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Did Moms 4 Housing have the right to occupy 2928 Magnolia Street? Why or why not?To arrive at your position, you should continue to explore the following ideas from our discussion forums:

your philosophy on the balance between human rights and property rights
your interpretation of the history of racist housing policy in the United States
your beliefs about community activism

Ultimately, your essay will synthesize the facts, examples, and perspectives from the texts in this unit to support your thesis. You will strengthen your credibility (appeal to ethos!) by including at least one counterargument.

An introduction that describes the general situation and narrows down to the specific issue.
A thesis statement that conveys your main argument in response to the prompt.
PIE-style paragraphs that support your thesis.
At least one counterargument paragraph.
Clear writing that displays the sentence focus and sentence boundary conventions of standard English grammar.
MLA format (including Times New Roman 12 pt font), MLA in-text citations, and an MLA-style Works Cited page.
At least 5 FULL pages of writing.

will use Moskowitz, How to Kill a City, as a source. Then, you will choose from the texts (listed below) that we read/ watched for this unit. See rubric for number of texts that you should incorporate into your essay to synthesize with Moskowitz:

KCET, City Rising: Gentrification and Displacement (Links to an external site.)
Rothstein, Segregated By Design (Links to an external site.)
Coates, “The Case for Reparations (Links to an external site.)”
Moms 4 Housing (Links to an external site.) Website
Kendall, Oakland: Moms 4 Housing Home Sells for $587,500, Will Become Homeless Housing (Links to an external site.) or read PDF here download.
KQED Podcast: A Right to Housing (Links to an external site.)
Hahn, “These Moms Fought for a Home and Started a Movement (Links to an external site.)”
Ferrari, “The House on Magnolia Street (Links to an external site.)”
Grabar, “A Property Manage’s Take on the Coming Eviction Crisis (Links to an external site.)”
ABC 7 News “Wedgewood Properties, company in battle with homeless moms evicted from Oakland home, answers questions about business (Links to an external site.)”
KQED Forum, “Moms 4 Housing Activists Seek Right of Possession in Housing Case (Links to an external site.)”

Write a new 500 word paper on a business start-up idea. See below for more details.*

Note: You will use this business concept throughout the quarter, so consider making it something of interest to you.

2. Add a cover page. Use one of the Cover Page templates.

3. Give your document a title (ex: Business Proposal for _______) and format as Heading 1.

4. Add page numbers.

5. Change the font of what you have written today from the default one.

6. Change the format of a few words in the first paragraph of your paper to italic and bold.

6. Change the text alignment of one of your paragraphs.

7. Change one of your page orientations to Landscape.

8. Change one of your page’s Margins to “Narrow” or a custom size.

9. Indent the first line of every paragraph using the ruler.

10. Insert a hyperlink to a reference on the web.

11. Spell check your document.

12. Add at least 2 references as footnotes.

13. Create a bullet list of at least 3 reasons why this is a good idea for a business.

14. Turn on Track Changes and make a noticeable edit in the last paragraph of your paper.

15. Turn on Comments and enter a comment; also in the last paragraph.

Total:

*DETAILS Consider:

1. What business format would you use?

2. What in your background qualifies you to start this business?

3. Why would it be successful?

4. What is the competition like?

5. What is the history of similar businesses?

6. Envision giving this or using this to get funding to start this business.

Important Factors:

7. Must be a business, not a job

8. Has to be a business that would have expenses

9. Can be a fantasy- i.e., doesn’t currently exist

10. Must be school appropriate
11. Can have employees and/or contract workers

v. 09-25-2015

2 How Gentrification Works

The word gentrification was coined by

British sociologist Ruth Glass

in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside.

“

One by one, many of the working class quarters

have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Even then, gentrification meant remaking a neighborhood for new incomers and to the detriment of current residents.

The first mention of gentrification stateside seems to have occurred four years later, in 1969, when a white Brooklyn man named Everett Ortner founded the Brownstone Revival Committee, a nonprofit committed to the “brownstone lifestyle.” Ortner began publishing The Brownstoner, a magazine dedicated to convincing other middle- and upper-class white people to move to Brooklyn. One article in the magazine proclaimed, “

Gentrification is not ‘genocide’ but ‘genesis.’

” Gentrification supporters such as Ortner were intent on persuading the gentry that gentrification was an organic movement made up of people who wanted to improve neighborhoods—in other words, he and others wanted to shift the focus from larger forces to individual decisions. Ortner wrote in The Brownstoner, “

I think one should approach the acquisition

of a brownstone, the way one goes into a love affair: To the non-lover it is merely a row house. To the brownstone connoisseur, it is part of an architecturally homogeneous cityscape, scaled perfectly for its function, housing many but offering each person space and privacy and a civilized style of living.”

well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “

The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes

is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.”

Ortner and his fellow members of the Brownstone Revival Committee, like similar groups in cities across the country, were instrumental in crafting the narrative of good-hearted pioneers the media still cling to today. Yet Ortner’s story proves that gentrification was never really about individual pioneers, but rather about a confluence of policies pushed by wealthy individuals, politicians, and the companies that stood to benefit from a gentrified neighborhood. Today gentrification has become an even more pronounced top-down process.

In 1979,

MIT urban studies professor Phillip Clay

outlined four distinct phases of gentrification, which remain remarkably applicable today. According to Clay, the first phase begins when individuals, unsupported by any government or large institution, decide to begin moving into a previously poor neighborhood and renovating houses. National media pay little attention, and any increase in the concentration of gentrifiers comes largely from word of mouth. There’s some evidence that historically this phase of gentrification was often spearheaded by gays and lesbians in search of safe spaces outside homogenized suburbia where they could congregate.

San Francisco experienced an influx of gays

during World War II, thanks in part to the military’s practice of dishonorably discharging gay men into the city via military bases on the Pacific Ocean. While there are no hard numbers,

there is evidence that the white LGBT community

, especially lesbians, also played a pioneering role in Brooklyn in the 1970s. New Orleans’s largely white queer scene today also seems one step ahead of other gentrifying places. (Detroit is an outlier here, as there’s not much of a queer scene.)

The second phase, according to Clay, is when those attracted to the neighborhood because of the change that’s already begun start buying up real estate. Some in this second wave are hoping to take part in the neighborhood’s new cultural cachet. Others are small-scale speculators, hoping they can get a house on the cheap and sell it sometime later. This is the phase when media start paying attention, and when the New York Times might write an article about whether said neighborhood is the next hot new thing, or even the next Williamsburg. Vacancies go down, and displacement begins.

I would argue that these first two phases are still happening in some cities—Detroit; Cleveland; Lexington,

How Gentrification Works

But even then, in the early days of gentrification, the process had just as much to do with a specific set of policies and corporations that benefited from them as it did with love. The first Back to the City Conference, established by Ortner in 1974, was sponsored by a real estate industry group called the Development Council of New York City as well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “
The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes
is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.”

I would argue that these first two phases are still happening in some cities—Detroit; Cleveland; Lexington, Kentucky; and others—where young people are flocking, where new restaurants are opening, and where intrepid reporters are sent to cover the surprising revitalization of once downtrodden cities. But these phases are also historical anachronisms at this point. Gentrification in places such as Detroit and Cleveland, while appearing as organic as the flocking of gay men to San Francisco, is today most often sponsored by the state and other powerful institutions.

Clark’s third phase is essentially what New Orleans is experiencing right now, as middle-class gentrifiers start taking on more prominent roles in gentrifying neighborhoods—sitting on committees and community boards, promoting neighborhoods to outsiders as a place where the middle class can move and maintain a high quality of life. During this phase, Clark says, you can expect banks to begin lending more frequently in previously disinvested neighborhoods. Developers (as opposed to individuals) become the preeminent renovators and builders. Police and other security forces increase to ensure that the new gentrified class feels safe. Tensions between the “old” and the “new” rise.

Stage four is when a neighborhood is already gentrified and begins to become even more wealthy. Managerial-class professionals replace the artists and punks. Properties that were held vacant by developers are turned into high-cost condos. Displacement is rampant. And gentrification begins spilling over into other, less gentrified neighborhoods.

In 1979, these phases provided a near-complete and prescient description of the process. But several researchers have suggested that today we need to add a fifth phase to that list, in order to grapple with what’s happened to places such as New York and San Francisco. Gentrification in these globalized cities is no longer about individuals, and it’s not even about local developers chasing cash in cool neighborhoods. In the words of geographer Neil Smith, it’s about “

the reach of global capital

down to the local neighborhood scale.”

Today, many development deals are initiated by foreign investors, and many neighborhoods are affordable only to the global elite. Buildings spring up that are meant less to house people and more to house the wealth of millionaires and billionaires. In a stretch of Midtown Manhattan, which has recently become filled with sky-high multimillion-dollar condo buildings,

New York Times

investigation found that 50 percent

of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year. In other words, the fifth and last phase of gentrification is when neighborhoods aren’t just more friendly to capital than to people but cease being places to live a normal life, with work and home and school and community spaces, and become luxury commodities.

These phases provide a good outline of how gentrification works, and they also rightly suggest that the process is predictable—that the pioneers and the coffee shops will likely be followed by the professionals and the condos, no matter where you are. But gentrification is also messier than that. Sometimes the phases happen simultaneously, or out of order. Detroit’s gentrification, for example, seems to be largely driven by professionals, not individual “pioneers.” But regardless of what order they come in, the phases all push in the same direction: gentrification heightens the worth of neighborhoods and cities until they become uninhabitable for average people.

Clay’s stages of gentrification are useful to understand how the process happens, but they don’t answer the fundamental question of why. Why do neighborhoods and entire cities all of a sudden become hot for reinvestment? There’s a critical preparatory phase missing from the analysis, a phase zero. Cities’ real estate and zoning policies are determined by local, state, and federal governments. And so for phases one through five to happen, governments have to be willing to allow for it.

There’s still debate in academic circles about what forces convince lawmakers to welcome or encourage gentrification. Some view gentrification as a production-driven process: real estate developers who see profit potential in inner cities are luring in the young and moneyed, displacing those who aren’t as profitable. Others argue gentrification is a consumption-driven process that is more about a million Everett Ortners converging on cities—that generations of white people raised in the suburbs have come to see the inner city as a space for personal liberation and economic possibility, and therefore create spaces within cities that conform to their needs. The negative effects of gentrification (displacement, cultural loss, etc.), in this view, are just unfortunate ancillary consequences of the compounded individual decisions of millions of former suburbanites who believe they’d be better off in the city. To be sure, consumption explanations have some merit: inner-cities are attractive cultural spaces. I know several dozen young white people who were raised in the suburbs and who believed the only place they could live a good life was in the city.

They came to New York to be artists, activists, authors

, and other types of creatives, and/or to liberate themselves from the familial expectations of the suburbs—to be single, gay, queer, or just different.

Others have posited that gentrification represents a more nefarious kind of individualistic expression: that of colonial power. In the same way that people of European descent colonized the Americas, some argue, gentrifiers see the inner city as a place lacking control and in need of white “civilizing” force. “

As part of the experience of postwar suburbanization

, the U.S. city came to be seen as an ‘urban wilderness,’” Neil Smith wrote in his landmark 1996 book on gentrification, The New Urban Frontier. “In the language of gentrification, the appeal to frontier imagery has been exact: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders and urban cowboys became the new folk heroes of the urban frontier.”

It’s hard to argue that gentrifiers don’t often harbor this troubling colonialist mind-set. I’ve heard countless times about people who think the only way to make a neighborhood better or safer is for them to move into it. And the language developers and gentrifiers use is often dripping with imperialist subtext. When a new apartment building opened on the west side of Times Square in 1983 (back then a non-gentrified area), its owners advertised in the New York Times with a full-page spread that celebrated the “

taming of the wild, wild West

” where “the trailblazers have done their work.”

Often stores in gentrifying areas will hint at these semi-subconscious colonialist sympathies. In Brooklyn, there’s Empire Mayonnaise and Outpost Café (outpost of what?), both of which are glaringly white businesses in predominantly black neighborhoods. In 2014, a building opened in Bushwick, a predominantly Hispanic section of Brooklyn, called Colony 1209. Its sales materials sound like gentrification-themed self-parody: “

Here you’ll find a

How Gentrification Works

The word gentrification was coined by
British sociologist Ruth Glass
in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside.
“
One by one, many of the working class quarters
have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Even then, gentrification meant remaking a neighborhood for new incomers and to the detriment of current residents.
The first mention of gentrification stateside seems to have occurred four years later, in 1969, when a white Brooklyn man named Everett Ortner founded the Brownstone Revival Committee, a nonprofit committed to the “brownstone lifestyle.” Ortner began publishing The Brownstoner, a magazine dedicated to convincing other middle- and upper-class white people to move to Brooklyn. One article in the magazine proclaimed, “
Gentrification is not ‘genocide’ but ‘genesis.’
” Gentrification supporters such as Ortner were intent on persuading the gentry that gentrification was an organic movement made up of people who wanted to improve neighborhoods—in other words, he and others wanted to shift the focus from larger forces to individual decisions. Ortner wrote in The Brownstoner, “
I think one should approach the acquisition
of a brownstone, the way one goes into a love affair: To the non-lover it is merely a row house. To the brownstone connoisseur, it is part of an architecturally homogeneous cityscape, scaled perfectly for its function, housing many but offering each person space and privacy and a civilized style of living.”
But even then, in the early days of gentrification, the process had just as much to do with a specific set of policies and corporations that benefited from them as it did with love. The first Back to the City Conference, established by Ortner in 1974, was sponsored by a real estate industry group called the Development Council of New York City as well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “
The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes
is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.”
Ortner and his fellow members of the Brownstone Revival Committee, like similar groups in cities across the country, were instrumental in crafting the narrative of good-hearted pioneers the media still cling to today. Yet Ortner’s story proves that gentrification was never really about individual pioneers, but rather about a confluence of policies pushed by wealthy individuals, politicians, and the companies that stood to benefit from a gentrified neighborhood. Today gentrification has become an even more pronounced top-down process.

In 1979,
MIT urban studies professor Phillip Clay
outlined four distinct phases of gentrification, which remain remarkably applicable today. According to Clay, the first phase begins when individuals, unsupported by any government or large institution, decide to begin moving into a previously poor neighborhood and renovating houses. National media pay little attention, and any increase in the concentration of gentrifiers comes largely from word of mouth. There’s some evidence that historically this phase of gentrification was often spearheaded by gays and lesbians in search of safe spaces outside homogenized suburbia where they could congregate.
San Francisco experienced an influx of gays
during World War II, thanks in part to the military’s practice of dishonorably discharging gay men into the city via military bases on the Pacific Ocean. While there are no hard numbers,
there is evidence that the white LGBT community
, especially lesbians, also played a pioneering role in Brooklyn in the 1970s. New Orleans’s largely white queer scene today also seems one step ahead of other gentrifying places. (Detroit is an outlier here, as there’s not much of a queer scene.)
The second phase, according to Clay, is when those attracted to the neighborhood because of the change that’s already begun start buying up real estate. Some in this second wave are hoping to take part in the neighborhood’s new cultural cachet. Others are small-scale speculators, hoping they can get a house on the cheap and sell it sometime later. This is the phase when media start paying attention, and when the New York Times might write an article about whether said neighborhood is the next hot new thing, or even the next Williamsburg. Vacancies go down, and displacement begins.
I would argue that these first two phases are still happening in some cities—Detroit; Cleveland; Lexington, Kentucky; and others—where young people are flocking, where new restaurants are opening, and where intrepid reporters are sent to cover the surprising revitalization of once downtrodden cities. But these phases are also historical anachronisms at this point. Gentrification in places such as Detroit and Cleveland, while appearing as organic as the flocking of gay men to San Francisco, is today most often sponsored by the state and other powerful institutions.
Clark’s third phase is essentially what New Orleans is experiencing right now, as middle-class gentrifiers start taking on more prominent roles in gentrifying neighborhoods—sitting on committees and community boards, promoting neighborhoods to outsiders as a place where the middle class can move and maintain a high quality of life. During this phase, Clark says, you can expect banks to begin lending more frequently in previously disinvested neighborhoods. Developers (as opposed to individuals) become the preeminent renovators and builders. Police and other security forces increase to ensure that the new gentrified class feels safe. Tensions between the “old” and the “new” rise.
Stage four is when a neighborhood is already gentrified and begins to become even more wealthy. Managerial-class professionals replace the artists and punks. Properties that were held vacant by developers are turned into high-cost condos. Displacement is rampant. And gentrification begins spilling over into other, less gentrified neighborhoods.
In 1979, these phases provided a near-complete and prescient description of the process. But several researchers have suggested that today we need to add a fifth phase to that list, in order to grapple with what’s happened to places such as New York and San Francisco. Gentrification in these globalized cities is no longer about individuals, and it’s not even about local developers chasing cash in cool neighborhoods. In the words of geographer Neil Smith, it’s about “
the reach of global capital
down to the local neighborhood scale.”
Today, many development deals are initiated by foreign investors, and many neighborhoods are affordable only to the global elite. Buildings spring up that are meant less to house people and more to house the wealth of millionaires and billionaires. In a stretch of Midtown Manhattan, which has recently become filled with sky-high multimillion-dollar condo buildings,
a

New York Times

investigation found that 50 percent
of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year. In other words, the fifth and last phase of gentrification is when neighborhoods aren’t just more friendly to capital than to people but cease being places to live a normal life, with work and home and school and community spaces, and become luxury commodities.
These phases provide a good outline of how gentrification works, and they also rightly suggest that the process is predictable—that the pioneers and the coffee shops will likely be followed by the professionals and the condos, no matter where you are. But gentrification is also messier than that. Sometimes the phases happen simultaneously, or out of order. Detroit’s gentrification, for example, seems to be largely driven by professionals, not individual “pioneers.” But regardless of what order they come in, the phases all push in the same direction: gentrification heightens the worth of neighborhoods and cities until they become uninhabitable for average people.
Clay’s stages of gentrification are useful to understand how the process happens, but they don’t answer the fundamental question of why. Why do neighborhoods and entire cities all of a sudden become hot for reinvestment? There’s a critical preparatory phase missing from the analysis, a phase zero. Cities’ real estate and zoning policies are determined by local, state, and federal governments. And so for phases one through five to happen, governments have to be willing to allow for it.
There’s still debate in academic circles about what forces convince lawmakers to welcome or encourage gentrification. Some view gentrification as a production-driven process: real estate developers who see profit potential in inner cities are luring in the young and moneyed, displacing those who aren’t as profitable. Others argue gentrification is a consumption-driven process that is more about a million Everett Ortners converging on cities—that generations of white people raised in the suburbs have come to see the inner city as a space for personal liberation and economic possibility, and therefore create spaces within cities that conform to their needs. The negative effects of gentrification (displacement, cultural loss, etc.), in this view, are just unfortunate ancillary consequences of the compounded individual decisions of millions of former suburbanites who believe they’d be better off in the city. To be sure, consumption explanations have some merit: inner-cities are attractive cultural spaces. I know several dozen young white people who were raised in the suburbs and who believed the only place they could live a good life was in the city.
They came to New York to be artists, activists, authors
, and other types of creatives, and/or to liberate themselves from the familial expectations of the suburbs—to be single, gay, queer, or just different.
Others have posited that gentrification represents a more nefarious kind of individualistic expression: that of colonial power. In the same way that people of European descent colonized the Americas, some argue, gentrifiers see the inner city as a place lacking control and in need of white “civilizing” force. “
As part of the experience of postwar suburbanization
, the U.S. city came to be seen as an ‘urban wilderness,’” Neil Smith wrote in his landmark 1996 book on gentrification, The New Urban Frontier. “In the language of gentrification, the appeal to frontier imagery has been exact: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders and urban cowboys became the new folk heroes of the urban frontier.”
It’s hard to argue that gentrifiers don’t often harbor this troubling colonialist mind-set. I’ve heard countless times about people who think the only way to make a neighborhood better or safer is for them to move into it. And the language developers and gentrifiers use is often dripping with imperialist subtext. When a new apartment building opened on the west side of Times Square in 1983 (back then a non-gentrified area), its owners advertised in the New York Times with a full-page spread that celebrated the “
taming of the wild, wild West
” where “the trailblazers have done their work.”

