Post by Logan on Apr 24, 2017 5:12:12 GMT -6
Peter Moskowitz is a journalist and activist raised in New York and based in Philadelphia. His new book, “How to Kill a City,” looks at four American cities that have been transformed by new money in recent years – New York, San Francisco, New Orleans and Detroit.
Moskowitz argues the transformations have displaced longtime residents, especially poorer ones, and replaced them with affluent, mostly white, newcomers who drive up rents and tax assessments and turn what had been vibrant cities into, effectively, gated communities for the wealthy. Detroit is not New York, he acknowledges, but what’s happening is gentrification.
Bridge: The two-city scenario you describe in your book – with the central city doing very well, and the neighborhoods still struggling – is familiar to everyone in Detroit, and not everybody thinks it’s so bad, because at least it represents some recovery, even if it is uneven. Explain why you think it’s bad.
Peter Moskowitz: I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. But the way it’s being done in Detroit, and other cities, increases inequality. What’s happening is not a rebirth of the city but a focused concentration on one particular part of it. Which happens to be one of the whitest parts of the city and the hottest for real-estate development, and that’s where the government is pouring all its resources.
Meanwhile, the rest of the city has kind of been falling off the map. Blocks are still abandoned, until a few years ago there weren’t streetlights, garbage collection was minimal. Take that in combination with the water shutoffs, the tax foreclosures… (and) you get the sense that this is not an accident, that it’s not an organic rebirth, but a purposeful concentration on one part of the city and a purposeful forgetting of the rest of it. It’s a rebirth for a certain set of people, but not for everyone.
Read more: www.bridgemi.com/detroit-journalism-cooperative/welcome-new-detroit-white-people-so-long-poor-folks
Moskowitz argues the transformations have displaced longtime residents, especially poorer ones, and replaced them with affluent, mostly white, newcomers who drive up rents and tax assessments and turn what had been vibrant cities into, effectively, gated communities for the wealthy. Detroit is not New York, he acknowledges, but what’s happening is gentrification.
Bridge: The two-city scenario you describe in your book – with the central city doing very well, and the neighborhoods still struggling – is familiar to everyone in Detroit, and not everybody thinks it’s so bad, because at least it represents some recovery, even if it is uneven. Explain why you think it’s bad.
Peter Moskowitz: I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. But the way it’s being done in Detroit, and other cities, increases inequality. What’s happening is not a rebirth of the city but a focused concentration on one particular part of it. Which happens to be one of the whitest parts of the city and the hottest for real-estate development, and that’s where the government is pouring all its resources.
Meanwhile, the rest of the city has kind of been falling off the map. Blocks are still abandoned, until a few years ago there weren’t streetlights, garbage collection was minimal. Take that in combination with the water shutoffs, the tax foreclosures… (and) you get the sense that this is not an accident, that it’s not an organic rebirth, but a purposeful concentration on one part of the city and a purposeful forgetting of the rest of it. It’s a rebirth for a certain set of people, but not for everyone.
Read more: www.bridgemi.com/detroit-journalism-cooperative/welcome-new-detroit-white-people-so-long-poor-folks