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

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Gentrification is a word that gets tossed around frequently, especially in conversations about sky-high rent increases or being priced out of your former neighborhood. It’s happening all across the country, and Peter Moskowitz explores the issues and causes of gentrification clearly and compassionately. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com

In cities all across the country, neighborhoods are changing so quickly that nearly everyone is at risk of getting priced out. The term gentrification has become a buzzword, but we've failed to realize that 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.
  
In How to Kill a City, Peter Moskowitz 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.

A lively, hard-hitting expose in the tradition of City of Quartz and Once in a Great City, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities and how we can fight back.

"Moskowitz...pulls no punches in his depiction of gentrification...He paints a vivid and grim picture of the future of American cities." Kirkus Reviews

"A fascinating analysis of late-stage gentrification in which corporate control of cities renders them uninhabitable to most people. Showing how gentrifiers exploit 'someone else's loss' as a consequence of long histories of racist policy, Peter Moskowitz calls for a global movement against this 'new form of segregation,' defining housing as a human right rooted in community instead of real estate profit." Sarah Schulman, author of Gentrification of the Mind and The Cosmopolitans

"How to Kill a City is a convincing and persuasive argument that the U.S. has a serious problem with affordable housing that is not going away any time soon." Booklist

Peter Moskowitz is a freelance journalist who has written for the Guardian, New York Times, New Republic, Wired, Slate, Buzzfeed, and many others. A former staff writer at Al Jazeera America, he is a graduate of Hampshire College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Moskowitz lives in New York City.

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