Here you’ll find a group of like-minded settlers

, mixing the customs of their original homeland with those of one of NYC’s most historic neighborhoods to create art, community, and a new lifestyle. Let’s Homestead, Bushwick-style.” It’s worth noting that the building received a fifteen-year tax abatement from the city worth $8 million.

But these cultural explanations don’t go far enough toward explaining the why of gentrification, the phase zero. Yes, it’s important that young white people with money find inner-city spaces attractive, but at the end of the day gentrification isn’t about culture, it’s about money. Gentrifiers may be seeking art, emancipation from suburban norms, and a sense of discovery, but the entire process would grind to a halt if it weren’t profitable. Developers don’t build condos to lose money or support the arts. They don’t pressure cities to rezone entire neighborhoods because they believe in inner-city liberation. So to answer the question of why gentrification happens, we have to answer the question of how the city became profitable to gentrify.

Cities do not gentrify unless the process is profitable for real estate developers. Yes, hipsters and yuppies can move into a neighborhood and inflate local real estate values, but it is developers’ profit motive that causes massive, citywide change.

The city wasn’t always profitable. Up until the 1960s, developers could make much more money in the suburbs—buying land cheaply, constructing single-family houses, and taking advantage of a burgeoning mortgage industry to sell to the (mostly white) middle and upper classes. But at a certain point, profit potential in many suburbs was more or less maxed out. If you look at the inner-ring suburbs of New York, you can see why: by the 1960s, in places near commuter trains or within a reasonable driving distance of the city, nearly all of the land was developed and housing prices were high, making it hard for developers to buy on the cheap and sell at a markup. Sure, they could buy land even farther from the city and attempt to develop it, but commuters are only willing to travel so far, and New York’s suburban commute times were already pushing the hour mark. The city, on the other hand, was a bargain, thanks to white flight and deindustrialization.

In 1979, geographer Neil Smith came up with what has become possibly the most influential academic theory on gentrification: the rent gap. Smith posited that the more disinvested a space becomes, the more profitable it is to gentrify. The idea behind his theory is a basic tenet of free-market economics: capital will go where the rate of potential return (i.e., the potential to make profit) is greatest. Smith realized that gentrification wasn’t happening at random. It was predictable. If you wanted to find the neighborhood that would gentrify next, all you had to do was figure out where the biggest potential for profit was in a city—the place where buildings could be bought cheap and made more expensive in a short period of time.

By looking at tax data, Smith could pinpoint blocks that seemed to be gentrifiable, which usually meant buildings

were in disrepair (so they could be bought cheap) and were close to other gentrified areas (so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for gentrifiers to move in). The rent gap was the disparity between how much a property was worth in its current state and how much it would be worth gentrified. The larger the gap in a neighborhood, the higher the chance it would gentrify.

Gentrification might seem rapid when you’re in a neighborhood experiencing it firsthand, but it’s really a long game: real estate developers (at least the smart ones) know they can benefit from the vast, decades-long shifts that happen in metropolises. As Smith points out, developers reap profit by charging the highest rents they can to poor people and skimping on repairs, milking buildings for all they’re worth, and then they benefit from kicking out those residents, making repairs, and charging much more money to new residents.

“

Having produced a scarcity of capital

in the name of profit they now flood the neighborhood for the same purpose, portraying themselves all along as civic-minded heroes, pioneers taking a risk where no one else would venture, builders of a new city for the worthy populace,” Smith writes.

This milk-and-revitalize strategy can sound conspiratorial, and the reality often bears out that interpretation. New York’s real estate and banking barons bought up cheap land in the outer boroughs before they lobbied for the deindustrialization of Manhattan, so they could profit both off the city’s new condos and the industry and poor people forced into Brooklyn and Queens. But it doesn’t have to be the result of clever plotting. Creating markets where profit potential is highest—that is, purchasing declining and underfunded buildings, and then quickly renovating and flipping them—is just sound economics. A rental market where the poor are adequately provided for, where there is enough space in a neighborhood to accommodate everyone, costs building owners more and is less profitable.

This constant search for the highest profit potential—what Smith calls a locational seesaw—is what created the suburbs, and it’s what created the gentrified cities of today’s United States. In the 1930s, most Americans were stably housed in either cities or rural areas, but the entire country was in an economic depression.

By funding the construction of roads outside cities

and by subsidizing and underwriting mortgages for suburban homes, the federal government created the suburban housing industry in a matter of years, and promoted billions of dollars in economic growth for developers. Later, once the suburbs were built out, developers had to search for new ways to revitalize their profit rate, and both gentrification and exurbanization were part of this search.

Using the rent gap theory, Smith was able to accurately predict the gentrification of many New York neighborhoods, including the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Park Slope. He looked at tax arrears data and found that gentrification happened right after buildings hit their highest level of tax debt—a sign landlords were milking their buildings by not doing repairs or paying their taxes in preparation for flipping them. The same sections of Park Slope that Everett Ortner was attempting to gentrify hit their highest levels of tax arrears in 1976. Sure enough, 1977 was the first year in which several buildings were converted from rentals to co-ops and condominiums.

Between 1977 and 1984, there were 130 such conversions

in Park Slope. The neighborhood’s rapid conversions accounted for 21 percent

of all such activity in the entire borough those years.

Does Smith’s theory mean every gentrifier is seeking a high return on profit? Of course not. And it doesn’t mean developers are even conscious of the dynamic they’re playing into. But regardless of individual intent, the basic tenet holds true: gentrification works on a mass scale only because most inner cities have been purposely depressed and therefore are now profitable to reinvest in. That led Smith to conclude that “

gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement

all right, but a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people.”

Most cities in the US experienced slow bleeds of capital thanks to deindustrialization and white flight, which eventually made their inner cities ripe for gentrification. But New Orleans’s economic devalorization was instant, thanks to Katrina. The city’s real estate was already relatively inexpensive before the storm, but Katrina pushed values low enough that even hobby investors could afford to snatch up a few damaged properties. And the storm made the potential value of the place higher: before Katrina, many New Orleans neighborhoods were not exactly welcoming of (white) outsiders. Crime was high. Most neighborhoods were majority black. The storm changed that, allowing developers to envision entire neighborhoods as majority white or at least more mixed, more upscale, and therefore more profitable. With real estate prices low and the potential for remaking the city high, the rent gap was bigger than ever, and so it made economic sense to gentrify New Orleans.

Private profit only partially explains gentrification, though. Gentrification may not happen without the confluence of shifting cultural desires and newly focused real estate capital, but its pervasiveness—its existence not only in major cultural and economic capitals but also in rural towns and midsized postindustrial middle American cities—can be explained only by the active promotion of gentrification by a third party, a party large enough to influence policy: the government.

For the past half century, as the federal government has repeatedly slashed funds for everything from public housing to neighborhood development, anti-poverty programs to public transit, cities have been left to fend for themselves. And that’s pushed many into “entrepreneurial” and neoliberal forms of government—encouraging the growth of businesses and industries that in turn encourage the attraction of high-income and upper-middle-income families into cities. Through their taxes, those families help pay for the basic necessities of cities that used to be funded by the federal government. At the same time, cities have been forced into slashing the budgets of necessary but expensive parts of any good city: parks, transit, programs for the poor. In other words, cities are looking for the rich and the upper middle class to use their tax dollars and spending power to fund what used to be paid for by America’s semi-robust federal welfare state.

Detroit, New Orleans, and countless other cities are hoping the spending power of millennials who can afford to live consumption-oriented lifestyles will provide the tax dollars that everyone relies on. In richer cities with more infrastructure, such as San Francisco and New York, governments are relying on those millennials, along with big companies, millionaires, and billionaires, to provide the bulk of their tax revenue. In 1960, economist Friedrich

Hayek, one of the fathers of neoliberalism, laid out this gentrification strategy: “

Though the majority of residents may never contemplate

a change of residence, there will usually be enough people, especially among the young and more enterprising, to make it necessary for the local authorities to provide as good services at as reasonable costs as their competitors.” Hayek, who also advocated for a near-zero-spending federal government, was saying cities needed to fight for the young and moneyed in order to survive.

Nearly sixty years later, you can see that strategy playing out in most American cities: in New Orleans’s all-out attempt to attract companies, especially the movie industry, to move into the city; in Detroit’s various incentives for young people to move to the city; in San Francisco’s policy of giving Twitter and other tech companies millions in tax breaks to stay in the city and build offices in its poorest neighborhoods; in New York’s policy of subsidizing housing for the richest with the idea that they’ll help fund the rest of the city.

“

They are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes

,” New York’s billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “They’re the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy.… [I]f we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”

Federal spending on cities has been declining for decades, but it was President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 with a mandate to slash budgets, who really sealed the fate of many urban centers.

Reagan cut all nonmilitary spending

by the US government by 9.7 percent in his first term, and in his second term cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by an astonishing 40 percent, hobbling cities’ abilities to pay for public housing. The Department of Transportation also had its funding cut by about 10.5 percent during Reagan’s first term and 7.5 percent in his second. Those cuts forced cities to turn to alternative sources of funding, in particular bonds, to finance things such as public transit and road repair. But not just anyone can issue a bond—governments first had to prove they’d be able to pay that bond back. And there are only two entities that decide if a government or company is capable of paying back a bond: Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, ratings agencies that until relatively recently mostly concerned themselves with rating companies’ investment-worthiness. But now, with cities looking to take out loans to fund their operations, the agencies rated cities in the same way. They’d downgrade the rating of any government with high spending (i.e., a basic social safety net) and not enough income (i.e., too many poor people).

That’s exactly what happened to Detroit

: its costs were too high and its income too low, and so its credit rating was downgraded again and again until it was nearly impossible for the city to get a loan.

The result, to paraphrase planning and geography professor Jason Hackworth

, was that cities were forced into becoming more entrepreneurial in a short period of time. They hired city managers and PR teams in a quest to turn themselves into profitable entities, as if cities were corporations. It’s not uncommon these days for smaller cities to launch campaigns in larger ones, attempting to lure monied twenty- and thirtysomethings away.

At one point ads promoting “Life in Cbus

” (Columbus, Ohio) with slogans such as “Where Standing Out Never Means Standing Alone” littered Metro stations in Washington, DC. Philadelphia also paid for promotional billboards in Washington,

DC, as well as in Chicago, and started an organization called Campus Philly, which runs incentives to get people who come to the city for college to stay once they graduate.

New Orleans has been less direct, but no less committed to wooing rich people to the city.

Through its tax credit programs

, the city has incentivized tech companies and movie and TV studios to set up shop in the city.

It sold off properties (many abandoned since Katrina)

in poor areas to luxury developers.

It began marketing residential neighborhoods

beyond the French Quarter in its tourism ads, especially rapidly gentrifying ones such as the Marigny and Bywater (this inspired a pretty great parody video in which a black New Orleanian makes fun of all the new white tourists in the Bywater getting their bikes stolen).

That’s all left New Orleans a radically different place than it was pre-Katrina: it’s richer, whiter, and slightly less populous. And this newer, richer, whiter city was built on the forced removal of tens of thousands of poor black people, which sounds terrible—unless you’re a member of a city government that is only concerned with its bottom line. If that’s the case, things are going great.

“

Hurricane Katrina was an awful event

,” Ryan Berni, a senior aide to Mayor Mitch Landrieu, told Politico in 2015. “But it presented the opportunity for New Orleans to become this country’s laboratory and hub for innovation and change.”

3 Destroy to Rebuild

There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.”

after the storm, but

of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA

after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A year later, there were at least 111,000

Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta.

“

FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could

,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.”

There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearly 600 New Orleanians were housed in Utah, of all places, after the storm. Tens of thousands more were scattered between southern states such as Georgia and Texas. Many never came back, either because they couldn’t afford to or because they didn’t want to—their homes and communities had been destroyed, and they’d already begun making new lives and building new communities where they’d settled.

But Idakula was determined to go home. Needing the money and running out of options, she changed her application to claim she planned to settle in Atlanta, and when she checked her bank account a few days later, she found a direct deposit from FEMA.

Living in New Orleans now isn’t easy for Idakula.

Home prices in Bywater, where she lives, doubled post-Katrina

. That mirrored the jump in rent across the city: in New Orleans the average amount spent on rent citywide rose from 14 percent of income before the storm to 35

percent.

Idakula is able to afford her two-bedroom home only because her landlord, a retired activist who wanted to make sure someone black and involved in social justice could still live in Bywater, charges Idakula $500 a month.

“It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”

Wayne Glapion has a similar feeling. He grew up in Tremé, a neighborhood famous for its concentration of free people of color—African Americans who were not enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and usually had some European ancestors—and more recently for its concentration of jazz musicians and other cultural icons in the city. Glapion, a New Orleans–born music manager, has been battling ever since the storm to hold on to his piece of Tremé, a traditional double shotgun house that his parents bought in 1945.

For Glapion, every step back was a difficult one. After Katrina struck, he was forced to paddle in a small boat from that house to dry land. He then walked to the Convention Center, one of the city’s rescue operations centers notorious for the disarray and lack of services. A bus eventually took him to an army base near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He’d been separated from his extended family by the storm and heard some had been taken to Fort Worth, Texas. Glapion wanted to get back to them, so he left the base on foot, hoping to walk the nearly twenty miles to town to find a car, plane, or anything else that would get him to Fort Worth. A few miles into his walk, a white couple stopped him and asked, “Are you a refugee from New Orleans?”

“I didn’t think of myself as a refugee,” Glapion told me. “But I guess I was.”

The couple offered to pay for a rental car for Glapion, and so he drove to Fort Worth. He left two weeks later to return to New Orleans and rebuild his grandparents’ house.

“The grass was still gray, there were no birds, no insects,” he said.

Glapion would work at gutting the house every day, sleep in his van most nights, and every Wednesday and Sunday drive three and a half hours to Lake Charles, where his cousin lived, to shower. Nearly every day in New Orleans he’d be approached by National Guard troops or private military contractors who told him he couldn’t be there. He often feared for his life as he gutted his house, and for good reason: racist violence was rampant in New Orleans after Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm,

one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover

was found shot and burned nearly beyond recognition in the back of a police car. Five police officers were found to be involved in the shooting and apparent attempted cover-up of Glover’s death. One, David Warren, who shot the unarmed Glover, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was acquitted after an appeal in 2013. It wasn’t until 2015 that Glover’s death was ruled a homicide.

Police also shot and killed two unarmed people

who were attempting to get to a hotel on higher ground via a bridge.

“

These are some of the 40,000 extra troops

that I have demanded,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded.… I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”

Glapion didn’t see himself as a “hoodlum,” but he knew the cops might view him as one. But he risked arrest, or worse, and continued to rebuild.

“They threatened to send me to Angola [the Louisiana State Penitentiary],” he said. “But they didn’t understand the importance of this city. I was trying to get it back to what it was.”

Glapion spent years keeping the house up, slowly making the repairs it required, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to hold on to it. Neither FEMA nor Louisiana’s Road Home program ever provided enough money to fully repair the house, so it was left partially dilapidated, and eventually he ran out of funds. Recently he sold the home to an investor who plans to convert the two-family shotgun into a single-family home. Glapion still lives in New Orleans, but now in another neighborhood, further north than Tremé.

“It’s not the same city anymore,” Wayne told me over coffee at a café near a club he promotes downtown. “It’s still vibrant. And it’s gonna come back. But I’m not going to say better than it was, because I know too many people who couldn’t come back. The city’s going to have a somewhat new face.”

Gentrifying New Orleans took more than keeping black people out. Institutions needed to be dismantled. First came the public schools.

Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system

was like many others in poor US cities: underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming. Less than two years later it looked nothing like any other school system in the country. It was still underperforming, overcrowded, and underfunded, but it was now, with the exception of only four schools, the nation’s first all-charter school district.

Nearly every conservative pundit and institution, from the American Enterprise Institute to one of the biggest backers of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, called on Louisiana to use Katrina as an opportunity to transform the city’s school system.

“

This is a tragedy

,” Friedman wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Just weeks after the storm, Governor Blanco signed Legislative Act 35 into law. The bill empowered the state to take over any “failing” school districts across the state, though its timing made it obvious that the law’s intent was to take over the New Orleans school system. Louisiana already had a law on the books allowing it to take over schools that achieved an average of 45 points or less on the state’s standardized School Performance Score for four years in a row. But by July 2004, the state had only exercised its power to take over one Orleans Parish School Board school. Three months before the storm, the state had taken over only four OPSB schools, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s schools did not fall below a score of 45 for four consecutive years. But Blanco’s new LA 35, passed in the wake of Katrina, drastically changed the state’s standards: after Katrina, any school that fell below the state average of 87.5 could be transferred to state control. The vast majority of New Orleans schools failed to meet this threshold, and the state was able to move nearly every New Orleans school to a new Recovery School District (RSD) within two years of the storm.

Research from Tulane University

found that many New Orleans schools fell just under that 87.5-point score but were transferred to the new district anyway, while no other schools in Louisiana that scored above a 60

were taken over by the state.

Activists called the takeover an educational land grab

Fast-forward ten years, and conservatives and other pro-charter reformers are now using New Orleans as a model for cities struggling to educate their kids.

Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful

: its high school graduation rate is now almost 80 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004. But it’s unclear if that’s as good a sign as it seems, as

only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD

are graduating with ACT test scores high enough to get them into a college in Louisiana. That’s still 2 percent better than before the storm, but by no means a success story.

There’s also evidence that black students aren’t getting the same benefits from the new school system as everyone else.

A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent

of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way.

And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents

to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs. To attend those, students have to be picked up by parents and driven to other schools, as no public transportation for extracurriculars is provided.

The takeover of New Orleans’s school district also enabled the state to dismantle a bastion of the city’s black middle class: the teachers’ union. The United Teachers of New Orleans represented 7,500 teachers before the storm. Ninety percent of teachers in the Orleans Parish School Board were black. But when the state took over New Orleans’s schools, all 7,500 were fired and had to reapply in the new state-run district.

“

It is about breaking unions

,” the head of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, said at the time. “It is about breaking the spirit of working-class people. It is about denying them their rights.”

Those who were hired back were stripped

of their collective bargaining rights, in many cases were threatened with dismissal if they discussed their salaries, and were given “at-will” contracts, meaning their employment could be terminated at any time. And it’s unclear how many of those 7,500 teachers were in fact hired in the new district. One clue as to how many weren’t rehired comes from a Tulane study that looked at the years of experience teachers in New Orleans had pre- and post-Katrina.

During the 2004–2005 school year, only 9.7 percent

of New Orleans teachers had less than one year of teaching experience. Nearly 30 percent had twenty-five or more years of experience. But in the 2007–2008 school year, 36.7 percent of teachers had one year or less of experience, and only 11.6 percent had more than twenty-five.

The other bastion of black New Orleans was the city’s public housing, which came in the form of traditional brick projects: C. J. Peete, Melpomene, B. W. Cooper, St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Lafitte, Iberville, and Press Park. Today, nearly all are gone. Some have been replaced by mixed-income, privately run, for-profit housing such as River Garden. Some are still empty lots awaiting private development.

In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.

Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing

were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement. Some cities were hit particularly hard by Hope VI. Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing. Philadelphia lost 7,800. New Orleans started out with less public housing than those cities, but the destruction of 5,628 units of housing has nonetheless been a burden to the poor here.

Plans to demolish several New Orleans housing projects, including St. Thomas, were under way years before Katrina, but with tens of thousands still evacuated from the city, and the city’s politics shaken up by the storm, the demolitions were able to proceed at a much faster pace. The rhetorical attacks on public housing began just days after the storm.

“

The storm destroyed a great deal

,” Finis Shelnutt, a real estate developer, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel in September, “and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money.… Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don’t come back.… The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the US.”

Local politicians used the storm as an excuse to ramp up attacks on public housing as well. “

There’s just been a lot of pampering

, and at some point you have to say, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” said Oliver Thomas, a city councilman at the time. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now.”

