in this book. Some people think
it has become pejorative; I think it’s the process of gentrification that
has gained so much negative press such that the word cannot be seen
in anything but an unfavorable light. British sociologist Ruth Glass,
who is credited with coining the term in 1964, recognized that the
process has positive and negative effects, and yet approached the
topic with equanimity. “The social status of many residential areas
is being ‘uplifted’ as the middle class— or the ‘gentry’— moved into
working-class space, taking up residence, opening businesses, and
lobbying for infrastructure improvements,” she wrote. Glass at once
ascribed gentrification to a “switch from suburban to urban aspira-
tions,” but also warned, tongue in cheek, that “London may soon be
faced with an embarras de richesse in her central area— and this will
prove to be a problem, too.”5
Alternative terms sound euphemistic. “Recycling” an old poor
neighborhood into a new wealthier one popped up in the mid-1970s;
the word has a certain charm, but it never really caught on. “Reno-
vation” was in vogue in the 1980s, but it applies more aptly to first-
generation gentrifiers who remodeled their homes themselves. “Re-
vitalization,” meanwhile, has a positive spin to what is clearly an
ambiguous phenomenon. Many government officials and policy pro-
fessionals prefer “reinvestment.” However, I have never been sure
who was supposed to be doing the reinvesting. Was it banks? Perhaps.
But banks were reinvesting in these neighborhoods only because pro-
fessionals wanted to move into them— professionals who at first had

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to fight tooth and nail to get a mortgage from those same financial in-
stitutions. (See chapter 2.) Once they realized how much money was
to be made, banks certainly enabled the renewed affluence of selected
neighborhoods in the past sixty years. But to suggest they were the
primary drivers misses the mark. Is it the home-buyers themselves
who are doing the “reinvestment”? Sure, a home is an investment,
but for the upper-middle income professionals who moved to brown-
stone neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, it was primarily a home
that just happened to appreciate in value. “Reinvestment” describes
inputs— the money being spent within a neighborhood— while “gen-
trification” describes outputs— the changing demographics.
The term displacement is related to gentrification, but it’s different,
and it does have unavoidable negative connotations. Displacement
describes the forced relocation of a household because its home can
command a higher price than it can afford. Neighborhoods may
change because low-income residents are forced out by rising rents,
or perhaps, the low-income families were about to move out anyway
and higher-income households took their place. (This latter process
is sometimes called succession.) I discuss the complicated question of
whether gentrification causes displacement throughout the book. It
is my conclusion that gentrification does not cause as much displace-
ment as might be expected, but it causes enough disruption to indi-
viduals that we should try to mitigate its impact.
This brings me to three main arguments.

genTrifiCaTion is neiTher good nor Bad

It is not a cause, but a symptom of a macroeconomic transformation

much larger than any of us, the transformation from an industrial
economy to a professional and then a “creative” one. The corporate
managers who proliferated in America’s post–World War II economic
expansion valued loyalty and teamwork, and even spoke of being a
“cog in the wheel” with a certain pride. Journalist William H. Whyte
observed that preplanned suburbs were perfect for the Organization

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Man of this era, for they were “communities [built] in his image.”6 By
contrast, the “creative” economy that has emerged more recently os-
tensibly values independence, adaptability, and imagination; creative
workers seek neighborhoods that express those traits— or at least
purport to. Other demographic trends, such as the proliferation of
two-earner families and the choice by women to have children later
in their lives, have also contributed to the appeal of living in a city.
Among academics, such an explanation of gentrification’s origins
is known as a consumption-side theory: consumers drove the migration
of middle- and upper-middle-income individuals back to the city.
Chapter 6 explains the “production-side” model, which holds that
real estate developers, investors, and marketers were instead respon-
sible.

