Pretty good!

I didn't expect it to be so straight forward. This book definitely tackles the political aspects of gentrification head on. I highly recommend.

3 people found this helpful

Snobby Socialist New Yorker Gets Hyperbolic

Five stars for the narrator because I truly felt the author was an intolerable New Yorker with a superiority complex in love with his own opinion. If I had to read this in dead tree form, I would have given it one or negative stars, and probably wouldn't have finished it. The writing style was just entertaining enough, and the narration superior that I was willing to finish listening to the intolerable subject.

Before I go further, quick summary of the book. This journalist goes and visits 3 cities (Detroit, New Orleans, and San Francisco) and then writes about his own city, New York. White people are rich and gentrifiers, and people of color are poor and must be saved by government intervention with the assistance of activists, artists and non-profits. And capitalism is evil.

Peter Moskowitz lost me early on with conflating gentrification with genocide. His grandmother doesn't see why anyone would want to live in the city and I doubt she'd agree that the Holocaust, with its gas chambers, starvation, and other methods of death have anything in common with displacement. What gentrifier breaks into their neighbor's home and hacks the family to death with a machete as like Rwanda? Or what government favoring gentrification burns the homes of the soon to be displaced and moves them at the point of a gun and denies them citizenship, as the Burmese government has done to its Muslim population. It is offensive that the author even went there, but hey, shock value. I was willing to listen to an argument or point of view that I knew that I would have disagreements with, but this an other bits of hyperbole made me not trust the author, because I see he is willing to write stupid stuff that insulted my intelligence.

I have read Jacobs, Florida, and Glaeser's work as well as various academic papers, and urban planning blogs, so I'm familiar with the subject of cities and gentrification. So there were moments when I wondered if Moskowitz ever did as well, or conveniently forgot how cities and housing actually work so he continue on with whatever narrative he was slavishly sticking to. For example in the Bay area, he seemed to want to count people who sold their homes to developers as the displaced and was annoyed that those who did, did not show up in any measurements about displacement. Same with buy outs (cash for keys) that don't show up as evictions, because they aren't evictions! But I know he want the power of the word 'evictions' for things that are voluntary agreements between landlord and tenant. He also doesn't seem to understand that city governments, well most that I know of, do not exist to serve the poor. Nor does he seem to understand that when a city is bankrupt and or hasn't a decent tax base, it is very limited. He seems annoyed that broke and not broke cities are catering to companies and people who have jobs and money and they're not doing the same for the poor.

There was one section of the book, when covering the history of redlining and he Federal government's role in segregating housing, where I thought he should have started here. It was actually tolerable. I wish I could say informative, but if you've read about race and housing in America before, this should be familiar. It was the same old stuff to me, but I didn't mind hearing it again. What I did mind was that he gave zoning a free pass and ignored its racial history to instead talk about zoning specific to New York City.

Because I am listening to this book for a book group I belong to I kept stopping the audio (you can do this in the audible app) for taking notes. These notes were mainly to disagree with the author. If this is your first book on the topic, then you have no idea what's missing and ignorance is bliss. I unfortunately am aware of what he left out, what is highly colored by his Socialist leaning anti-capitalist point of view and what he has wrong.

Moskowitz doesn't add anything to the topic except his own opinion, nor does he offer any solutions that have a snowball's chance in Hades. One was land banking. Sounds great, but as I said, the author sometimes doesn't know how cities work. Cities will kick the homeless off public lands, and mine closed their waiting list for public housing years ago because it and the wait got ridiculously long. Cities are slower than a dead snail in Alaska when it comes to building the kinds of solutions he suggested. Another suggestion mentioned community boards like that in NYC. Once again that New Yorker-centric mentality creeps in. He likes the idea of the people but doesn't care for democracy when ballot initiatives in San Francisco don't deliver the results he wanted. Another suggestion was to regulate housing nationally. Housing is already regulated. There are only things a licensed plumber, HVAC person and the like can do. There are many tenant friendly cities, like NYC that are heavily regulated and the costs of doing business are passed on to the tenants in one way or another in higher rents, deferred maintenance and/or poor service. If regulation was so great NYC should be a renter's wonderland, but it isn't. Protectionism is another suggestion, but this just goes to something that is NYC specific regarding up-zoning. The last suggestion could just be summarized as try Socialism, raise taxes and wages and spend the money on the poor.

27 people found this helpful

difficult read

struggled through it
not recommended for those wanting an unbiased or balanced view of the subject

2 people found this helpful

LOVE THIS BOOK

As a city person, this book made me angry and brought tears to my eyes. I've been to the 4 cities and lived in 2.
written and read beautifully. I wish I could claim it as my work. Bravo!

2 people found this helpful

Speaks to my life

This book speaks to my life experiences like no other book that I've heard before. I found it thoroughly enjoying and very enlightening the current housing situation in the United States

5 people found this helpful

Great listen

Good listen with a nice voice. I enjoyed learning more about gentrification and this book is filled with new info.

1 person found this helpful

Compelling! Need to read

This book is an important contribution to the conversation around how we shape our communities—not only our cities. It challenges the reader to consider hard realities that our systems are built upon and provides some strategies for moving forward together.

1 person found this helpful

Unproductive criticism.

You have to endure hours of complaining before you get to anything actionable in the last 30 minutes of the book. There is some value added in better understanding gentrification, but in the process, you're made to feel guilty about going for a latte or choosing to move into a more urban neighborhood you can actually afford. I would have liked to have learned more about what good policy looks like by maybe offering a positive example in contrast to the four negative case studies.

6 people found this helpful

Very informative with both style and substance! Touched on subjects too often ignored or overlooked!

2 people found this helpful

Disturbing, stirring, albeit cursory.

This shook me a bit. Left me with the queasy questions, "Why did I fall in love with my city neighborhood?" "Are those reasons real? Honest? Good?" It's a bit in love with its own thesis, and the analysis feels sometimes skimpy. But the punches that land, they bruise. Important reading.

2 people found this helpful