One state representative went as far as to say

that public housing residents should be sterilized. And former US representative Richard Baker, who’d represented Baton Rouge for ten terms, said: “

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans

.… We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

the City Council finally voted to knock down

the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard),

that means 12,381 people

, 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two

decades, most right after Katrina.

In the city’s new housing developments, there are no tenants’ rights groups, and residents told me there’s no sense of community either.

Instead, management groups run by nonprofits and private companies

monitor the mixed-income developments with a close eye and a penchant for unnecessary discipline.

“What is activism going to look like in these places? What is speaking truth to power going to look like? What is social services going to look like in these new places?” Kool Black asked me when we met near his apartment, about ten miles away from St. Thomas in a sprawling, suburban-ish section of the city called New Orleans East, where he’s lived since the demolition of the projects. “This is what they destroyed with Hope VI.”

The storm also decimated the city’s market-rate housing stock, and the programs put in place to help those living in single-family dwellings come back to the city were deeply flawed and racially biased as well.

Road Home, Louisiana’s main program

meant to help homeowners rebuild their houses, was meant to distribute billions of dollars from the federal government. But by 2008, two-thirds of the funds hadn’t yet been doled out.

And in 2011, a court found that Road Home

distributed grants in a racially biased way, awarding homeowners in majority-white neighborhoods more money to rebuild than those with similar homes in majority-black neighborhoods.

Those who couldn’t make it home, or who could only afford to partially fix up their Katrina-damaged homes thanks to lackluster government grants, often found their properties seized and auctioned off by the city. If the city considers a home blighted (which could just mean, for example, it needs a paint job or its grass is overgrown), the city cites it and imposes steep fines often adding up to thousands of dollars a month. If the owner doesn’t fix the property within a month or can’t pay off the fines, the city imposes a lien on the property and then waits another thirty days. If the owner is unable to bring the property up to code by then, the city claims the property as its own and puts it up for sale in an online auction. Since 2010 the city has sold off or demolished at least 13,000 properties, most of which were abandoned after Katrina and many of which are in rapidly gentrifying areas.

With far fewer public housing projects and a thinned housing stock, New Orleans is now more expensive than ever. In 2016, one nonprofit found

New Orleans was the second-least-affordable housing market

in the country based on how many people devoted 50 percent or more of their income to rent. The increased unaffordability represents another factor in the city’s mass displacement. I talked to several former New Orleans residents living in Houston and other parts of the South who did not experience direct discrimination via FEMA or other governmental agencies. But

they’d found relatively affordable housing elsewhere—in Houston or Dallas, Atlanta or Shreveport—and so they decided to stay. They wanted to return, but they were simply priced out.

The irony is that in remaining ignorant of their class positions, gentrifiers often become victims of the process. If you look toward San Francisco and New York, cities that have a few decades of gentrification under their belts, you’ll see that the gentrifiers—punks, artists, LGBT communities—are inevitably replaced by a flood of hipsters with more money, and those hipsters with more money are then pushed out by yuppies with even more money. Small, independent businesses give way to Starbucks and bank branches. Rising housing costs put a strain on everyone, even the white middle class. And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less. There are few winners in gentrification. As Ruth Idakula put it, if the city is a ladder, gentrification pushes everyone down one rung: the most disenfranchised get pushed off completely, the middle class ends up on the bottom rung, and even the rich feel pressure from the top.

they are affected in less tangible ways. A completely gentrified neighborhood is a boring neighborhood, and a completely gentrified city (a good example being New York) is a boring city, one that can’t provide the social life, diversity, and sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “

We must understand that self-destruction of diversity

is caused by success, not failure.”

Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?

John and Alicia Winter moved to New Orleans for the same reasons most people move to New Orleans: it’s cheap compared to other major cities and, as John put it, it “feels European.”

“This is like the closest to a European city in America,” he told me. “It reminds me of Brussels.”

John is from London, Alicia’s from Texas, and both lived in Houston before deciding to move here. John programs software for banks and energy companies and works from home, so he can work anywhere. Alicia works in education. Now that they’ve moved, she’s hoping to open her own day care center. The thirtysomething couple said they were ready to start new lives in a truly urban setting, and both decided that Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.

“In Houston they’re not passionate about the city,” John told me.

Alicia agreed. Plus, she said, Houston was missing New Orleans’s diversity.

“It’s nice to be in a place with a range of incomes,” she said.

The proportion of vacant buildings in the Freret neighborhood

dropped from 28 to 16 percent between 2008 and 2010, a sure sign that people who can afford to renovate things are moving in.

Home values have more than doubled

, from a median of $81,000 in 2000 to $184,000 in 2013. And white people have multiplied too:

between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract

, the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22

percent.

The fair where I met John and Alicia Winter, called the Freret Street Festival, takes place every year in March and is essentially an advertisement for the “new” neighborhood. Those generic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries splay their wares on the sidewalk, and the fair’s attendees (nearly all of them white) stroll through, consuming $6 sliders, parmesan fries, cold-pressed juices, and other hipster-approved items below banners reading “Welcome to the New Freret.”

John and Alicia were there checking out their new neighborhood. A few months prior, the couple had purchased a home on Upperline Street for $370,000, a price they acknowledged was much steeper than it would’ve been a few years ago. They fell in love with the neighborhood as soon as they moved, but they wanted to feel like they were part of its fabric. So they stopped into the Freret Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps low-income people in the area, to see if any volunteer opportunities were available. John wondered if he could maybe teach a computer class. Alicia wondered about the area’s child care needs. They took the business card of one of the center’s staffers and left.

Both had heard of the term gentrification. John said he hated what the process had done to a neighborhood in London called Dalston. He has a lot of friends there and said the place had changed around them, going from edgy and hip to bland and filled with yuppies.

When I asked if John and Alicia saw themselves—two young white transplants making enough money to buy a $370,000 house—as gentrifiers, both said they’d never thought about it, but that perhaps they were.

“I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing as in Dalston,” John said. “But maybe we’re the pricks changing the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel guilty and wonder if the neighbors think, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they see me.”

But both John and Alicia said they felt like they were working hard at integrating themselves. In addition to checking out volunteer opportunities, John said he made sure to hire a local to help run his software development company, even though that local had less experience than other candidates. And Alicia said she planned to make sure her new day care center was affordable, or she’d at least set up a scholarship program. Yet despite all their good intent, it seems that people like John and Alicia Winter can’t stop a changing neighborhood’s more deleterious effects.

Destroy to Rebuild

When African Americans in the city say it’s hard to live in New Orleans, many of them are not just talking about a lack of jobs, inadequate housing, or racism. They mean it is literally hard to stay here without being displaced, that it was hard to have returned here after Katrina, and that they feel they are constantly at risk of being pushed out. Between the rhetoric of politicians who said they saw Katrina as an opportunity to revamp the city, the unavailability of money for repairs and housing for people left homeless by the storm, and the one-way tickets to places far away from New Orleans that were handed out to the storm’s victims by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the message seemed clear: The city is better off without you.
There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.”

There was no official policy to displace people, but FEMA seems to have preferred to send people anywhere but back. New Orleans residents who couldn’t afford to settle somewhere else or return on their own were placed in all fifty states—anywhere but the city they’d left behind. It’s unclear exactly how many people stayed out of New Orleans after the storm, but
of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA
after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul.
A year later, there were at least 111,000
Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta.

“
FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could
,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.”
There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearly 600 New Orleanians were housed in Utah, of all places, after the storm. Tens of thousands more were scattered between southern states such as Georgia and Texas. Many never came back, either because they couldn’t afford to or because they didn’t want to—their homes and communities had been destroyed, and they’d already begun making new lives and building new communities where they’d settled.
But Idakula was determined to go home. Needing the money and running out of options, she changed her application to claim she planned to settle in Atlanta, and when she checked her bank account a few days later, she found a direct deposit from FEMA.

Living in New Orleans now isn’t easy for Idakula.
Home prices in Bywater, where she lives, doubled post-Katrina
. That mirrored the jump in rent across the city: in New Orleans the average amount spent on rent citywide rose from 14 percent of income before the storm to 35 percent. Idakula is able to afford her two-bedroom home only because her landlord, a retired activist who wanted to make sure someone black and involved in social justice could still live in Bywater, charges Idakula $500 a month.

She told me she has no problem with white people moving to the area, but she wishes they had an understanding of the power they carry. When white people, followed by white businesses, show up in a place like Bywater, they seem not to integrate into the fabric of a neighborhood, but take it over. Many black-owned businesses on St. Claude Avenue, the fast-gentrifying strip at Bywater’s northern edge, simply never reopened after Katrina. And while the ones that took their place don’t have “Whites Only” signs in the window, their clientele suggests there’s a clear dividing line between the old and new New Orleans. On St. Claude, there’s the Healing Center (also owned and developed by Pres Kabacoff), which includes an upscale food co-op and art spaces; there are also new queer punk bars, organic juice joints, and expensive coffee shops and brunch spots. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these places in theory, Idakula said; it’s just that it feels like they’ve replaced what was before them without acknowledgment. The new people, according to Idakula, are not commingling with longtime residents in a melting pot, but instead are reaping benefit from the physical removal of 100,000 black people.
“It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”
Wayne Glapion has a similar feeling. He grew up in Tremé, a neighborhood famous for its concentration of free people of color—African Americans who were not enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and usually had some European ancestors—and more recently for its concentration of jazz musicians and other cultural icons in the city. Glapion, a New Orleans–born music manager, has been battling ever since the storm to hold on to his piece of Tremé, a traditional double shotgun house that his parents bought in 1945.
For Glapion, every step back was a difficult one. After Katrina struck, he was forced to paddle in a small boat from that house to dry land. He then walked to the Convention Center, one of the city’s rescue operations centers notorious for the disarray and lack of services. A bus eventually took him to an army base near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He’d been separated from his extended family by the storm and heard some had been taken to Fort Worth, Texas. Glapion wanted to get back to them, so he left the base on foot, hoping to walk the nearly twenty miles to town to find a car, plane, or anything else that would get him to Fort Worth. A few miles into his walk, a white couple stopped him and asked, “Are you a refugee from New Orleans?”
“I didn’t think of myself as a refugee,” Glapion told me. “But I guess I was.”
The couple offered to pay for a rental car for Glapion, and so he drove to Fort Worth. He left two weeks later to return to New Orleans and rebuild his grandparents’ house.
“The grass was still gray, there were no birds, no insects,” he said.
Glapion would work at gutting the house every day, sleep in his van most nights, and every Wednesday and Sunday drive three and a half hours to Lake Charles, where his cousin lived, to shower. Nearly every day in New Orleans he’d be approached by National Guard troops or private military contractors who told him he couldn’t be there. He often feared for his life as he gutted his house, and for good reason: racist violence was rampant in New Orleans after Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm,
one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover
was found shot and burned nearly beyond recognition in the back of a police car. Five police officers were found to be involved in the shooting and apparent attempted cover-up of Glover’s death. One, David Warren, who shot the unarmed Glover, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was acquitted after an appeal in 2013. It wasn’t until 2015 that Glover’s death was ruled a homicide.
Police also shot and killed two unarmed people
who were attempting to get to a hotel on higher ground via a bridge.
“
These are some of the 40,000 extra troops
that I have demanded,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded.… I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”
Glapion didn’t see himself as a “hoodlum,” but he knew the cops might view him as one. But he risked arrest, or worse, and continued to rebuild.
“They threatened to send me to Angola [the Louisiana State Penitentiary],” he said. “But they didn’t understand the importance of this city. I was trying to get it back to what it was.”
Glapion spent years keeping the house up, slowly making the repairs it required, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to hold on to it. Neither FEMA nor Louisiana’s Road Home program ever provided enough money to fully repair the house, so it was left partially dilapidated, and eventually he ran out of funds. Recently he sold the home to an investor who plans to convert the two-family shotgun into a single-family home. Glapion still lives in New Orleans, but now in another neighborhood, further north than Tremé.
“It’s not the same city anymore,” Wayne told me over coffee at a café near a club he promotes downtown. “It’s still vibrant. And it’s gonna come back. But I’m not going to say better than it was, because I know too many people who couldn’t come back. The city’s going to have a somewhat new face.”

Gentrifying New Orleans took more than keeping black people out. Institutions needed to be dismantled. First came the public schools.
Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system
was like many others in poor US cities: underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming. Less than two years later it looked nothing like any other school system in the country. It was still underperforming, overcrowded, and underfunded, but it was now, with the exception of only four schools, the nation’s first all-charter school district.
Nearly every conservative pundit and institution, from the American Enterprise Institute to one of the biggest backers of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, called on Louisiana to use Katrina as an opportunity to transform the city’s school system.
“
This is a tragedy
,” Friedman wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Fast-forward ten years, and conservatives and other pro-charter reformers are now using New Orleans as a model for cities struggling to educate their kids.
Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful
: its high school graduation rate is now almost 80 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004. But it’s unclear if that’s as good a sign as it seems, as
only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD
are graduating with ACT test scores high enough to get them into a college in Louisiana. That’s still 2 percent better than before the storm, but by no means a success story.
There’s also evidence that black students aren’t getting the same benefits from the new school system as everyone else.
A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent
of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way.

And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents
to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs. To attend those, students have to be picked up by parents and driven to other schools, as no public transportation for extracurriculars is provided.
The takeover of New Orleans’s school district also enabled the state to dismantle a bastion of the city’s black middle class: the teachers’ union. The United Teachers of New Orleans represented 7,500 teachers before the storm. Ninety percent of teachers in the Orleans Parish School Board were black. But when the state took over New Orleans’s schools, all 7,500 were fired and had to reapply in the new state-run district.
“
It is about breaking unions
,” the head of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, said at the time. “It is about breaking the spirit of working-class people. It is about denying them their rights.”

Those who were hired back were stripped
of their collective bargaining rights, in many cases were threatened with dismissal if they discussed their salaries, and were given “at-will” contracts, meaning their employment could be terminated at any time. And it’s unclear how many of those 7,500 teachers were in fact hired in the new district. One clue as to how many weren’t rehired comes from a Tulane study that looked at the years of experience teachers in New Orleans had pre- and post-Katrina.
During the 2004–2005 school year, only 9.7 percent
of New Orleans teachers had less than one year of teaching experience. Nearly 30 percent had twenty-five or more years of experience. But in the 2007–2008 school year, 36.7 percent of teachers had one year or less of experience, and only 11.6 percent had more than twenty-five.
The other bastion of black New Orleans was the city’s public housing, which came in the form of traditional brick projects: C. J. Peete, Melpomene, B. W. Cooper, St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Lafitte, Iberville, and Press Park. Today, nearly all are gone. Some have been replaced by mixed-income, privately run, for-profit housing such as River Garden. Some are still empty lots awaiting private development.
In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.

Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing
were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement. Some cities were hit particularly hard by Hope VI. Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing. Philadelphia lost 7,800. New Orleans started out with less public housing than those cities, but the destruction of 5,628 units of housing has nonetheless been a burden to the poor here.
Plans to demolish several New Orleans housing projects, including St. Thomas, were under way years before Katrina, but with tens of thousands still evacuated from the city, and the city’s politics shaken up by the storm, the demolitions were able to proceed at a much faster pace. The rhetorical attacks on public housing began just days after the storm.
“
The storm destroyed a great deal
,” Finis Shelnutt, a real estate developer, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel in September, “and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money.… Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don’t come back.… The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the US.”
Local politicians used the storm as an excuse to ramp up attacks on public housing as well. “
There’s just been a lot of pampering
, and at some point you have to say, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” said Oliver Thomas, a city councilman at the time. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now.”

One state representative went as far as to say
that public housing residents should be sterilized. And former US representative Richard Baker, who’d represented Baton Rouge for ten terms, said: “
We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans
.… We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Soon after Katrina, the demolition of St. Thomas was fast-tracked, and the City Council began debating what to do with the city’s remaining four projects. Thanks to a well-organized protest movement and infighting in the City Council, the removal of the city’s remaining 4,500 units of public housing was delayed. But in 2007, with its first white majority in more than two decades,
the City Council finally voted to knock down
the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard),
that means 12,381 people
, 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two decades, most right after Katrina.

The projects in New Orleans were also home to a well-organized tenants’ rights movement, and displacing thousands of black New Orleanians by demolishing public housing quelled a stronghold of black activism. In St. Thomas in the 1990s, activists such as Robert Horton, who goes by the name Kool Black, helped form first-of-their-kind networks for community policing and after-school activities for kids. And St. Thomas was one of the first public housing projects to establish a board of residents that worked with nonprofits in the area to ensure that government-funded services in public housing were actually benefiting residents.
In the city’s new housing developments, there are no tenants’ rights groups, and residents told me there’s no sense of community either.
Instead, management groups run by nonprofits and private companies
monitor the mixed-income developments with a close eye and a penchant for unnecessary discipline.
“What is activism going to look like in these places? What is speaking truth to power going to look like? What is social services going to look like in these new places?” Kool Black asked me when we met near his apartment, about ten miles away from St. Thomas in a sprawling, suburban-ish section of the city called New Orleans East, where he’s lived since the demolition of the projects. “This is what they destroyed with Hope VI.”
The storm also decimated the city’s market-rate housing stock, and the programs put in place to help those living in single-family dwellings come back to the city were deeply flawed and racially biased as well.
Road Home, Louisiana’s main program
meant to help homeowners rebuild their houses, was meant to distribute billions of dollars from the federal government. But by 2008, two-thirds of the funds hadn’t yet been doled out.
And in 2011, a court found that Road Home
distributed grants in a racially biased way, awarding homeowners in majority-white neighborhoods more money to rebuild than those with similar homes in majority-black neighborhoods.
Those who couldn’t make it home, or who could only afford to partially fix up their Katrina-damaged homes thanks to lackluster government grants, often found their properties seized and auctioned off by the city. If the city considers a home blighted (which could just mean, for example, it needs a paint job or its grass is overgrown), the city cites it and imposes steep fines often adding up to thousands of dollars a month. If the owner doesn’t fix the property within a month or can’t pay off the fines, the city imposes a lien on the property and then waits another thirty days. If the owner is unable to bring the property up to code by then, the city claims the property as its own and puts it up for sale in an online auction. Since 2010 the city has sold off or demolished at least 13,000 properties, most of which were abandoned after Katrina and many of which are in rapidly gentrifying areas.

With far fewer public housing projects and a thinned housing stock, New Orleans is now more expensive than ever. In 2016, one nonprofit found
New Orleans was the second-least-affordable housing market
in the country based on how many people devoted 50 percent or more of their income to rent. The increased unaffordability represents another factor in the city’s mass displacement. I talked to several former New Orleans residents living in Houston and other parts of the South who did not experience direct discrimination via FEMA or other governmental agencies. But they’d found relatively affordable housing elsewhere—in Houston or Dallas, Atlanta or Shreveport—and so they decided to stay. They wanted to return, but they were simply priced out.

This is what gentrifiers and gentrification boosters often fail to grasp about gentrification: it’s not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss. Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival. Gentrifiers might even have noble intent—to become a part of a community, to help better a community, to fight for political change. Or they might just be there for the cheaper rent. Either way, it is rare to see gentrifiers take a full reckoning of history and recognize that their presence is often predicated upon the lessened quality of life of someone else, the displacement of someone else, or, in the case of New Orleans, the death of someone else. A gentrifier’s intent isn’t meaningless. A new neighbor concerned with his or her new neighborhood can make strides toward healing the wounds brought by gentrification. A neighbor concerned with preserving the culture of a neighborhood or joining in political action can make a real difference. Intent helps, but intent cannot stop gentrification. As New Orleans’s history shows, being white and having more money than most people in a given neighborhood gives you more buying power, more privilege, and more autonomy than those who have been systematically held back from achieving the same levels of wealth. I believe this is why gentrifiers do not like to acknowledge that they are gentrifiers: they do not want to feel like perpetrators of violence and inequality.
The irony is that in remaining ignorant of their class positions, gentrifiers often become victims of the process. If you look toward San Francisco and New York, cities that have a few decades of gentrification under their belts, you’ll see that the gentrifiers—punks, artists, LGBT communities—are inevitably replaced by a flood of hipsters with more money, and those hipsters with more money are then pushed out by yuppies with even more money. Small, independent businesses give way to Starbucks and bank branches. Rising housing costs put a strain on everyone, even the white middle class. And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less. There are few winners in gentrification. As Ruth Idakula put it, if the city is a ladder, gentrification pushes everyone down one rung: the most disenfranchised get pushed off completely, the middle class ends up on the bottom rung, and even the rich feel pressure from the top.