The hisTory of genTrifiCaTion is More

CoMPLiCaTed Than yoU MighT reaLiZe

While I have chosen a deliberately simple definition of the term, gen-

trification is an amorphous process that frequently changes its guise.
Its starting point is unclear, but earlier than most people would as-
sume; its end point is, right now, unforeseen. The line between “good”
gentrification (the kind that makes cities thrive) and “bad” gentrifi-
cation (the kind that pushes people out of their homes) has never
been clear and is largely a subjective distinction— meaning, different
people will draw the line in different places. I have interviewed many
people who began our conversation by vociferously criticizing gen-
trification, but by the end realized they have contributed to it—
sometimes in the most well-meaning ways.

PUBLiC PoLiCy Makers have done a Poor

JoB of ConTroLLing genTrifiCaTion

Just as gentrification began much earlier than many realize, so too

did the backlash. By the mid-1970s, editorial writers, activists, and
a few academics were warning that the trend was causing displace-

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 inTrodUCTion 7

ment. Mayors and other local leaders were quick to pooh-pooh such
concerns, and the federal government acted too slowly. Nor did
the nonprofit sector effectively intervene; instead it chose to battle
redlining. The answer these apologists gave again and again was that
gentrification was a fringe phenomenon— until, suddenly it wasn’t.
At that point, the solutions that would have been cheap to impose in
the 1970s and ’80s were several times as expensive.

There has been plenty written about gentrification recently, though

it tends to come in two flavors: academic literature that provides
very little sense of what it is like to live in a city undergoing change;
and more general works that give that view from the street but do so
snidely, with little appreciation for the complexities and paradoxes of
urban development. This latter set of writings often idealizes a mo-
ment in the neighborhood’s development— sometimes the moment
when the author started living there. It is that moment, the author
argues, when the neighborhood was its “true” self— and in the years
since, it has become less so, glammed up by newcomers, city govern-
ment, and developers.
This book recognizes that cities are dynamic places; our conception
of them today as places of commerce and culture contrasts sharply
with their functions thousands of years ago as tools of civil defense or
centers of religious worship. It is hard to argue that a neighborhood
belongs to one people or another. Many of today’s gentrified neigh-
borhoods were once built for the gentry of the nineteenth century,
fell from fashion in the mid-twentieth century, and have become
desirable again in the past few decades. Other gentrified neighbor-
hoods descend from working-class roots but have gone through con-
siderable ethnic changes: Williamsburg was German before it be-
came Puerto Rican; the Mission District was Irish before it became
Chicano. Nor do I find arguments that gentrification ruins a neigh-
borhood’s cultural identity to be terribly compelling, or at least I see
them as far less important than material changes in an individual’s
circumstances— whether someone must move miles away from a job
or social network or family. Likewise, I don’t presume tenants have a

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 8 inTrodUCTion

moral “right to the city” as some activists have suggested they do; but
I do agree society is better off minimizing the disruption to the lives
of large numbers of people.
I also try to avoid any nostalgia of pre-gentrified urban places.
Those supposedly noble industrial jobs of the 1940s and ’50s where
people (or at least white men) could earn an honest living often in-
volved back-breaking labor and were unsafe; the quaint neighbor-
hoods we miss today gained their sense of community from segrega-
tion and ethnic tribalism. The breakdown of those communities came
in part due to antidiscrimination laws, intermarriage, and assimila-
tion. Many writers lament the fact that cities have become less “in-
teresting” because of the disappearance of ethnic enclaves. But think
about this: If you come upon a place and declare it “interesting” or
“uninteresting,” aren’t you seeing a neighborhood as something that
exists for your enjoyment, rather than viewing it from the perspec-
tive of the people who are living there? Let’s judge neighborhoods
first on how they serve their inhabitants rather than on whether they
please visitors.
I provide some historical context to gentrification in order to chal-
lenge these preconceptions from the Left and Right. Readers must
recognize the sorry state in which most American cities found them-
selves in the 1950s and ’60s in order to consider fairly whether gen-
trification has done more harm than good. A historical account also
shows just how difficult it is to distinguish between the idealism that
sparked gentrification, and the exploitation of that ideal. Most of all,
history tells us what it was like for mayors, homeowners, and land-
lords to be there, at any number of critical junctures over the past
sixty years, uncertain whether cities would flourish or perish.