Only those who can afford to do without the government institutions most of us rely on every day—those with private transportation, money for private schools, and enough funds to either buy real estate or withstand rent fluctuations—can float above the effects of gentrification. And while it’s hard to sympathize with the wealthy, even they are affected in less tangible ways. A completely gentrified neighborhood is a boring neighborhood, and a completely gentrified city (a good example being New York) is a boring city, one that can’t provide the social life, diversity, and sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “
We must understand that self-destruction of diversity
is caused by success, not failure.”

John and Alicia Winter moved to New Orleans for the same reasons most people move to New Orleans: it’s cheap compared to other major cities and, as John put it, it “feels European.”
“This is like the closest to a European city in America,” he told me. “It reminds me of Brussels.”
John is from London, Alicia’s from Texas, and both lived in Houston before deciding to move here. John programs software for banks and energy companies and works from home, so he can work anywhere. Alicia works in education. Now that they’ve moved, she’s hoping to open her own day care center. The thirtysomething couple said they were ready to start new lives in a truly urban setting, and both decided that Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.
“In Houston they’re not passionate about the city,” John told me.
Alicia agreed. Plus, she said, Houston was missing New Orleans’s diversity.
“It’s nice to be in a place with a range of incomes,” she said.

I met John and Alicia Winter at a street fair on Freret Street, a previously nearly abandoned strip of land in the northeast of the city. Freret is not far from some very fancy neighborhoods. It’s just north of St. Charles, which is lined by stately houses on both sides and has a famous streetcar line down its middle, and just east of Tulane and Loyola Universities, where professors and administrators inhabit some swanky digs. The area right around Freret Street has for decades housed a sizable middle-class black population. But the commercial strip of Freret Street for decades housed mostly vacant storefronts. Now the area is rapidly gentrifying.
The proportion of vacant buildings in the Freret neighborhood
dropped from 28 to 16 percent between 2008 and 2010, a sure sign that people who can afford to renovate things are moving in.
Home values have more than doubled
, from a median of $81,000 in 2000 to $184,000 in 2013. And white people have multiplied too:
between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract
, the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22 percent.

Freret feels like so many gentrifying neighborhoods in US cities. If you spun around a couple of times, you might think you were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mojo Coffee on one of Freret’s corners could be in Brooklyn or Portland, or really anywhere with enough twentysomethings with MacBooks to sustain a business that makes most of its money from $4 cups of coffee. The tattoo place could come from Austin, Texas. The burger joint could be in Uptown Minneapolis. In the same way the outskirts of every city host a confluence of chain stores—Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, OfficeMax—every city now seems to contain a Freret Street.
The fair where I met John and Alicia Winter, called the Freret Street Festival, takes place every year in March and is essentially an advertisement for the “new” neighborhood. Those generic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries splay their wares on the sidewalk, and the fair’s attendees (nearly all of them white) stroll through, consuming $6 sliders, parmesan fries, cold-pressed juices, and other hipster-approved items below banners reading “Welcome to the New Freret.”
John and Alicia were there checking out their new neighborhood. A few months prior, the couple had purchased a home on Upperline Street for $370,000, a price they acknowledged was much steeper than it would’ve been a few years ago. They fell in love with the neighborhood as soon as they moved, but they wanted to feel like they were part of its fabric. So they stopped into the Freret Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps low-income people in the area, to see if any volunteer opportunities were available. John wondered if he could maybe teach a computer class. Alicia wondered about the area’s child care needs. They took the business card of one of the center’s staffers and left.
Both had heard of the term gentrification. John said he hated what the process had done to a neighborhood in London called Dalston. He has a lot of friends there and said the place had changed around them, going from edgy and hip to bland and filled with yuppies.
When I asked if John and Alicia saw themselves—two young white transplants making enough money to buy a $370,000 house—as gentrifiers, both said they’d never thought about it, but that perhaps they were.
“I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing as in Dalston,” John said. “But maybe we’re the pricks changing the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel guilty and wonder if the neighbors think, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they see me.”
But both John and Alicia said they felt like they were working hard at integrating themselves. In addition to checking out volunteer opportunities, John said he made sure to hire a local to help run his software development company, even though that local had less experience than other candidates. And Alicia said she planned to make sure her new day care center was affordable, or she’d at least set up a scholarship program. Yet despite all their good intent, it seems that people like John and Alicia Winter can’t stop a changing neighborhood’s more deleterious effects.

Down the street from the Freret Neighborhood Center is Dennis’ Barber Shop, which Dennis Sigur has run in the same location for forty-three years. He’s seen the neighborhood go from bustling and mostly black before the city’s economic crash and white flight in the 1970s to gentrified now. His shop is not meant for gentrifiers—nothing prevents them from coming in, but Dennis makes no effort to attract them. His employees are black, and from what I could tell, so are all of his customers. The shop is busy, Dennis said, but less busy than it used to be. Yet he sees new businesses catering to white people opening constantly.

“Our customers are getting further and further away,” he said. “We’re struggling. But the welcome mat is rolled out for the newcomers.”

Freret’s newcomers have gotten a bit of red carpet treatment: After Hurricane Katrina,

the state designated Freret a cultural district

, allowing businesses opening along this strip to receive tax incentives—exemptions from income taxes for artists, tax credits for rehabbing storefronts, and the like. Only new businesses were eligible, not long-running ones like Dennis’ Barber Shop. The city also passed a zoning overlay that allowed bars and restaurants to concentrate in the area like almost nowhere else in the city. In a city that already has an abundance of liquor options, the City Council is hesitant to issue new liquor licenses, but not on Freret Street.

Thanks to that zoning overlay

, any new restaurant on Freret can apply for a liquor license without seeking the City Council’s approval. That allowed several new restaurants to open in rapid succession and attract a young, white, liquor-swigging crowd in a matter of months. That might not seem like a big deal, but imagine an alternative scenario in which restaurants on Freret were required to go through the same permitting process as everywhere else in the city. Imagine that many of the stores weren’t allowed to exist tax free for a number of years. There’s a chance Freret would’ve developed very differently.

Most New Orleanians I spoke with seemed to have no problem with the incentives used to lure people to forlorn parts of the city. But some took issue with the way they were used. If incentivizing businesses is often synonymous with bringing all-white, upscale businesses to an area, it seems obvious that the process isn’t working for everyone. In the spring of 2013, a hundred Freret-area residents crowded the cafeteria of a charter school to discuss a proposal to raise property taxes in the neighborhood and use the revenue to hire private security to patrol the area. At the meeting, two white people sat at the table representing those for the idea. Two black residents represented those who were opposed. There was so much opposition to the proposal—mostly black residents who feared security guards would add to the already rampant police harassment of black people in the neighborhood—that the proposal was shelved. But it nonetheless highlighted that in New Orleans, the revitalization of an area nearly always comes with tension between those benefiting from the new city and those who feel they’ve been left behind.

“It’s going to come to the point where if you don’t have a good income you can’t stay,” Dennis Sigur told me. “There’s a growing divide between the new and the old.”

This middle phase of gentrification—after the “pioneers” have settled in and capital goes on autopilot, seeking out any

neighborhood that seems potentially profitable—tends to divide everyone in a city, not only into black and white, rich and poor, but also into groups within those groups. Gentrifiers begin filtering into self-defined niches in order to differentiate themselves from those they feel are ruining the city. No one wants to be labeled a gentrifier, and a new class emerges: the white, relatively well-off who also hate gentrification.

Leslie Heindel fits into this category. I met Leslie through her mother, Lisa, a real estate agent whom I’d visited to talk about New Orleans real estate values. But while I was interviewing Lisa in her office in the upscale Garden District, her daughter kept stopping her work and audibly sighing. Eventually Lisa suggested she chime in. It turns out gentrification is something Leslie and her friends talk about on a near-daily basis.

Leslie said she sees gentrification as an ever-present threat to her way of life. To stay afloat in New Orleans, she works at least two bartending jobs at a time in addition to the administrative work she does at her mom’s office. She, like a growing number of twenty- and thirtysomethings, rents an apartment as opposed to owning one. She doesn’t have the money to afford a down payment on one, especially now that real estate values are skyrocketing in her city.

Over cigarettes and draft beers at a bar in the Irish Channel, just a few blocks from where Ashana Bigard lives, Leslie and her friends told me about everything wrong with New Orleans today—the movie industry coming in and taking up space and houses and jobs; Airbnb, which allows people to rent their houses for short periods of time and has been shown to cause rent inflation; the increased touristification and Disneyfication of every neighborhood near the French Quarter; and the lack of community that comes with all those things.

“I’ve worked at this bar for ten years,” Leslie told me through a cloud of Marlboro Lights smoke. “There are nights I know nobody here.”

Leslie and her friends have the luxury of being middle class, so their fear of gentrification has less to do with outright displacement and more to do with a sense of being squeezed into different neighborhoods and smaller apartments and having to take on more work in order to stay in their city. They see themselves being pushed down Ruth Idakula’s metaphorical ladder.

“Everyone who grew up here has experienced a different New Orleans,” Leslie admitted. But, she and her friends said, the changes since Katrina have been different, faster, and more tumultuous.

“If you had talked to me six years ago, I would have said we were moving in the right direction,” Leslie’s friend Crista Rock, a video producer, said. “I would’ve said the movie industry is great, and all the entrepreneurial stuff is great. I don’t think anyone could’ve foreseen this. I had real big hopes for us.”

The industries Leslie and Crista complained of had been wooed here with taxpayer money. Like every state in the country, Louisiana uses tax breaks and other incentives to lure and keep companies, but Louisiana uses more of them than most places.

The state gives away 21 cents per dollar

of the government’s budget to companies—a higher percentage than any other state besides Texas and Michigan.

In Louisiana, there’s a ten-year tax exemption

for buying materials used in manufacturing, a 40 percent tax break for companies using technology developed in the state, a 25

percent tax break for companies that record sound in Louisiana, a 100 percent five-year tax break for restoring old commercial structures, and the list goes on.

In 2011, the state gave $214 million

to make sure shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls stayed within New Orleans.

The same year, it approved tax incentives

worth $1.5 billion for Cheniere Energy, a natural gas and oil company that paid its CEO $142 million in 2013.

But no industry in Louisiana gets tax credits more often than film and television production, which is centered in New Orleans. Cheniere might’ve been the biggest single deal, but Louisiana gives away hundreds of millions for TV and movies every year.

In 2013 alone, the state gave away $251 million

in tax credits to the industry. Every time the A&E reality show Duck Dynasty filmed an episode in Louisiana, the show received incentives worth $300,000.

Those incentives bring to New Orleans thousands of high-paying jobs, which usually come with salaries higher than

New Orleans’s median income of $36,964

. This essentially creates two economies—one filled with low-paid natives, and one filled with people who make higher salaries, subsidized by Louisiana taxpayers. That second category views Louisiana’s real estate as a relative bargain. Leslie told me most of her clients now come from out of town, especially New York and Los Angeles. And so, in her own small way, Leslie is helping push herself down the ladder.

But how’s the view from the top of the ladder? If not even many gentrifiers think gentrification is good, why does it keep happening? Pres Kabacoff is one of the city’s biggest developers—he’s the one who turned the St. Thomas housing projects into for-profit mixed-use housing. And he’s intimately tied in with city decision making. He chairs the city’s Housing Task Force Committee and is a member of the Urban Land Institute, a powerful national urban planning group. When Kabacoff talks, city officials listen.

Kabacoff is a genial guy with some surprising views for a multimillionaire who makes money off private development. For example, he believes the federal government should spend way more on housing poor people, and he thinks the United States spends too much on war and not enough on things such as education. But when it comes to gentrification, Kabacoff has some troubling views for someone who wields so much power in a majority-poor, majority-black city.

“If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” he told me from his dark-wood-filled office, located in a building he owns downtown. “It’s certainly not a good solution to stop development to protect neighborhoods.”

In Kabacoff’s view, the best way for New Orleans to grow is to start looking more like New York and San Francisco: “We lost our middle income dramatically and it becomes a vicious cycle. The middle class don’t require a lot of services, but they pay for services that are provided. When your middle class leaves and your poor get more concentrated, your service needs go up—the tax base is gone and you go into a vicious downward spiral. And you get

what happened here, and in Detroit, and Newark, and Gary, Indiana.”

But what about the Ashana Bigards and even the Leslie Heindels—the people who feel they’re being pushed further and further down the ladder by his attempt to bring a sizable middle and upper-middle class to the city? His answer, essentially, was that this is an inevitable consequence of progress.

“It’s true when a neighborhood comes back many people who found it to be an affordable place are priced out,” he said. “But the cold truth is, if you’re going to revitalize a neighborhood that’s in bad shape or where market rate won’t go—because the amount of crime, the amount of poverty or the amount of minorities, or whatever keeps market rate uncomfortable moving there—one of the realities is that when the market rate come in, those people move to another neighborhood. It’s a pain in the ass, but they move.”

Given the city’s apparent willingness to incentivize, unchecked, the kind of revitalization Kabacoff and other major developers promote, I asked Kabacoff if he thought New Orleans was on its way to becoming like New York or San Francisco, where people are marching in the streets over gentrification, and where even those in the middle class feel like they’re hanging on to their cities by a thread.

“You might argue New Orleans could use a little gentrification,” he told me. “In San Francisco and New York, you reach that saturation point and once you reach that, people start to march. Am I worried about people marching in New Orleans? Not yet. We’ve got a ways to go.”

It’d be easy to paint Kabacoff as a villain, a 1 percenter toying with his city without regard to the people who live in it, but his ideas aren’t so different from Leslie Heindel’s, or the policies of most members of the New Orleans City Council, or the ideas of academics and planners and pundits who see gentrification and revitalization as near-synonyms. Most people who aren’t directly displaced by gentrification seem to want just enough of it to improve their lives, but not too much—they don’t want it to overwhelm their own bank accounts. Hipsters are fine with coffee but eye boutiques and banks with suspicion, yuppies are fine with the boutiques and banks but see landscapes radically altered by development as cultural losses, and developers such as Pres Kabacoff are fine with those landscapes as long as they don’t inspire protest. The problem is that these steps are all part of the same process, and once you start turning the city into a capital-accumulation machine, it’s kind of hard to turn back.

It’s hard to say what New Orleans will look like in ten or twenty years, but it’s become obvious that the city is almost solely focused on economic growth, not on repairing or moving beyond the trauma of Katrina. The press today in New Orleans rarely mentions gentrification or displacement. The politicians of New Orleans have all but given up trying to get any of the 100,000 displaced residents back to the city. Those former New Orleanians have disappeared, and the city has opened a new chapter, one that seems to contain no mention of race or class, just “progress.”

In an essay analyzing political rhetoric after Katrina, Colorado State University ethnic studies professor Eric Ishiwata writes that the storm shed light on the fact that many Americans still don’t accept the existence of extreme racism and extreme poverty in this county. The idea that there’s a group of people who on a daily basis are having their rights violated and their lives threatened occurs to many Americans only in moments of national trauma. Katrina was one of those moments. Weeks after the storm, the lead story in the September 19 issue of Newsweek would deem these “forgotten” people the “Other America.” And four days after Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, explained the disastrous FEMA response by saying: “

The American people don’t understand

how fascinating and unusual this is—is that we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist that suddenly are showing up on bridges or parts of the interstate that aren’t inundated.”

According to Ishiwata, phrases like these

—“people we didn’t know exist,” “the other America”—show that “a large segment of Katrina’s victims had, to the point of the disaster, been cast as personae non grata—citizen-subjects rendered invisible by the reigning neoliberal ideology of a ‘colorblind America.’”

In other words, until they were abandoned by their governments and forced onto bridges where CNN cameras delivered images of them into the homes of millions of Americans, poor black people’s lives in New Orleans rarely weighed on the conscience of Americans, even the Americans meant to protect them, such as FEMA director Michael Brown.

Katrina opened a window that allowed us to peer into the real America, but as soon as the disruptive event was over, that window closed, and the country’s consciousness went back to its usual state of ignoring the fact that black people, especially low-income black people, are daily denied democracy and equality in this country. As Ishiwata points out, we didn’t just go back to forgetting that issues of inequality and racism exist; we went back to forgetting that an entire group of disenfranchised people exists.

Closing that window explains why it took only days before people seemed to stop caring about the rebuilding of New Orleans, to stop caring that nearly 100,000 African Americans were not able to return after the storm. To many politicians and thought leaders such as David Brooks, the idea that we’d need to get a majority-black, majority-poor city back to its former self seemed unnecessary, even irresponsible. After taking a tour of the Houston Astrodome, where thousands had been bused after Katrina, former first lady Barbara Bush told a radio show that people seemed better off there than in New Orleans.

“So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said. “So this is working very well for them.”

Less than a week after the storm, when asked if he thought billions should be spent rebuilding New Orleans, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said: “

I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me

.… It looks like a lot of that place should be bulldozed.”

The country’s collective ignoring of black New Orleanians’ lives also explains why there was no federal effort

undertaken to figure out where exactly all the evacuees from Katrina had ended up. Ten years later, not one federal agency is studying the diaspora caused by Katrina.

The biggest study of their whereabouts

was performed by the nonprofit RAND Corporation, and that tracking program ended five years ago.

A decade after the man-made failures that preceded and followed Katrina tore New Orleans apart, the “other America” narrative has been completely forgotten. The chasm has closed. And a new narrative—one of rebirth and growth—has overtaken the country’s popular media.

The city has been “resurrected

,” according to the Daily Beast.

Its growth is an “economic miracle

,” according to the National Journal. The city is indeed growing at a rapid clip, making its way up the lists featured in business magazines and newspaper travel sections of the top ten places to live or work or fall in love. New Orleans, despite the tens of thousands still missing from it, is “back.” And now, with the benefit of hindsight, despite all that went wrong, and all those the recovery failed, its leaders are confirming that, yes, just like David Brooks said, Katrina was truly a blessing in disguise.

This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as “People are starting to move to that neighborhood,” or “No one used to go there, but that’s changing.” The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance. This is what is happening in New Orleans and every other gentrifying city. If you ignore the destruction of the lives of the people who’ve always mattered the least, things are going great. If you acknowledge that their lives exist and that they matter, then it becomes immediately obvious something is terribly wrong. So what does it mean that we are not only ignoring these people but increasingly erasing their narratives in the name of progress?

Here’s the image we’ve created of the gentrifying city:

People are experiencing New Orleans through fresh eyes

and ears.

People are moving to Detroit to change it

and make it better.

They’re spotting areas of Brooklyn

that have yet to be discovered.

They’re finding San Francisco’s next hot markets

They’re discovering renewal in the ruins

of abandoned sections of town.

Neighborhoods are being revitalized

Entire economies are being turned around

But we know that from the perspective of the gentrified, revitalization looks like displacement, new business opportunities often look like racial preference, and hot neighborhoods mean a loss of community.

I think both these perspectives are true: some people are discovering neighborhoods they think are hot, others are discovering they can no longer afford to live in those neighborhoods. Some people really are finding hope in the new New Orleans and the new Detroit; others are not. Whether or not gentrifiers, policy makers, and others with power and money can grapple with both narratives—the one about discovery and betterment, and the more complicated, uncomfortable one about loss, about economics and race—will determine the future of our cities.

As Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “

Private investment shapes cities

, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.”

So what image of our cities do we hold in our hearts?

4 The New Detroit

On an early summer day in 2015, Detroit Bikes, one of at least four high-end bicycle manufacturers in Detroit, opened its first retail shop downtown. The shop had recently signed a lease on the ground floor of the Albert, one of Detroit’s premier new loft conversions, which sits across from Capitol Park, a newly renovated park in an up-and-coming section of the city’s until recently barren business district. Outside, the storefront employees passed out stickers with the company’s logo and chatted up the few pedestrians passing by—some walking their dogs, others biking or walking to work. In most other cities this would be unremarkable. And today, in Detroit, it’s becoming commonplace. But even five years ago, this scene—people walking downtown, shopping, buying hundred-dollar bike saddles—would strike many Detroiters as ridiculous.

Inside the shop, Detroit Bikes founder Zak Pashak served up locally made tamales as potential customers milled about the store and surveyed the company’s offerings: two models of bikes, each priced at $700; $100 leather Brooks bike seats; $65 Bern helmets; some high-end messenger bags; other standard bike gear.

“I love downtowns, and this is the middle of a historic city,” Pashak told me after we took a seat on a bench in Capitol Park. “You just have to be aware of what you’re moving into and be as good a guest as possible.”

Not long ago, Capitol Park was crumbling. But in 2009, the city undertook a renovation of the park and sold several city-owned buildings surrounding it to private developers.

Since then, at least fifteen development projects

, mostly conversions of historic office buildings and run-down apartments into high-end condos, have been completed. Capitol Park is now one of the most expensive addresses in Detroit. You can still see parts of the old neighborhood poking through—homeless people still hang out in the park, a couple of cheap cafés and delis take up a few corners—but for the most part, the neighborhood now caters to the newly arrived aspirational-class youngsters: there are expensive and hip restaurants, ironically dive-y bars with pricey cocktails, even a John Varvatos store where shoes

start at about $400. Gentrification in much of Detroit seems to have skipped the beginning phase with the artsy folks, the laid-back coffee shops, and the activists and instead jumped straight from broke dystopian metropolis to yuppified playground.

Max Gordon, twenty-four, whom I found wandering Detroit Bikes, moved from one of the city’s wealthier suburbs a few months ago. He’s now the property manager of the apartment building that Detroit Bikes rents ground-floor space in, and he is wholeheartedly in favor of the transition the new buildings have helped bring about.

“Down here is the place to be,” he told me outside the store. “We’re on the cutting edge of everything going on.”

The Albert is jointly managed by two of Detroit’s biggest development companies, Bedrock and Broder & Sachse. Bedrock, the largest in the city, is owned by Dan Gilbert, the head of Quicken Loans, one of the largest mortgage companies in the United States. And Dan Gilbert is a kind of cheerleader for the new Detroit. In 2010, he moved Quicken’s headquarters and its thousands of employees from the suburbs to downtown Detroit. Since then he’s been on a skyscraper-buying spree:

he now owns at least eighty buildings downtown

. He’s known for curating the feeling of the streets here, recommending park designs to the city, throwing events to draw in tourists, and picking shops that fit in with his high-end yet independent aesthetic. He personally chose Detroit Bikes as a tenant in the Albert.

Gilbert’s mission, he says, is not only to make hundreds of millions of dollars on Detroit’s cheap real estate but also to transform Detroit’s downtown into a world-class destination for tourists, businesses, and especially young people. As his favorite motto goes: “

Do well by doing good

.” That mission has made him a lightning rod in the city.

He’s hailed by business leaders, city officials

, and the local and national media (one article even called him a superhero). He’s also criticized by activists for turning Detroit into somewhat of an oligarchy in which he and a few other powerful people control its redevelopment, especially downtown, which locals now often refer to as “Gilbertville.”

Part of Gilbert’s strategy has been not only to buy up Detroit but also to rebrand it. His development team has plastered hundreds of posters across the city’s downtown with “Opportunity Detroit” in a white faux-graffiti font on a black background. Buses carrying his workers also carry the logo. Some of the Opportunity Detroit posters come with inspirational quotes. “Finding opportunity is a matter of believing it’s there,” reads one.

Max Gordon, sleekly dressed in a green polo, tight jeans, and a watch made in Detroit by Shinola (another new high-end manufacturer in town; their bikes start at $1,000, their watches at $500), is one of new Detroit’s and Gilbert’s true believers. He told me that the thousands of young people moving to Detroit’s downtown were not simply a trend but a movement.

“To be involved with the young people coming downtown and the Bedrock family of companies is great,” he said. “Living here is like college when you were in freshman year. Everybody’s looking for friends. I think it’s great.”

When asked about gentrification, Max dismissed the word as divisive.

“We have to turn everything upside down to turn it right-side up,” he said, quoting verbatim from one of the

Opportunity Detroit posters that surround Capitol Park. “It’s an area that requires a lot of work.”

Zak Pashak, while a little more toned down in his rhetoric, nonetheless agreed that Gilbert’s critics, and critics of Detroit’s redevelopment in general, ought to ease up. After all, development, even if it comes with “

suspend[ed] democracy

,” as Dan Gilbert once put it, is better than no development.

“I think Gilbert is fantastic,” Pashak said. “You couldn’t ask for a more benevolent billionaire. But a lot of the people are just against change. That’s why I don’t like the word gentrification. Detroit needed change.”

Zak said he believed he was part of that change, but I pressed him on the gentrification question. I asked if he ever felt as if two Detroits might be emerging—the new Detroit, in which people can afford $1,200-a-month studio apartments and $700 bicycles, and the other Detroit, where

the per capita income is about $15,000

a year.

“We’ve got to make sure the people here are being lifted up from the rising tide,” Pashak said in response.

The reality, though, is that the rest of Detroit is still struggling economically. And for those who lived around Capitol Park before this latest wave of redevelopment, the new Detroit has been anything but a boon.

Broder & Sachse bought the building at 1214 Griswold Street in 2013 and rechristened it the Albert, after one of Detroit’s most famous Art Deco architects, Albert Kahn. Before 2013, the building housed about a hundred low-income seniors who were able to afford to live there thanks to Section 8 housing vouchers. All were evicted by Broder & Sachse, given vouchers to move elsewhere, and scattered throughout the rest of the city. Now the building houses mostly white millennials. Apartments at the Albert now start at $1,200 a month.

Broder & Sachse received a ten-year tax abatement

from the city when they began their conversion.

Across the park sits another luxury rental building. That one, owned by Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock, once housed artists. They too were evicted a few years ago. Both evictions caused protest in Detroit. But the evictions, according to Pashak and Gordon, are the price of progress.

“This is the way the market was going,” Pashak said. “Everyone here had the best of intentions.”

Todd Sachse, vice president of the development company behind the Albert’s progress, seemed to hold a similar view: “

I would bet you that of the 100 people

who moved out of here, 95 of them are happier today,” he told the Detroit Free Press.

That’s not exactly true: every one of the former residents I spoke with from the Albert seemed at best ambivalent about their departure. Sure, 1214 Griswold was falling apart, they told me, but it was convenient—downtown and near everything. Some had planned on living there until their deaths. Now many have been forced to move to Detroit neighborhoods surrounded by nothing but freeways and gas stations.

Jerome Robinson, seventy-two, used to work the assembly line for Ford and Chrysler. He grew up in what is now called Midtown. When a spot opened up in 1214 Griswold in 2007, he was ecstatic—Robinson’s eyes are bad, he can’t drive anymore, and his pharmacy, bank, library, and pretty much everything else he needed were within walking distance. Five years later he was told to leave. He now lives in a small apartment not too far from where he grew up,

but cut off from the rest of the city by a freeway. There’s little transit around him, no pharmacy, no bank.

“It bothers me,” he told me in his new living room. “We had a riot in ’67. And the Caucasians, I mean they ran. And then in the 1970s, we got a black mayor, and they ran some more. And then these guys come in and start buying up stuff and tearing down and rebuilding stuff, and they’re coming back.

“People can say whatever they want about these rich people coming in and doing this that and the other, but I was comfortable down there,” Robinson continued. “I wanted to stay there. And they kicked me out.”

The rent-gap theory—that capital flows to the rate of highest return, and return is highest after a city has been economically drained and primed for gentrification—explains the economic rationale behind the new Detroit. Detroit has been in decline for decades, but its bankruptcy in 2013 put it in position for a rent-gap rebound: not only was the city broke, but it was now run by an emergency manager named Kevyn Orr, who was intent on slashing city services and making the city more palatable for investment. And that explains why people such as Zak Pashak are now courted by powerful players like Dan Gilbert to fill Detroit’s core, while people such as Jerome Robinson are ignored (and patronizingly told that they should enjoy what is happening). Detroit did not gentrify because of the whims of people like Pashak. Pashak and his friends are the pawns of a much larger strategy of redevelopment.

In 2008, Richard Florida, perhaps the most famous urbanist in the United States, came to Detroit to keynote the Creative Cities Summit 2.0. The topic of his talk was “

the re-imagining of Detroit

.” In 2013, Florida came back again, this time to keynote the Detroit Policy Conference, where he was joined by Matt Cullen, the CEO of Dan Gilbert’s investment group, Rock Ventures, along with other leaders from around the city to talk about “designing Detroit’s brand.”

“

Already you can see the renewal

, revitalization, not from the government, but from the bootstraps, from creative people,” Florida said in a five-part video series released before the conference. “Every single person is creative and what’s key to rebuilding Detroit is harnessing the creativity of everyone.”

And in 2015, Florida was back in the city once more, this time leading Create: Detroit, a conference focused on “building a more creative and inclusive city.” That conference was sponsored by, among others, Gilbert’s Rock Ventures and the luxury goods company Shinola.

“We don’t have to create Detroit,” Florida said at that conference. “Detroit is creating itself.”

In each speech, and in the video series that preceded his second appearance, Florida focused on the downtown and Midtown core of the city—praising its gritty urban fabric and its historic architecture, highlighting that college-educated graduates seemed to be moving there and that new companies were opening doors there. Left unmentioned by Florida at each of those three conferences was the fact that the city was still shrinking rapidly each year, even as

Florida spoke of its rebirth.

Detroit, despite its continuous release of creative energies, lost 25 percent of its population

between 2000 and 2010. It was still declining in 2015, when its population reached its lowest level since 1850. But Florida did not focus on that part of Detroit’s story. He did not mention that most people in the city, especially those not involved in its creative rebirth, still think it’s a hard place to live:

a full third of Detroiters say they plan on leaving

within the next five years. But that’s Richard Florida’s business: convincing cities that gentrification is their only choice for an economic reboot.

Ever since his landmark book The Rise of the Creative Class was published in 2002, Florida, who is also the director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a senior editor at The Atlantic, has been urging broke cities to attract the “creative class” in order to revive themselves. And since there’s quite literally

almost no US city more broke than Detroit

, maybe it’s no surprise that, as one activist told me, “they love some Richard Florida here.”

Florida’s 2002 book provided a beacon of hope to cities struggling to rebuild their economies in the wake of a national shift away from industrialized urban centers. Globalization meant factories were closing and relocating, first to nonunion states and then overseas. And it signaled the start of the crumbling of a middle-class aspirational dream of stability and material success. Cities, in their decrepit postindustrial states, became symbols of the end of that dream. Florida provided an antidote.

Florida proposed that cities revitalize themselves by attracting the “creative class,” an amorphous category of workers Florida created to describe essentially any profession in which someone relies on a modicum of creativity to do his or her job—doctors, lawyers, artists, movie producers, accountants, hair salon owners, “high end sales” people (a category including cashiers, managers, door-to-door salespeople, real estate brokers, and models), and so on.

According to Florida, this class of people accounted for 24 percent

of the American workforce in 1980 and increased to 32.6 percent of the workforce by 2010. Florida takes this as a sign that the creative class is strong, not that, say, there are inevitably more independent entrepreneurs and creative freelancers when there are fewer full-time jobs. (In this same style of historical forgetting, Florida attributes the decline in unions to the decline in the need to push for better working conditions, not the purposeful and directed attack on organized labor during the last half century.)

The solution to the massive loss of manufacturing jobs across the United States, according to Florida, is to turn every worker into a “creative worker.”

How exactly this would be done remains a mystery

that Florida doesn’t really elucidate in his book. How does the Starbucks barista serving the creative-class lawyer become a creative barista? How do you turn an entire economy that’s built on low-wage labor into a creative economy? How do you account for the fact that the rise in the creative class seems to be coupled with the decline in the middle class?

While Florida acknowledges the limitations of the creative class—it won’t solve economic inequality, it won’t magically revitalize entire cities—he nonetheless devotes most of his book to laying out a strategy of how to structure

entire cities to cater to its preferences, with the idea explicit throughout that if they come, your city will become rich, or at least richer than it is now. Florida’s book is essentially a blueprint for gentrification. He tells cities to attract artists and other “bohemians” by catering to the whims of millennials, who, according to Florida, love things like running and living an active lifestyle (but not team sports), art galleries, buying antiques and other unique items, and fun dining experiences (not white-tablecloth restaurants).

Millennials, Florida says, are on a never-ending “quest for experience

,” and it’s a city’s job to provide a road map for that quest if it expects to take in enough money to govern.

It’s not enough for cities to just hope for these things to happen, Florida writes. Cities must plant the seeds of creative growth by investing in the three areas that attract creative people:

technology, talent, and tolerance

. In other words, cities need to invest in the high-tech sector, in education, and in ensuring that their cities are tolerant of creative people (especially gays and lesbians, who Florida says are often the creative class’s canary in the coal mine) if they expect to become bastions of bohemia.

Cities seem to gobble up Florida’s ideas not only because they’re delivered with the excitement and verve of a Baptist preacher but also because they promise a relatively easy and business-friendly solution for postindustrial American cities. No taxes need to be raised, no new roads need to be built, no new laws have to be passed—just a few tax cuts here, a few incentives there, a sprinkle of advertising and branding, and bam, your city’s a boomtown.

That’s part of the reason Florida’s book has become required reading in many urban planning and economic development departments.

The original edition sold 300,000 copies

, an unheard-of number for an urban planning book. And while there are no official surveys to back this up, I’d bet that every single head of every economic development team in nearly every midsize city in America is familiar with the book.

Downtown and Midtown Detroit are the crown jewels of Florida-led new-age urban revitalization models. There are new restaurants and galleries and lofts on every block. Average incomes are up. The anchor institutions of the city—Quicken, Rock Ventures, Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation—are all bringing new jobs to the city. If you stand on the corner of Woodward Avenue and Selden Street, it’d be impossible to deny that a lot of new stuff is happening here after years of no growth. Detroit, at least this narrow part of it, is a Florida-inspired success story, and so Detroit, at least this narrow part of it, is the new place urban planners point to as a success.

The Congress for New Urbanism held its 2016 conference

in Detroit. In addition to the usual hotel-based workshops, attendees could sign up for tours of Detroit’s revitalized neighborhoods. The year prior, UNESCO dubbed Detroit a “City of Design,” and launched a campaign with local branding firms and business groups to showcase Detroit’s “commitment to the creative sector around the globe.”

Urban planners and other Florida followers seem to believe Detroit proves that attracting the creative class works. All you have to do is ignore the rest of the city and its (mostly black) residents, who keep slipping further and further off the grid.

To his credit, Florida essentially admits this problem in his book: “

One problematic consequence [of the rise of the

creative class]

is the accelerated sorting of people and cities into an economic hierarchy. Our society is not just becoming more unequal, its inequities are being etched into our economic geography.… The new geography of class might be giving rise to a new form of segregation—different from racial segregation or the old schism between central city and suburb, and perhaps even more threatening to national unity.”

And Florida has said in a series of articles for The Atlantic that some cities, including Detroit, are beyond salvation by the creative class: “

We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline

of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.” Detroit was one of the places Florida mentioned.

But believing that hipsters can reverse the consequences of late-stage capitalism is a more attractive thought for city planners in cash-strapped cities than realizing that many American cities are, for now, screwed thanks to postindustrial decline and growing inequality. Gentrification may provide a new tax base, but it also reshapes what cities are, turning them into explicit supporters of inequality, reliant on it to self-fund, yet still unable to meet the needs of their poor. A real solution to the economics of American cities would require more work—more taxes, more laws, more intervention from the federal government. Those things are hard. Gentrification is easy.

So with little money in municipal coffers and little hope for a better future, it seems that politicians and planners (and in the case of Detroit, the corporations and nonprofits that have replaced them) have managed to turn a blind eye to the warnings of the profession’s foundational texts. Cities have pursued whole-hog Richard Florida’s strategies for wooing millennials without considering the serious limitations of those strategies and the profound effects they may have on everyone else. They ignore that Richard Florida has admitted that the creative class is not a silver bullet, and they forget that Jane Jacobs, the other most famous urbanist in America, talked not only about what makes city blocks cute and community-oriented but also about all the ways in which governments encourage the destruction of places for the middle class. It seems that in their desperation to find something, anything, that will get their cities going again, city leaders have deemphasized all the risks and potentially lackluster results inherent in the gentrification-as-renewal strategy and instead embraced a strategy of “please just come.” Like Detroit’s former economic development czar said: “

Bring on more gentrification

. I’m sorry, but I mean, bring it on.”

In the years preceding Detroit’s official bankruptcy, a confluence of neoliberal policy doctrine passed down from the leaders of successfully gentrified cities such as New York and prophets like Richard Florida, along with capital from people such as Dan Gilbert who were finally willing to take a risk on Detroit (and take advantage of its rock-bottom real estate prices), set the city up for a radical refocusing.

No longer would Detroit present itself as a poor city in massive need of help. Instead, it would become a boot-strapping, millennial-attracting juggernaut, and anyone not on board would be left behind. That meant redirecting the

energy and resources of the city’s government from adequately governing an entire city to remaking a relatively small, gentrifiable area.

In 2010, the city’s mayor, Dave Bing, proposed

shrinking the municipal boundaries of Detroit, cutting off the money-losing sections of the city in favor of the downtown core. The proposal drew immediate protest from the people who live in those outer sections (the majority of Detroit’s population), but the idea behind it stuck.

Since then, planners, creatives, and the corporations they work hand in hand with have focused nearly all their energy on downtown, Midtown, and a few other select areas, while ignoring the rest of the city, denying it media coverage and equal political representation, allowing its houses to crumble, and starving it of transportation networks. The new Detroit is now a nearly closed loop. It is possible to live in this new Detroit and essentially never set foot in the old one.

When a new (usually white-owned, hipster- or yuppie-oriented) store opens, it’s often profiled by Model D Media, a news outlet funded by nonprofits and corporations to cover what’s happening in Detroit in a positive light. Big Detroit-centric foundations such as the Knight Foundation or the Kresge Foundation might issue press releases about the new businesses to drum up support. They might give out small grants to help with renovations. Urban Innovation Exchange, which is partially funded by Knight, might help that business connect with the plethora of other nonprofits in the area dedicated to helping “innovative” new businesses thrive—Hatch Detroit, Detroit Creative Corridor Center (DC3), and TechTown, to name a few. The city, through its Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, might get involved—issuing more grants, paying for historical renovation costs, promoting the business on social media. Then bigger media outlets such as Curbed or the Detroit Free Press might do a little profile on this new business that seems to be making it in a down-and-out neighborhood despite supposedly long odds. Eventually, the New York Times might come to town and declare that the business is, for example, “

a gleam of renewal in struggling Detroit

.”

In that article, the Times profiled five businesses, all owned by white Detroiters. Detroit is 83 percent black, but the new Detroit—the one that gets all the attention and press—is overwhelmingly white.

Research by Wayne State University grad student Alex B. Hill

found that 69.2 percent of the grantees of nonprofits, fellows at various nonprofits committed to revitalization, and those chosen to take part in tech and business incubators were white.

Given this echo chamber, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the young leaders of this new Detroit are somewhat crass defenders of their cause, seemingly impervious to criticism that their newly revitalized city is also an exclusionary one. The new Detroit is unable to account for the fact that while the tide of particular sections of Detroit does indeed seem to be rising, the rest of the city continues to fall to pieces.