THREE CITIES, SIX DECADES

Admittedly, this book could have started in many places. I chose 1956
in Brooklyn Heights, when “young marrieds”— affluent, college-
educated couples— chose to stay in New York City and raise families

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 inTrodUCTion 9

instead of moving to the suburbs. They were self-conscious about

that choice. They began to organize themselves, and to talk about the
joys of urban life, and how wonderful it was that people with families
were taking over rooming houses and renovating them into single-
family homes. They were proudly rebelling against suburbanization
in a way that earlier gentrifiers had not.
Chapter 1 also reveals two other hallmarks of early gentrification.
One is early gentrifiers’ uneasy relationship with urban renewal,
the post–World War II strategy of reviving cities by bulldozing large
tracts of so-called slums and replacing them with large modern
buildings for residential or institutional use. Young marrieds were
opposed to urban renewal on principle, but found it could bring them
certain pragmatic advantages, such as increasing the critical mass of
young professional families like themselves. The second hallmark is
early gentrifiers created an alliance with the remaining old-money
families in their neighborhood, and became that much more politi-
cally powerful as a result. It is important to realize that gentrification
was not born with the paradigm it’s now known for— an unrelenting
belief in historic preservation, opposition to large-scale renewal, and
a preference for small, independently owned shops— but was trying
to find its way.
The young marrieds’ fever caught on, moving further south and
east into Brooklyn, first to Cobble Hill, and then to Park Slope, which
is where I go in chapter 2. Evelyn and Everett Ortner moved there
when, in effect, Brooklyn Heights had become too gentrified and too
expensive for them. They were an effective pair: Everett was a World
War II veteran whose military training served him well while fighting
for his neighborhood; Evelyn, an interior designer, helped to secure
Park Slope’s historic designation. The Ortners first made alliances
with real estate brokers, banks, and city officials, and then with orga-
nizations in gentrifying neighborhoods across the country through
their annual “Back-to-the-City” conferences.
Chapter 3 takes place in San Francisco, a city that shares many
of the attributes of gentrifying cities around the globe, but which

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 10 inTrodUCTion

also has unique features that have exacerbated its housing shortage.
The city’s geographic area— a mere 46 square miles, some of which
is undevelopable due to its topography— was prematurely circum-
scribed in the nineteenth century. The economic development of the
Bay Area would further complicate San Francisco’s future, because
job centers grew both downtown and in the farmland 30 miles to the
south, which came to be known as Silicon Valley. Those two factors
would lead to housing and transportation problems that found their
locus in the Mission District, a working-class area with a strong sense
of community.
In chapter 4, the action moves to the Near North Side of Chicago, a
notable area where great wealth and deep poverty have existed nearly
adjacent to one another since the early 1900s. In the 1950s and 1960s,
the same back-to-the-city impulse that affected Brooklyn Heights
took root in Chicago’s Old Town. Affluent residents both embraced
urban renewal and advocated historic preservation, not realizing that
they would price out the idiosyncrasy and diversity that had made
their neighborhood special. As Old Town’s wealth spread, it butted
up against one of the city’s most violent public housing complexes,
Cabrini-Green, right at a time when the Chicago Housing Author-
ity had come to a standstill, unable to build new complexes because
of politics, or to repair the old ones because of finances. Those two
factors— the growing affluence of the city, and the collapse of public
housing— would together set the stage for the unthinkable: the gen-
trification of Cabrini-Green.
The second part of this book describes the era from the mid-1970s
to 2000. Gentrification was fully underway and had in fact engen-
dered a backlash that we have largely forgotten about today. I devote
chapter 5 largely to the activities of a university professor from Phila-
delphia, Conrad Weiler, who tried to make the public, and govern-
ment, aware of the potential downsides of gentrification. He pro-
posed many of the solutions that are still circulated today— such as
buying up buildings and converting them to permanently affordable