“So many people walk in and say, ‘Oh, I guess they couldn’t find a black entrepreneur,’” said Angela Foster, a white former suburbanite and the owner of a coffee shop called Coffee and (___), located in a predominantly black neighborhood. Coffee and (___) received grants from the city to open. “It’s not a black and white thing. It’s whatever neighborhood people want to do something in. That’s it. That’s absolutely it.… I don’t see how a city this big with so much property and so much opportunity, I don’t see how anyone could be left out.… I guess I’m not buying into this

conspiracy theory. You have to know where to look. Some people aren’t social creatures. So maybe those are the people being left out.”

One business association made up of young white entrepreneurs even called themselves the Conquistadors. The group busied itself with ensuring that the food pantry run by a church in Corktown, one of the city’s newly hip areas, did not detract from its surrounding hipness by providing a safe space for homeless people to stand outside while they awaited food.

“I mean, I wouldn’t starve people by any means,” Phil Cooley, the owner of Slows Bar B Q, perhaps Detroit’s most famous new business, and a member of the group (which no longer calls itself the Conquistadors), told me. “But just continually giving them food, giving them food, giving them food, without having anything surrounding them about how you could get a job or get out of this vicious cycle—it’s frustrating.”

Despite his somewhat uncaring attitude toward the less fortunate, when the New York Times profiled Slows in 2010, the paper opened with this line: “

How much good can a restaurant do?

”

Cooley has embraced his role as a kind of poster child for the new Detroit. Quotes from him have been included in seemingly every story about the city’s revival, from the New York Times profiles to Model D Media’s feature on how Slows helped transform the neighborhood of Corktown and the Crain’s profile of him done as part of the newspaper’s “20 Detroit Power Brokers in Their 20s” series.

“I guess I chose to live here because I’m young and dumb,” Phil told me from the second-floor offices of Ponyride, the co-working and artist studio space he started in Corktown. Ponyride has received funding from the city and various nonprofits, and attention from Martha Stewart and American Express. “I wanted to feel like I was doing something. And Detroit felt like a place where I could have a voice. Detroit is a democratic city.… We never wanted Detroit to be an island.”

But the new Detroit is in many ways being built as if it were an island, or perhaps more accurately a city-state within the city, in no way related to or governed by what exists outside it. Soon you’ll be able to travel within its gentrified core by foot, bike, and light rail without ever leaving. It is quite literally becoming a closed loop.

The Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, a nonprofit funded by some of the city’s biggest corporations, including General Motors, has built a path along the city’s riverfront that connects the downtown to its east and west. From its east side along the river, you can take the Dequindre Cut, a former railway turned bike and pedestrian path, to Eastern Market, a 150-year-old farmers market that recently was upgraded with more artisanal offerings. If you’re trying to get from downtown to Midtown (the other hip section of Detroit, which was called Cass Corridor until recently, when real estate interests rebranded it), you can walk, bike, or now take the brand-new M-1 Rail, a 3.2-mile-long trolley that was marketed as public transit but funded mostly with private dollars from the likes of GM, Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, and a slew of nonprofits.

Anti-gentrification activists are quick to point out that more and better transit options aren’t in and of themselves

bad for a city sorely lacking them. Transportation advocates have for years been trying to get Detroit to take public transit seriously. But when you consider that Detroit is 142 square miles—bigger than Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan combined—and that all its new transit is located within the 7.2 square miles that make up the city’s gentrifying core, the question must be asked: who exactly is this transportation for?

The M-1 Rail is perhaps the best example of Detroit’s gentry-focused new infrastructure. It was originally envisioned as a real public transit system that would connect Detroit’s northern suburbs, where many commute from, to its downtown, where many work. Now, however, the M-1 will be about a fifth its original length and will only connect the business-heavy downtown with the residential, art, and education district of Midtown. Speculators have already begun snapping up real estate to turn into high-end apartment buildings along its route. The M-1, its supporters freely admit, is no longer public transit, but a real estate development tool.

“It’s a circulator to get people in Midtown and people in downtown circulating in a bigger marketplace,” Sue Mosey, the head of Midtown Detroit Inc., the city’s most powerful neighborhood economic development organization, told me in her glass-walled offices one afternoon. “It isn’t the responsibility of M-1 to do the public sector job to get transit for the region or the rest of the city. That isn’t M-1’s job. That’s the city’s job. That’s the regional government’s job, the federal government’s job, the state’s job. Our jobs are not to solve everybody else’s problems in the city.”

M-1 is also a good example of the modus operandi of Detroit’s development these days—touted as good for the public, planned by a confluence of powerful nonprofits that have little accountability to Detroiters, and funded by, and largely for the benefit of, the city’s most powerful companies.

But the flowery rhetoric employed by Detroit’s redevelopers often masks that fact. In the parlance of new Detroit, Zak Pashak isn’t just creating expensive bikes, he’s making sure people here are being lifted up by the rising tide of bicycle manufacturing. Phil Cooley isn’t just a profiteer, he’s participating in the burgeoning democracy of Detroit. Dan Gilbert’s favorite business phrase—“Do well by doing good”—seems to be the official slogan of the new Detroit, embraced by hundreds of young white entrepreneurs who believe they’re not only making money but helping rescue an entire city. That’s why speaking with Midtown Inc.’s Sue Mosey was refreshing. She can talk about the profit motive of the new Detroit without resorting to euphemisms for trickle-down economics.

The biggest problem, Mosey told me, is that there is practically no city government left in Detroit. Midtown Inc., which has no accountability to anyone except those who fund it (developers and nonprofits such as the Kresge Foundation), has become the de facto department of planning for its section of the city. The real city government, which went through bankruptcy in 2013—the largest bankruptcy in municipal history—does not have enough money, expertise, or manpower to plan its own streetscape.

“We’re rezoning everything right now,” Mosey said. “We pay for all the planning, all the specialists, we hold all the meetings. Then we work with the city to meet all their requirements.”

Mosey admits that leaving basic city services such as transportation and planning up to people like her privileges

the sections of the city that can afford to get those things done. Midtown, thanks to its proximity to downtown, is a profit-producing locale—major companies and many of Detroit’s big foundations are located there.

That provides Mosey and Midtown Inc. with a budget of about $10 million

a year to govern their own little micro-city. Midtown Inc. can hire planners. Nearly every other neighborhood in Detroit cannot.

“I do agree that a broken public system does not help challenged neighborhoods, and that needs to be fixed,” Mosey told me. “It’s not right. And it shouldn’t be like that. But that’s not my fault. I’m doing my job. I’m paid to do my job, and my organization does it, and we do it well.”

Hardly anyone is saying there’s anything wrong with new restaurants and new stores, new buildings and better security. Most Detroit residents I interviewed were not begrudging toward the newly arrived white hipsters from the suburbs and the coasts. After all, those who came had reasonable reasons: cheap housing, the ability to start a new business, new jobs. And most native and longtime Detroiters have complex and conflicted views about downtown’s redevelopment—some even praise Gilbert for stepping in and investing in the core of the city when no one else would.

It’s not the investments and new people themselves that are necessarily harmful; it’s the attention, in press and money, that’s paid to those investments and people. While Dan Gilbert is lavished with praise by the city government and newspapers, and while he and others receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives, a new rail line, and bike lanes, the rest of Detroit has learned to live without streetlights and regular trash collection, without a consistent or helpful police presence, with hundreds of thousands of foreclosures on bad mortgages (some made by Gilbert’s Quicken Loans), with the persistent threat of water shutoffs from a broke water utility, with blight and bad schools and high poverty. Sure, it’s great that Detroit is to some extent being revitalized, but Detroit has been in need of revitalization for decades. Its population has been shrinking since the 1950s. Black people in the city have been working that entire time to try to keep Detroit from falling apart. Why, some have asked, is it that the country seems to pay attention only when the white people show up?

On a side street downtown, surrounded by dozens of Gilbert-owned buildings, sits Café D’Mongo’s Speakeasy, a thirty-year-old bar that looks much older than that. The spot had been a gathering place for Detroit’s black elite—it wasn’t uncommon to see council members and mayors at D’Mongo’s back in the day. But in 1993, Larry Mongo, its owner, shut it down. The area had become too run-down, the crime too high to justify staying open.

“The white people left,” Mongo told me, sitting on one of the diner-style stools at his bar. “Then it got so bad the homeless left, then it got so bad the pigeons left. Then it was only me.”

The place remained locked up for fifteen years, until 2008, when a drunk driver smashed his car through the front glass of the bar. Mongo was out of the city, and by the time he showed up, a group of white kids—new gentrifiers in

the city’s downtown—had gathered to protect the café from potential vandals and thieves. Mongo saw these new kids, who were apparently willing to live in Detroit’s bombed-out downtown, and decided to reopen his bar. It’s been open since then, and it’s nearly always packed.

On a recent Saturday, Mongo, who is black, held a special event for the people who’d convinced him to reopen. That night, a jazz band played in one cramped corner as a standing-room-only crowd, almost all of whom were white and dressed in the kind of clothing sold by Detroit’s hippest new retail shops, chatted and sipped classic cocktails. Mongo sat at a table outside. He told me he was calling the celebration “Pollinator Night.” To Mongo, the term pollinator describes what gentrification has become in Detroit: the white kids move into a neighborhood, and investment and attention follow. Mongo said all the kids from Quicken, Rock Ventures, and the rest of the companies moving downtown are great for D’Mongo’s Speakeasy, but he can’t help but think it’s troubling that the city seems on its way back up only now that they’ve arrived.

“The city doesn’t really see black life as life,” he told me. “When the pollinators come, that’s when the civilization comes.… It makes me angry, but you know something? That’s the way it is.”

5 The 7.2

Detroit’s gentrification isn’t so much about the displacement of one group by another, as it is in New York or San Francisco. In the 1950s, the city was home to nearly 2 million people. Today, fewer than 700,000 people live here. There’s plenty of room for the city to grow, plenty of abandoned structures and vacant land that can be reinhabited.

Instead, gentrification here operates in two separate, concurrent processes: the rich, mostly white newcomers to the city and their allies in business get accolades from the press, the government’s attention, and the financial backing of Detroit’s nonprofit sector, while the rest of the city—the remaining 134.8 square miles outside the 7.2—slowly falls off the map, bled out by foreclosures, blight, and a lack of city services. For those who stay but cannot afford to be within the 7.2, the city is literally going to seed around them.

Cheryl West is one of the ones outside the 7.2. When I met West, she was standing in her front yard, surrounded by sixty cardboard boxes containing her life. A few volunteers from Detroit Eviction Defense—the city’s preeminent anti-eviction group—guarded her boxes and helped tape them up. Two gave an interview to a documentary filmmaker from Ecuador. Other men who were being paid a low hourly rate by Wayne County—the county that encompasses Detroit—lugged everything else from West’s former house and tossed it into a dumpster parked curbside. A sheriff’s deputy let West take one last look inside her house and give me a quick tour. She showed me the pink-carpeted living room; the kitchen, which had already been partially gutted by the house’s new owners; the spot where her father’s piano used to sit. West, sixty-eight, had lived here for sixty years. She’d seen her neighborhood go from majority white to black, through riot and police violence, through relative wealth and struggle. She’d seen it become what it is now—beautiful but severely decayed, its large four- and five-bedroom homes either boarded up or already gutted by people seeking scrap metal to sell, the storefronts on its main avenues shuttered, their windows broken, their roofs collapsed. We exited the house, and the deputy told the dozen or so neighbors, activists, and passersby assembled on

West’s lawn that from that moment on, only those employed by Wayne County could enter.

Cheryl West’s family was in many ways an exception to the rules that governed Detroit and much of the United States at the time. When West’s family moved in, every house in the neighborhood, along with many other neighborhoods in the city, had deed restrictions barring African Americans from buying them. However, despite those restrictions, West’s parents were able to buy the house from a Jewish couple looking to leave the city. They were the first black homeowners on the block. Her father was also the first African American music teacher in the Detroit Public Schools, and her sister was one of the only African American journalists to cover Detroit’s 1967 uprising for a national publication.

“We witnessed that riot and lived through it,” she told me from her lawn. “And I feel like there’s another one coming.”

West lost her house in the same way tens of thousands of Detroiters have lost their homes in the last few years: she couldn’t afford its astronomically high taxes. As more and more residents leave Detroit, the burden of paying for the city’s services falls on fewer and fewer households. Most residents of Detroit are poor, but they are nonetheless expected to fund roads, water lines, and everything else in the city through their property taxes, which can be thousands of dollars a year on houses that currently aren’t worth much more than $10,000 on the market.

For years, the city and the county encompassing it had allowed West’s taxes, along with the taxes of tens of thousands of others, to build up without taking action. When what she owed was too much to even qualify for a payment plan, they seized the house. West told me she’d tried to gain admission to a tax program started by the state of Michigan for those struggling to stay in their homes, but because of a technicality (she didn’t live in the house for about a year while she helped take care of one of her last living family members in California) she was denied four times.

In fact, one-half of all people who attempted to enter that program

were denied. So Cheryl’s house was sold at tax auction by Wayne County for $20,000 in 2015 to a young African American woman who owns several in the neighborhood. Cheryl is currently staying on the top floor of a friend’s house up the block. Her things are in storage. And now another house sits empty, though only temporarily, on a block that already has plenty of gutted houses in a neighborhood with more empty lots than full ones.

Meanwhile, the 7.2 is booming

, at least compared to the rest of Detroit. Detroit has 53,000 vacant homes, but within the 7.2 square miles that make up downtown (Gilbertville), Midtown (where Sue Mosey works), Corktown (where Phil Cooley owns property), and three other centrally located neighborhoods, more than 90 percent of homes are occupied. Detroit lost 25 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010, but the 7.2’s loss was only half that. Its boosters say the area is also getting more diverse. In reality, it lost 5 percent of its black population in those years and gained 3 percent more white people. While everywhere else in Detroit the housing stock continued to disintegrate, the 7.2 added 1,300 new units of housing, a 5 percent increase. Between 2010 and 2012 there were sixty-five new building projects completed within the 7.2, and another sixty-five are under construction or in the planning phases. If

you look only at the 7.2, it seems as though Detroit is doing pretty well. It looks like the wooing of the creative class is really paying off.

But incentives and investments large and small predestined this area of Detroit to come back while the rest of the city falls off the map. As early as the 1990s, business leaders and the heads of foundations encouraged the city to focus its investments solely within the 7.2, which is both more densely populated and has a denser stock of buildings than most of the rest of the city, and closer to the skyscrapers where the city’s elite work. That investment has picked up steam in recent years, with Dan Gilbert buying at least eighty buildings downtown. When he moved Quicken to Detroit’s downtown,

the state gave Gilbert a $50 million tax break

, the largest incentive in the state that year. Then, when Gilbert bought an iconic Art Deco building downtown in March 2015, Detroit’s mayor, Mike Duggan, cooed, “

I’m excited that somebody successful is acquiring

all these properties.… I couldn’t be more pleased with what Dan has done and his contributions to the community.”

Gilbert’s investment hasn’t ended with buildings—

he’s built an entire security force

that patrols downtown and monitors more than 500 security cameras attached to buildings Rock Ventures owns. From a command center in a Rock-owned building, Gilbert’s force watches nearly every corner of Detroit’s downtown. His agents coordinate closely with Detroit’s police. Gilbert’s security, along with a police force privately funded by Wayne State University in Midtown, have become a kind of shadow police agency, ensuring that low-level offenses in Detroit’s gentrified core remain at a minimum.

Wayne State, Detroit’s main university, has taken security

one step further by certifying its sixty officers with the state so that they can perform the same functions as real police. Now 60 percent of calls within Midtown are answered by Wayne State’s patrol. The average response time in Midtown is ninety seconds. In the rest of Detroit, it can be up to an hour, even for deadly crimes.

Gilbert has also chipped in for other projects that would usually be funded by cities—

the M-1’s $179.4 million cost

will be paid mostly by corporations and nonprofits, including Quicken. The biggest funder was the Kresge Foundation (mission statement: “Creating opportunity for low-income people”), which contributed more than a quarter of the total. Gilbert has also funded the revitalization of parks and plazas downtown.

And there are other, less visible ways Gilbert has spread his vision of a bustling, millennial-filled core city. Employees of Compuware (owned by Quicken), Quicken Loans, DTE Energy (Detroit’s main energy company), and a few other companies can get $20,000 of forgivable loans to purchase a home or apartment within the downtown area, or $3,500 in rental subsidies. Midtown Detroit Inc. has a similar program that has raised $10 million from employers in the area to incentivize 2,000 people to live in Midtown, according to Sue Mosey. Occupancy in Midtown is now at 98 percent.

The people who are benefiting from all these subsidies—the gentrifiers of the 7.2—do not seem to realize the work that has gone into bringing and keeping them there. They consider themselves cunning pioneers who’ve figured out how to make the economics of a rough city work, ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars that could

be used to keep people like Cheryl West in their homes are propping up their lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. And they do not seem to realize that they are benefiting directly from the past oppression of those whom they hope to lift with their rising tide.

Detroit was made cheap and therefore attractive to gentrify because, beginning in the 1930s, its black residents were systematically denied jobs in the booming auto industry and, later, mortgages in the suburbs as the housing industry took off. Detroit’s black residents were hired last and fired first when the auto industry collapsed; they were foreclosed upon and denied basic city services. The racism of Detroit’s geography means that the city’s population decline has been incredibly uneven:

between 2000 and 2010, the white population

of the city decreased by 35 percent, while the black population decreased by 24 percent. Detroit’s rebirth has been built on the backs of people who were too poor to leave. And the 7.2 can exist only as a heavily subsidized state, perpetuating the historical constriction of subsidy and wealth to the rest of Detroit.

Of course, private companies and foundations can do what they wish with their money. As Sue Mosey told me, they’re not required to do the public sector’s job of ensuring that the poorest of Detroit’s citizens have good parks, fair policing, transit, jobs, and housing. And activists here aren’t even suggesting that they do that job. The problem in Detroit isn’t necessarily the money being poured into Midtown and downtown but the fact that it’s happening in a vacuum. The private and nonprofit sectors have virtually replaced the public sector in the city’s most gentrified areas. And with the absence of a public good, there’s no guarantee that Midtown, downtown, or any of Detroit’s other gentrifying tracts will be amenable to anyone but those who make Quicken Loans–level salaries.

If the early stages of gentrification in the city are any clue, that’s exactly what’s happening. John Varvatos shoes, bars with $15 cocktails and coffee shops with $4 coffee, Shinola watches, Detroit Bikes—these are meant for people with large disposable incomes. And while there’s no sign on these businesses’ doors specifically prohibiting the old, largely African American Detroit from entering, their gentrified aesthetic and high prices may have the same effect.

“

Nobody wants to inject race

into the marvelous story of downtown’s rebound, driven largely by young creatives who grew up in the suburbs and are now fiercely Detroiters. I don’t either. It’s a downer,” Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley wrote in 2014. “[But] it’s a clear red flag when you can sit in a hot new downtown restaurant and nine out of 10 tables are filled with white diners, a proportion almost exactly opposite of the city’s racial make-up.”

As Tonya Phillips, a black Detroiter and the executive director of Southwest Detroit Community Justice Center, put it to me, the new Detroit is nice; it’s just not built for her.

While nonprofits and corporations are the main funders of Detroit’s new economic segregation, the government at all levels has placed its thumb on the 7.2’s side of the scale. Just weeks after Detroit filed for bankruptcy—a process that

would see city workers’ pensions cut and a variety of city services reduced—Dan Gilbert traveled to the White House and

convinced President Barack Obama to spend $300 million

on Detroit, including $35 million for the M-1, and $150 million on blight removal, knocking down unoccupied houses throughout the city. It’s unclear exactly how that $150 million was and will be spent, but a good chunk will go toward demolishing homes that Gilbert’s Quicken Loans were partially responsible for making blighted in the first place. Quicken has for years insisted it did not engage in the same practices that led millions of Americans into foreclosure after the 2008 financial crisis.

But an investigation by the

Detroit News

found that Quicken had the fifth-highest number of mortgages ending in foreclosures in the city. Half of those foreclosed properties are now blighted.