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 inTrodUCTion 11

housing. Those ideas would have been a lot cheaper had they been
implemented at 1975 prices than at today’s.
I revisit New York and San Francisco in chapters 6 and 7, respec-
tively tracing how the rise of the so-called creative class was partly,
though not wholly, responsible for those cities’ fiscal health in the
1980s and 1990s— as well as their gentrification. Brooklyn’s Dumbo
neighborhood provides a fascinating case study of artist-led gentri-
fication, as well as of a developer’s ability to take advantage of it. The
developer in question, David Walentas, cleverly crafted a myth that
the neighborhood was dead when he found it, and encouraged artists
to lend the area some cachet before kicking them out. But Walentas
also deserves more admiration than he typically receives; he metic-
ulously re-created the development patterns he witnessed in SoHo
and applied many of the principles outlined by Jane Jacobs in her
1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which has
emerged as the bible of contemporary planning.
San Francisco made its housing shortage worse for itself— though
sometimes in ways that no one could have predicted. Housing and
community preservation activists were so burned by the excesses
of urban renewal in the city that it took a strict no-displacement ap-
proach. As a result, they pushed for zoning changes that permitted
very little new residential building, and limited the amount of new
office space that could be created in any single year. The idea was that
by curbing the growth of jobs, the legislation would also reduce the
price pressure on housing. Unfortunately, real estate developers and
employers found ways around the law.
I also devote a chapter to rent regulations, which have recently
gained popularity as an antidote to gentrification. While it is tempt-
ing, as many conservative commentators believe, to argue that rent
restrictions exacerbate high housing prices, the evidence suggests
their impact has been minimal. In large part, that’s because contem-
porary rent laws already accommodate some degree of free-market
economics. At the same time, poorly written rent control laws can

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 12 inTrodUCTion

exacerbate income inequality, or, alternatively, provide loopholes

that encourage tenant harassment. Rent regulation is an extremely
tricky, but at times essential, solution to the affordable housing
shortage: it is important that policy makers rescue it from ideologues
on the Left and the Right and apply it carefully.
Part III describes gentrification as we know it today: a highly con-
tested process that has taken on the dimension of a culture war. Real
estate developers, construction workers, economic development in-
terest groups, and political conservatives have joined together (some-
times with young, affluent would-be residents) to advocate for in-
creasing the supply of housing as a way out of the current crisis. On
the other side lie community organizations, historic preservationists,
tenant groups, people of color— and their political patrons— who
fear that new development will not sate the hunger for housing but
only increase the appetite for city living. Of course, there are excep-
tions to these groupings, as well as some geographic variation, but
they generally prove the rule. Increasing supply, I find, is a clumsy
and insufficient way of reducing displacement pressure, if also one
that we cannot ignore.
The Chicago Housing Authority’s demolition of its high-rises, as
detailed in chapter 9, raises the question of whether cities can use
gentrification to rectify past injustices. Here, the Daley administra-
tion leveraged the “back-to-the-city” Zeitgeist to replace vertical
ghettoes with mixed-income, low-rise communities— which in many
ways was exactly what the young marrieds of Brooklyn Heights had
been aiming to create half a century earlier. Among the many conse-
quences of Daley’s plan, the most startling may be how out of place
former public housing residents have felt in their new/old neighbor-
hoods, and how deep class tensions run among the new inhabitants
as well.
In the conclusion, I discuss what my account can teach us about
addressing gentrification today— though I think what we learn best
by examining the past is not what to do in the future, but what NOT
to do. Some of what we should learn NOT to do are ways of thinking.

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Chief among them is the stance, adopted too often over these past six
decades by people in power, that gentrification is a fringe phenom-
enon that is not likely to grow, and whose benefits outweigh its costs.
We had solutions to displacement all along; what we failed to do was
to implement them.
Despite the current crisis, I hope readers find something to laugh
at in this book. The history of gentrification is full of inspiration and
humor, of unintended consequences and delightful surprises, of very
committed individuals working— at times at cross purposes or with
bitterness toward one another— but nonetheless with the common
conviction that humans living in close proximity to one another,
sacrificing private space in favor of communal space, encountering
strangers and acquaintances on the street, is the best civilization has
to offer.

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