Maybe the most egregious example of government funding going toward the 7.2 was the 2013 deal made by the Detroit City Council to pay for 60 percent of a new hockey arena for Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch. Ilitch, a Detroit billionaire pizza magnate (he owns Little Caesars), already has an arena: Joe Louis Arena, located on Detroit’s waterfront. The new facility will come with housing, office space, and upscale retail, all located on Midtown’s most gentrified strip.

The project will cost the city of Detroit $261.5 million

Ilitch will get to keep all of the revenues

from the arena. The money the city spends on the deal would have otherwise gone to fund Michigan public schools.

The state says it will make up the difference

, so Detroit students won’t be affected. It’s unclear exactly where the state will get the money from instead.

While the Red Wings arena deal is a particularly large example of government waste in Detroit, it’s not unique.

The city also awarded Marathon Petroleum $175 million

in tax breaks to expand its oil refinery in the city. In return, the city got fifteen new jobs. And in 2012,

the mayor’s office sold 140 acres of public land

in the center of the city to another Detroit multimillionaire, financial services executive John Hantz, for $520,000. Hantz had promised to develop the land into a tree farm, though many in the city believe his urban agriculture idea was a ploy to get cheap land in the center of Detroit that can eventually be converted into profitable housing.

Outlandish subsidies for multimillionaires isn’t a phenomenon seen only in Detroit.

Michigan gives away 30 cents of every government dollar

to private companies. And in other cities, stadiums and ballparks are routinely paid for by governments, all with the hope that they’ll help stimulate revitalization, even though economists nearly unanimously agree that spending public funds on private stadiums is one of the least efficient ways for governments to spend money. But the strategy is perhaps particularly troubling in a city where garbage collection, street repair, and streetlights are considered privileges.

“Our history is this scattergun approach,” said Eric Larson, one of Detroit’s biggest developers and the CEO of the Downtown Detroit Partnership, which helps coordinate investments in the city’s core and which was involved in the Red Wings arena deal. “That doesn’t work. Finally we’re starting to focus and concentrate investment.… Whether we like it or not, if we don’t have the large entities that are taxed the way they’re taxed, the city doesn’t have anything to operate on.”

Mark Wallace, another longtime developer and the head of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, put it another way: “As we make Detroit better for one person, we make it better for everybody.”

Yet when community activists have tried to ensure that this trickle-down development strategy does indeed result in trickle-down benefits, developers have fought them tooth and nail. For years city activists have sought to pass an ordinance that would require the developers of Detroit’s biggest projects (including the Red Wings arena), as well as developers of projects seeking $300,000 or more in public funds (also including the Red Wings arena), to enter into contracts with the public that would provide guarantees of local jobs and other quality-of-life measures. The entire development community lined up against it.

A bill introduced in the state’s legislature would ban

community-benefits ordinances altogether in the state of Michigan, even though Detroit is the only city in the state considering one.

I asked every developer and pro–new Detroit figure I spoke with what they’d say to all those who feel like they’ve been left out of the recovery—those who see hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds, and billions in private funds, go toward just about 3 percent of the city’s landmass while they get left out. And all said something similar: eventually everyone else will be helped too.

“Nothing happens overnight,” Sean Jackson, a Rock Ventures employee who is close with Dan Gilbert, told me one night. “I would say wait and hope.”

Detroit did not need a hurricane to rid itself of the poor. There may not have been a natural disaster or a military occupation in the Detroit outside of the 7.2, but I’ve nonetheless heard it compared to apartheid South Africa and called “

a Katrina without water

.” While the 7.2 gets hundreds of millions of dollars, the rest of Detroit, the unprofitable Detroit, is being bled out.

These phrases might sound like rhetoric, but the numbers involved in Detroit’s destruction lend themselves to dramatic terminology. Beyond the newly built-up downtown and Midtown, Detroit is in crisis.

Detroit’s median income is about $25,000, roughly half that of the United States as a whole. It has a poverty rate

three times higher than the rest of the country.

Its unemployment rate is nearly 25 percent

, double or triple the rate of most other big cities. And because

Detroit charges some of the highest household water rates

in the country (about $70 a month on average, compared to the national average of $40), nearly a quarter of the population is behind on their water bill. In 2014, the city began shutting off water to those residents, leaving thousands without access to fresh water.

Experts from the United Nations called the move

a violation of human rights.

Detroit, like everywhere else in America, was also hit by the subprime mortgage crisis in the 2000s, only much, much harder.

Sixty-eight percent of all mortgages to Detroiters

in 2005 were subprime, compared with 24 percent

nationwide. Gilbert’s Quicken Loans made some of those loans; others were made by the same banks that demanded Detroit pay them back by slashing city employee pensions during the city’s bankruptcy. Now more than half of those homes are abandoned and blighted, nearly all of them in the outer parts of the city. The county has also been directly involved in the mass exodus: while it’s easy to snap up a house for $5,000 or $10,000 in many Detroit neighborhoods, houses are often assessed as if Detroit is still a hot, or at least non-apocalyptic, real estate market.

It’s not unheard of for residents to be paying $3,000 or $4,000

a year on a house with a market value of just twice that. Many here felt they shouldn’t have to pay those outrageous property taxes, considering that most Detroit neighborhoods didn’t have the normal amenities taxes buy—for example, streetlights and regular garbage pickup—until recently. That apathy and the high tax rates, combined with the city’s down-and-out economy (

Detroit’s per capita income is less than $15,000

), made a tax foreclosure crisis inevitable. Yet Wayne County sat on those back taxes for years, allowing them to pile up until they became unpayable for many. It was only in 2015 that the county began cracking down, when many families’ tax bills had reached more than $10,000. The county seized and sold 30,000 homes at auction that year. At least 10,000 of the homes were occupied. The years ahead promise to be equally punishing.

“We deferred, and waiting clearly made it more difficult,” Wayne County deputy treasurer Dave Szymanski told me at a county-sponsored event for tax relief. “Is that fair? It’s the reality of the situation. There were just too many properties.”

It’s hard to comprehend the scale of what’s happening to Detroit’s outer neighborhoods. The city is sprawling enough that you might not notice a couple of houses becoming abandoned, a block in one corner of the city going to seed. But there are a few places where the misery is concentrated enough that you can comprehend its strength. The Cobo Center on a January day in 2015 was one of them.

The Cobo Center is the city-funded convention center on Detroit’s waterfront. It’s already one of the largest convention centers in the country, but Detroit is currently overseeing a taxpayer-funded $300 million expansion of the place. It hosts the usual expos and gatherings, as well as the Detroit Auto Show each year. But in 2015, over the course of one week in January, it held no fewer than 10,000 Detroiters who’d shown up in a last-ditch effort to save their homes. Most were there to enter into tax payment plans with the county; others had come to seek help from a slew of nonprofits providing guidance (though no financial help) for how to deal with landlords, the county, and banks.

The convention center’s name was sadly apt for the devastation its temporary inhabitants represented. Cobo is named for Albert Cobo, mayor of Detroit from 1950 through 1957 and a notorious racist in both rhetoric and policy. Cobo ran on a campaign opposing “Negro invasions.” Many have blamed Detroit’s decline on white flight, but few have pinpointed the people responsible for it, including Albert Cobo, who did everything in his power to encourage it. Cobo forced the concentration of public housing in the center of the city, refused to build integrated public housing, and supported the construction of highways out to the suburbs.

Cobo was a one-man concentrator

of urban African

American poverty and disperser of white wealth.

Inside the center named after him that January, the culmination of decades of bad and racist housing policy could be seen on the faces of thousands of Detroit residents who waited patiently in folding chairs in one of the convention center’s immense halls. Each took a number from a red ticket machine as if they were approaching a deli counter. One by one, they were called up to sit at a plastic folding table with representatives from Wayne County’s Treasurer’s Office and work out a payment plan. Nearly every person in the hall was African American.

“Everybody’s black,” one activist remarked to me as she helped foreclosure victims find their way around the building. “Who is the criminal mastermind who put this together? This doesn’t just happen. Something at this scale doesn’t just happen.”

To be sure, there were positive stories that came out of Cobo. Gabriel McNeil, a fifty-two-year-old chef, worked out a plan with Wayne County to lower his back taxes from $10,000 to $6,000. He had to pay $653 upfront, and will now make monthly payments of $66 a month, down from $250.

“I could pick up soda cans and pay that,” McNeil said. “I’m real comfortable.”

But the overall mood at Cobo was one of desperation. There was Krystal Malone, a forty-four-year-old part-time substitute teacher. She bought a house for $10,000 last year without realizing its taxes would come out to about $5,000, and so she fell into $9,000 of debt.

“Why was the property valued so high?” she asked. “Across the street is all abandoned properties. Five thousand dollars a year on a $10,000 house. What sense does that make?”

There was Lula Smith, who had lived in Detroit since 1956, and who began falling behind on her taxes after her husband died and she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2011. She was at Cobo as a last-ditch effort after having attempted to enter into a payment plan several times over the last few years. At Cobo, the county offered to lower her payments to $300 a month.

“At least it shows they care,” she said. “I think they’re really trying to help. I’ll believe them until they prove me wrong.”

For many Detroiters, the county’s assistance was too little too late.

Detroit lost 237,000 people

between 2000 and 2010. It’d be easy to blame that on the region’s economy, but most of those people moved right across Detroit’s borders into suburbs with less blight, lower taxes, better roads, better lights, and a better police force. Macomb County, right next door to Wayne, saw its black population triple between 2000 and 2010. Those left in Detroit’s outer neighborhoods are people who either can’t afford to live anywhere else or are fighting for their right to stay.

Disa Bryant, forty-eight, fits into both of those categories. She inherited a house from her aunt in 2004 in the desirable Russell Woods section of the city. At the time, she worked for the state of Michigan in its medical records department. But the financial crash of 2008 forced Michigan to cut its budget, and Bryant was let go. After she fell behind on payments for a few years, in 2014 the county put her house on the auction block. Bryant offered $5,000 to

buy it back, but an investor outbid her at $8,000. That investor is now attempting to evict Disa if she can’t pay $1,000 a month in rent.

“They sell you off to the highest bidder and that just sucks,” she said. “The house has been in my family for forty years. Why can’t they buy a vacant home instead of putting someone out on the street?”

There’s a perverse answer to Bryant’s question, an activist from Detroit Eviction Defense explained to me one day: Detroit may have tens of thousands of vacant homes, but the ones that have been lived in have usually been maintained lovingly by the people living in them. The roof repairs, flooring, lighting, and yard upkeep have already been paid for by the existing tenants. Kicking people out is a better investment. And there’s no way to know exactly to whom properties such as Bryant’s are going. Some undoubtedly are sold to individuals, but most, it seems, are sold to small limited-liability companies, or LLCs. One eviction expert named Joe McGuire told me that over the past couple of years, countless small investment groups have descended on Detroit, snapping up properties by the dozen. Their business mailing addresses will often be the home of someone in a far-flung locale with an Internet connection and the expertise to sort through Detroit’s eviction listings.

“It was actually easier dealing with the big banks,” McGuire told me. “There’s a certain kind of rationality at play with them. They just care about money. But now it’s just small-time crazy people. When you’re dealing with them, you’re even further away from effecting real change. And if you win, you win against some guy who owns seven houses, not Bank of America.”

That’s the situation Kenny Brinkley and Sandi Combs are in

. Brinkley, a well-known Motown saxophone player, couldn’t find work after heart surgery in 2002. By 2010, the house he and Combs owned had gone to tax foreclosure. The company that bought the home, Detroit Property Exchange (which advertises its phone number as 1-888-FLIP-DETROIT), said the couple could pay rent toward repurchasing their home. But after four years, the couple found out that their payments hadn’t gone toward anything, including property taxes. The property was sold again at tax auction, and this time it was picked up by a California company called Sussex Immobilier. Since purchasing the property, Sussex has been attempting to evict the elderly couple. Detroit Eviction Defense has so far managed to keep them in their home by delaying court dates and finding problems with Sussex’s eviction paperwork.

When I visited Brinkley and Combs in their modest home, Brinkley told me he couldn’t talk too much about the pending eviction out of fear it would cause his heart problems to flare up. So I sat on their plush, faded couch at the front of their living area and spoke with Combs.

The house is well lived-in. Knickknacks—photos, plants, memorabilia from Brinkley’s sax-playing days—took up nearly every surface. Just hiring movers for all this stuff would be an expense Brinkley and Combs could not afford.

“It could be any day now,” Combs told me. “They could come with a dumpster and throw everything into the trash.”

As I spoke with Combs, Brinkley seemed to be keeping his mind occupied by pacing the house, scrubbing the

kitchen, and watering their dozens of plants. But after a while, despite his earlier statement that he would not talk, he cautiously approached the couch where Combs and I were sitting.

“I’m trying to stay busy to keep it off my mind,” he said. “But I just have to face it. It’s there.”

This is the state of the outer sections of Detroit: threats of evictions, water shutoffs, crushing poverty, reduced government services.

Study after study document the stress and depression

that come with being poor. You can feel that acutely here. People are on edge, afraid, upset, and resigned—and this is in not just one neighborhood but the entire city, minus the 7.2 square miles at its core. People here feel abandoned, pushed to their limits, and unsure of what to do.

Several months after I left Detroit, I heard that Sandi Combs and Kenny Brinkley had been forced to leave their house after a new set of owners came with chainsaws to cut down the massive trees the couple had planted in the front yard forty years earlier. That same day, Brinkley had a heart attack. A few days later, a nonprofit announced that it had purchased a new home for the couple farther out in Detroit, and held a little celebration in a carpeted conference room downtown. The local media reported it as a happy ending.

6 How the Slate Got Blank

How do you solve a problem as old as the United States? Gentrification may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but as geographer Neil Smith notes, it’s really just the continuation of the “locational seesaw”—capital moves to one place seeking high profits, then, when that place becomes less profitable, it moves to another place. The real estate industry is always looking for new markets in which it can revitalize its profit rate. Fifty years ago that place was suburbs. Today it’s cities. But that’s only half the explanation for gentrification. In order to understand why cities are so attractive to invest in, it’s important to understand what made them bargains for real estate speculators in the first place. It may sound obvious, but gentrification could not happen without something to gentrify. Truly equitable geographies would be largely un-gentrifiable ones. So first, geographies have to be made unequal.

One 2014 study from the University of Chicago Booth School

of Business found that poorer neighborhoods near already gentrified areas gentrified much faster than adjacent middle-class areas. As Smith’s rent gap theory suggests, this makes economic sense: gentrification is more profitable if the area being gentrified is initially cheaper. So the question is, how did those areas become cheaper?

The United States has a long history of dispossessing the poor of adequate housing through explicitly racist planning and housing policy. If gentrification requires cheap real estate, before areas can be gentrified they must be divested from, and the history of American housing is largely the history of a purposive concentration of African Americans and a subsequent disinvestment in their lives.

Few would argue that American housing is equitably distributed. It’s obvious to anyone who drives around an American city that there are areas of wealth and areas of poverty, that train tracks and highways often separate Hispanic neighborhoods from white ones, black ones from Asian ones. Most know without much thinking that “the projects” are in the “bad neighborhoods,” that big houses filled with wealthy people tend to be located not in city centers but on their outskirts. Because these features are universal to every city in the United States, we’ve internalized this geographic inequality as natural and normal. But a closer look reveals that larger, top-down forces are at play in the distribution of people and wealth in American cities.

Cities may appear chaotic, but the location, design, and makeup of their neighborhoods are the result of careful planning. In their book American Apartheid, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton provide clear evidence that American cities maintained or expanded housing segregation even as people of color gained civil rights and wealth and moved into northern cities in greater numbers from rural areas in the South.

Massey and Denton measure the racial dissimilarity

of US cities’ neighborhoods through an “index of dissimilarity,” calculating the percentage of black Americans who would have to move within a given city for every neighborhood to accurately mirror the overall demographics of the entire city. The higher the percentage, the more segregated a city is. The researchers found that before the 1900s, American cities were relatively integrated. In 1860 in the biggest cities outside the South—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and a couple of others—the average dissimilarity index was 45.7, meaning about 46 percent of African Americans would have to move into different neighborhoods in order for each city to be well integrated. The biggest southern cities were actually more integrated in 1860—their average index was 29. But by 1910, northern cities had an average dissimilarity index of nearly 60, and southern cities had one of nearly 40. Cities were becoming more segregated. By 1940, dissimilarity in southern cities had reached 81; in northern cities it had reached 89.2. In other words, by 1940, 89.2 percent of black people in northern cities would have had to move in order to achieve a truly integrated city. By 1970, the dissimilarity index in the United States as a whole had reached an all-time high at 79 percent. It’s worth pointing out the increase in segregation in the North came as black Americans were moving by the millions from the South to find industrial jobs in northern cities. In other words, the more black people who came to a city, the more segregated it became.

In the last fifty years, segregation’s gotten better, but not by much:

by 2010 the index had dropped just below 60

, still nowhere near true integration. In Detroit, the index still stands at nearly 80, making Detroit the most segregated city in America. Massey and Denton conclude there’s only one possible explanation for why, even as people of color gained rights in other areas of life, the United States became more and more segregated: white America has

deliberately created segregated ghettos.

Detroit is not an outlier—every city in the United States has been impacted by segregation—but the effects of racist housing policy were well documented here, and so the city provides a good example of how deleterious segregation has been in the United States.

The economic boom created by World War II

drew tens of thousands of African Americans to Detroit, where they sought employment in the factories making military ships and vehicles. They were met with violence every step of their journey. Threats of violence when blacks moved into majority-white neighborhoods were so common that in 1942 Life magazine ran a story with the headline “Detroit Is Dynamite.” “It can either blow up Hitler,” the magazine wrote, “or blow up the U.S.”

The next year, racial tensions over housing, policing, and job discrimination boiled over into one of the worst riots in Detroit’s history. Black and white Detroiters were killed, but whites had the advantage of the police on their side. By the end of the riots, 1,893 people had been arrested, 700 injured, and 34 killed. Twenty-five of those killed were black, and seventeen of those people were shot dead by police. No whites were killed by police.

The riot grabbed headlines, but it was far from the only example of racial tension in the city. Nearly every facet of life in Detroit for African Americans was plagued by racist violence and discrimination during and following World War II. Detroit’s economy was booming, but unions still tried to bar black workers from joining their ranks and auto factories only hired African Americans for dangerous, low-paying work.

While unions and corporations did their best to keep Detroit’s black residents economically disadvantaged, politicians and white residents did their best to ensure they stayed trapped in the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. In the 1940s, it wasn’t uncommon for white neighborhoods to post large billboards on their streets warning black Detroiters to leave.

Most of the signs simply read “Whites Only

,” though one on the West Side read, “Negroes moving here will be burned, signed Neighbors.”

Housing-based violence continued and even increased through the 1960s

. When black Detroiters moved into new neighborhoods, often their lawns would be torched; sometimes their houses would be burned down. New black residents in white neighborhoods frequently would have stones thrown at them. In 1963, the city documented sixty-five incidents of housing-based violence, but because many cases were never reported, that’s likely an undercount.

There were subtler but still effective ways

of keeping black Detroiters out of white neighborhoods. In the 1940s, neighborhood associations often included restrictive covenants in their bylaws that essentially barred black people. These covenants would sometimes be explicit; other times they’d list requirements that were nearly impossible for nonwhites to meet—for example, to move into some Detroit neighborhoods, a person’s boss would have to sign off on housing applications; in some neighborhoods only relatives of current residents could move in. One neighborhood on the city’s northwest side mandated that property “shall not be used or occupied by any person or persons except those of the Caucasian race.” More than 80 percent of the city outside its downtown core had these kinds of restrictions in

How the Slate Got Blank

At the back of Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, a small neighborhood park in northwest Detroit, sits a concrete wall covered in colorful murals. Today the wall seems somewhat randomly placed—it’s not separating much of anything except some grass from a street. But it’s there for a reason: in the late 1930s a developer tried to secure a mortgage, backed with mortgage insurance from the federal government, to build a housing development in the then largely white neighborhood. The Federal Housing Administration determined that the proposed houses would sit too close to those of an “inharmonious” racial group to qualify for mortgage insurance. In order to meet federal requirements, the developer built the wall—six feet tall, a foot thick, and a half mile long—to separate a black neighborhood from a white one. The federal government approved the project a few weeks later.
How do you solve a problem as old as the United States? Gentrification may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but as geographer Neil Smith notes, it’s really just the continuation of the “locational seesaw”—capital moves to one place seeking high profits, then, when that place becomes less profitable, it moves to another place. The real estate industry is always looking for new markets in which it can revitalize its profit rate. Fifty years ago that place was suburbs. Today it’s cities. But that’s only half the explanation for gentrification. In order to understand why cities are so attractive to invest in, it’s important to understand what made them bargains for real estate speculators in the first place. It may sound obvious, but gentrification could not happen without something to gentrify. Truly equitable geographies would be largely un-gentrifiable ones. So first, geographies have to be made unequal.

One 2014 study from the University of Chicago Booth School
of Business found that poorer neighborhoods near already gentrified areas gentrified much faster than adjacent middle-class areas. As Smith’s rent gap theory suggests, this makes economic sense: gentrification is more profitable if the area being gentrified is initially cheaper. So the question is, how did those areas become cheaper?
The United States has a long history of dispossessing the poor of adequate housing through explicitly racist planning and housing policy. If gentrification requires cheap real estate, before areas can be gentrified they must be divested from, and the history of American housing is largely the history of a purposive concentration of African Americans and a subsequent disinvestment in their lives.
Few would argue that American housing is equitably distributed. It’s obvious to anyone who drives around an American city that there are areas of wealth and areas of poverty, that train tracks and highways often separate Hispanic neighborhoods from white ones, black ones from Asian ones. Most know without much thinking that “the projects” are in the “bad neighborhoods,” that big houses filled with wealthy people tend to be located not in city centers but on their outskirts. Because these features are universal to every city in the United States, we’ve internalized this geographic inequality as natural and normal. But a closer look reveals that larger, top-down forces are at play in the distribution of people and wealth in American cities.
Cities may appear chaotic, but the location, design, and makeup of their neighborhoods are the result of careful planning. In their book American Apartheid, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton provide clear evidence that American cities maintained or expanded housing segregation even as people of color gained civil rights and wealth and moved into northern cities in greater numbers from rural areas in the South.

Massey and Denton measure the racial dissimilarity
of US cities’ neighborhoods through an “index of dissimilarity,” calculating the percentage of black Americans who would have to move within a given city for every neighborhood to accurately mirror the overall demographics of the entire city. The higher the percentage, the more segregated a city is. The researchers found that before the 1900s, American cities were relatively integrated. In 1860 in the biggest cities outside the South—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and a couple of others—the average dissimilarity index was 45.7, meaning about 46 percent of African Americans would have to move into different neighborhoods in order for each city to be well integrated. The biggest southern cities were actually more integrated in 1860—their average index was 29. But by 1910, northern cities had an average dissimilarity index of nearly 60, and southern cities had one of nearly 40. Cities were becoming more segregated. By 1940, dissimilarity in southern cities had reached 81; in northern cities it had reached 89.2. In other words, by 1940, 89.2 percent of black people in northern cities would have had to move in order to achieve a truly integrated city. By 1970, the dissimilarity index in the United States as a whole had reached an all-time high at 79 percent. It’s worth pointing out the increase in segregation in the North came as black Americans were moving by the millions from the South to find industrial jobs in northern cities. In other words, the more black people who came to a city, the more segregated it became.

In the last fifty years, segregation’s gotten better, but not by much:
by 2010 the index had dropped just below 60
, still nowhere near true integration. In Detroit, the index still stands at nearly 80, making Detroit the most segregated city in America. Massey and Denton conclude there’s only one possible explanation for why, even as people of color gained rights in other areas of life, the United States became more and more segregated: white America has deliberately created segregated ghettos.

The economic boom created by World War II
drew tens of thousands of African Americans to Detroit, where they sought employment in the factories making military ships and vehicles. They were met with violence every step of their journey. Threats of violence when blacks moved into majority-white neighborhoods were so common that in 1942 Life magazine ran a story with the headline “Detroit Is Dynamite.” “It can either blow up Hitler,” the magazine wrote, “or blow up the U.S.”
The next year, racial tensions over housing, policing, and job discrimination boiled over into one of the worst riots in Detroit’s history. Black and white Detroiters were killed, but whites had the advantage of the police on their side. By the end of the riots, 1,893 people had been arrested, 700 injured, and 34 killed. Twenty-five of those killed were black, and seventeen of those people were shot dead by police. No whites were killed by police.
The riot grabbed headlines, but it was far from the only example of racial tension in the city. Nearly every facet of life in Detroit for African Americans was plagued by racist violence and discrimination during and following World War II. Detroit’s economy was booming, but unions still tried to bar black workers from joining their ranks and auto factories only hired African Americans for dangerous, low-paying work.
While unions and corporations did their best to keep Detroit’s black residents economically disadvantaged, politicians and white residents did their best to ensure they stayed trapped in the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. In the 1940s, it wasn’t uncommon for white neighborhoods to post large billboards on their streets warning black Detroiters to leave.
Most of the signs simply read “Whites Only
,” though one on the West Side read, “Negroes moving here will be burned, signed Neighbors.”

Housing-based violence continued and even increased through the 1960s
. When black Detroiters moved into new neighborhoods, often their lawns would be torched; sometimes their houses would be burned down. New black residents in white neighborhoods frequently would have stones thrown at them. In 1963, the city documented sixty-five incidents of housing-based violence, but because many cases were never reported, that’s likely an undercount.

There were subtler but still effective ways
of keeping black Detroiters out of white neighborhoods. In the 1940s, neighborhood associations often included restrictive covenants in their bylaws that essentially barred black people. These covenants would sometimes be explicit; other times they’d list requirements that were nearly impossible for nonwhites to meet—for example, to move into some Detroit neighborhoods, a person’s boss would have to sign off on housing applications; in some neighborhoods only relatives of current residents could move in. One neighborhood on the city’s northwest side mandated that property “shall not be used or occupied by any person or persons except those of the Caucasian race.” More than 80 percent of the city outside its downtown core had these kinds of restrictions in the years after World War II. Neighborhood improvement associations, now considered benign bodies concerned with the beautification of neighborhoods, were most often established in Detroit and elsewhere to help keep black people out of rich white areas.

Detroit real estate agents helped segregate the city too. As in other places, they followed the code of ethics specified by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and until 1950 that code stated that

realtors should “never be instrumental in introducing

into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any industry whose presence will be clearly detrimental to real estate values.” The surrounding suburbs were also active in keeping Detroit’s poor black population stuck in place. Dearborn, a city just a few minutes’ drive west of Detroit, elected

Orville Hubbard

mayor in 1941 (and fourteen times after that) after he promised to keep the city “lily white.” “Housing Negroes is Detroit’s problem,” he said. Grosse Pointe, just to Detroit’s east, assigned a point system to people looking to purchase homes. Potential residents had points deducted based on their “degree of swarthiness,” and Jews were able to move in only if they were personally vouched for by people already living in the neighborhood; African Americans weren’t able to move in at all.

Mayor Albert Cobo

, the man the Cobo Center is named after, lent the city’s approval to the countless acts of racism perpetrated throughout its neighborhoods. Elected in 1949 largely on a promise to keep low-income housing out of white neighborhoods, Cobo quickly got to work promoting segregation. He gave the same neighborhood association heads who established restrictive race-based covenants in their neighborhoods prominent roles in his government, including on the city planning commission. The Mayor’s Interracial Committee, a quasi-governmental body that was established before Cobo took office and was meant to help quell racial tension in the city, denounced Cobo’s policies, especially his refusal to integrate low-income public housing, as having “the sole purpose of rebuilding and perpetuating the Negro ghetto.” So Cobo disbanded the committee.

As racist as Cobo and some of his predecessors were, local governments were limited in just how much segregation they could perpetuate. Only the federal government had the power to promote and enforce true apartheid conditions across the country. The federal government, unlike Cobo, rarely explicitly stated racism as its end goal. Instead, it cloaked its racism in the language of economic prosperity and individual consumer choice.

In 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover assembled more than 400 housing experts for the President’s National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. The idea was to restart the American economy through housing. “

I am confident that the sentiment for home ownership

is so embedded in the American heart that millions of people who dwell in tenements, apartments and rented rooms… have the aspiration for wider opportunity in ownership of their own homes,” Hoover said.

His assembled horde of housing experts agreed that the encouragement of home ownership was the best thing a government could do to grow America’s economy. To that end, the experts advised Hoover to create what we’ve come to take for granted as run-of-the-mill mortgages. Before Hoover’s housing assembly, mortgages with payback periods

of more than ten or fifteen years and low down payments were virtually unheard of. Banks feared the risk of lending to someone who could not afford to pay back the loan within a relatively short time frame. By extending the payback period and lowering down payment requirements, the new type of mortgage would allow families previously too poor to buy housing to purchase a home.

Two years later, with the economy even further into the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pounced on Hoover’s mortgage idea and created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refinance the mortgages of families at risk of losing their homes with the kind of low-interest, low-down-payment mortgages pushed by Hoover. This made economic sense: without the ability to refinance, many Americans could have gone into foreclosure, worsening the country’s economic depression. So between July 1933 and June 1935, HOLC made more than a million mortgage deals for a total of over $3 billion. But because of the massive risk inherent in the federal government getting involved in normal people’s mortgages, HOLC could not lend to just anyone. So the agency devised a comprehensive system for predicting the ability of people to pay back their mortgages. That system was blatantly racist.

Each neighborhood of every major American city was coded A, B, C, or D and assigned a corresponding color of green, blue, yellow, or red. “Homogenous” areas—identified by HOLC as areas with lots of new construction and filled with “American business and professional men”—were given A labels and colored green on maps. An “infiltration of Jews” or any other minority in a neighborhood would bar it from being given an A and the color green. So would old, semi-dilapidated housing. Blue neighborhoods were slightly less good investments in the eyes of the feds—perhaps they had a few Jews, or housing units that were too densely packed and crumbling. Yellow C neighborhoods were ones that were considered “definitely declining”—these were most often racially mixed areas in city centers. And neighborhoods labeled “D” and colored red were defined by the feds as neighborhoods “in which the things taking place in C have already happened”—in other words, where there was a combination of racial integration and poverty. Almost every majority-black neighborhood in the country was given a D and “redlined” on the federal government’s maps, barred from receiving federal funding for mortgages. The effect of these redlining maps was compounded as nearly every major bank adopted the federal government’s system. Within a few years of the HOLC system’s start, it was almost impossible to get a mortgage in much of the United States if you were black.

In 1934, FDR created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which ten years later would be joined by another homeowner program created through the newly established Veterans Administration (VA). Both programs were established with the intent of not only moving more Americans into homes but also funneling billions of dollars into the construction industry in order to boost the lackluster American economy.

“The building trades in America represent by all odds the largest single unit of our unemployment,” one housing official told Congress in 1934. “A fundamental purpose of this bill is an effort to get the people back to work.”

Unlike HOLC, the FHA and VA programs did not give out mortgages. Instead, for the first time in US history,

they created a government mechanism to insure bank mortgages. Any home that met FHA construction standards would be backed by government funding if the private mortgage went under, which enabled banks to start making riskier bets and making loans in numbers never seen before. The modern mortgage industry was essentially created by the two bills.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation had already started to make mortgages with lower down payments the norm, but the FHA helped solidify the idea that Americans could buy a home with very little cash up front. After the creation of the FHA, mortgages with 20 percent or sometimes even 10 percent down were common—spurring not only the construction of new housing but also the development of a new class of Americans who could all of a sudden move into private, detached housing and grow their nest egg as that house appreciated in value.

In 1933, construction began on 93,000 new homes

. By 1937, just three years after the FHA was created, housing starts had risen to 332,000. In 1941, 641,000 homes began construction. After World War II, construction really boomed: the United States added 13 million homes between 1945 and 1954. And VA mortgages accounted for 40 percent of these homes in 1946 and 1947.

The FHA, VA, and HOLC all explicitly used race in determining where they would approve mortgages. FHA established a set of rules for identifying neighborhoods where fewer mortgages might fail. Its 1939 underwriting manual stated, “Crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability” and “Older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy.” The manual also set standards for setbacks from curbs and minimum widths for houses. And it discouraged mixed-use planning—buildings with storefronts, it said, were less than ideal. Instead, blocks should be purely residential, commercial, or industrial, following the urban planning orthodoxies of the time, which held that space and calm were always good, while crowdedness and chaos were undesirable. It’s hard to parse out whether the FHA’s aesthetic requirements were just about aesthetics or whether they were another, subtle way of encouraging racial division.

In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, zoning laws

from the 1910s and 1920s were proposed with the explicit intent of keeping white residents in high-value, residential-only neighborhoods and pushing poor black people into the mixed-use central city. Regardless of the FHA’s intent, its zoning preferences meant that multiuse, multiracial sections of cities such as St. Louis were ineligible for most home loans.

The manual also contained the same blatant racism as HOLC’s rules. “If a neighborhood is to retain stability,” the FHA manual stated, “it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” The manual recommended that neighborhoods that wanted to be eligible for mortgages enact restrictive covenants like those used in Detroit to bar blacks and others from new neighborhoods.

The FHA manual was perhaps the single most detrimental document in the history of urbanism in the United States. With a few lines of anti-density, racist planning policy, the federal government essentially forced the creation of the suburbs and the near-complete disinvestment of the inner city. Not only were builders discouraged from

building in cities; if they wanted insured mortgage funding, they couldn’t build in cities at all. Cities were dense, mixed-use, and diverse, all qualities the FHA thought undesirable for new-home construction.

It would be easy to dismiss the guidelines as clumsy or a product of less enlightened times, but the FHA knew exactly what consequences its practices would have.

In a 1939 memo about Washington, DC

, FHA officials admitted the guidelines would end up concentrating poor African Americans in city centers and moving richer whites out to the suburbs: “The ‘filtering up’ process [white people moving to the suburbs], and the tendency of Negroes to congregate in the District, taken together, logically point to a situation where eventually the District will be populated by Negroes and the surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia by white families.”

Yet the FHA did not change its policies for years

, and banks followed the agency’s lead. Historical data on FHA loans nationwide are slim, but surveys from individual cities show how vast the influence of the FHA was. In the city of St. Louis, for example, only 12,116 mortgages were backed by FHA insurance between 1934 and 1960, while St. Louis County (the suburbs of St. Louis) received nearly 63,000 FHA-backed mortgages. Nassau County, which encompasses many New York City suburbs on Long Island, received 87,000 mortgages; the Bronx received 1,641.

The FHA’s racist policies continued for decades. As late as 1966, for example, there had not been one mortgage backed by the FHA issued in the urban centers of Camden or Paterson, New Jersey, yet nearly half of all suburban housing in the 1950s and 1960s was backed by the FHA or the VA.

The FHA’s preference for suburban-style construction and its redlining of nearly every black neighborhood in America had the effect of trapping poverty in urban centers and trapping African Americans in poverty. In postwar boomtowns such as Detroit, black people were already at a disadvantage in finding jobs and getting paid fairly for those jobs—leaving them with lower incomes and nest eggs than whites. That disadvantage was further compounded when the FHA’s loans enabled white flight to the suburbs and forced black people into cities. And that plight was then further compounded when suburbs subsequently banned blacks from living in them, and when factory work (specifically car manufacturing in Detroit) followed white people to the suburbs.

Between 1946 and 1956, GM, Chrysler, and Ford

spent nearly $8 billion on new factories, nearly all in the suburbs of Detroit. The decentralization was so quick that by the time orders came in for military gear during the Korean War in the 1950s, only 7.5 percent of military purchases came from within the Motor City’s city limits. African Americans were essentially prevented from reaching these jobs by design: they were barred from living in suburbs and often too poor to afford transportation via car out to the factories.

Black people in Detroit and all across the country not only were pushed into city centers and held there by racist suburban policy but were repeatedly internally displaced by the forces of “urban renewal.” Federally funded highways began cutting through Detroit after World War II. The highways weren’t just ways to subsidize white flight to the suburbs; local politicians considered them a “

handy device for razing the slums

.” Detroit displaced nearly 2,000 black families from one area along Gratiot Avenue in 1947 for the sole purpose of getting rid of a section of the city that

used more tax dollars than it gave back. Mayor Albert

Cobo called urban renewal the “price of progress

.”

The effect of decades of segregation is that black Americans are poorer and less likely to achieve success than whites. In Stuck in Place, a study of the apartheid-like conditions of black America,

New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey

found that over the last half century there has been virtually no improvement in the income of African Americans.

While white children today who come from middle-class families can expect to earn on average $74,000

, $20,000 more than their parents, black children can expect to earn $45,000 a year—not only significantly less than white kids, but $9,000 less than the average earned by black people in the middle class a generation ago.

Half of middle-income black kids fall

down

the economic ladder

compared with the previous generation, while only 14 percent of white kids do.

Sharkey argues that there’s only one possible reason: “

When white families advance in economic status

, they are able to translate this economic advantage into spatial advantage by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children.” This simply is not possible for most black families.

The United States’ racist housing legacy may seem only tangentially related to gentrification today, but the two processes are part and parcel of the same historical trajectory. If black Americans had been able to achieve the same kind of success through housing that whites had, gentrification would not be such a race-based phenomenon. Instead, the intentional destruction of black urban life has become the canvas on which gentrifiers now paint.

Over and over again, media organizations, hipsters, and artists refer to Detroit as a “blank slate.” That ignores not only the 700,000 other people who still live there but also the historical reality that the “blank slate” was created through decades of brutal racism. The fact that gentrifiers are often taking advantage of the cheap rent caused by racially restrictive housing policy also complicates the narrative gentrifiers and the mainstream media like to perpetuate about being saviors to decimated urban areas.

When Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, announced

the bank would invest $100 million in the city’s downtown in 2014, the press hailed him as a risk taker. And, as we have seen,

Dan Gilbert has been called a superhero

. This of course belies the fact that the same kinds of institutions—and often the very same institutions, as is the case with old banks such as JPMorgan Chase—were instrumental in destroying Detroit and keeping its poor black residents poor. Gentrifiers may see racial inequality in Detroit, but few acknowledge where that inequality comes from. These gentrifiers are often the kids of the same white families that were able to leave Detroit thanks to subsidies from the federal government in the form of highways and low-interest loans on houses—loans that were denied to black families because of redlining.

Now, just like generations before, though with the geography reversed, the same dynamic is playing out: white people are being subsidized by the local, state, and federal governments to reinhabit cities, while black Detroiters are

ignored or even forcibly pushed out. Fifty years ago subsidies came in the form of billions spent on highways and suburban housing. This time they come in the form of billions used on tax breaks for stadiums and condos, for renovations of storefronts and homes, for streetcars and bike lanes.

Gentrification is often presented as a sort of corrective to the suburbs: instead of white flight and unsustainable cookie-cutter planning, we get dense, urban, and diverse cityscapes. But gentrification is simply a new form of the same process that created the suburbs; it’s the same age-old, racist process of subsidizing and privileging the lives and preferred locales of the wealthy and white over those of poor people of color. The seesaw has just tipped in the other direction. Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over, or that cities are becoming more diverse. All it means is that our geography of inequality is being redrawn. Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation. The borders around the ghettos have simply been rebuilt.

Lauren Hood grew up in Detroit

. She’s black and navigates the two worlds of the old and new Detroit. Until recently, Hood was the community engagement manager at Loveland Technologies, one of the hottest tech companies in the city. Loveland has developed software that allows the city of Detroit, along with anyone else with an Internet connection, to view detailed information about any piece of land in the city—its owner, its blight status (is it in need of being demolished? Is it occupied?), and often a photo. Loveland’s technology is used by the city and funded by some of its major players, including Dan Gilbert.

Hood told me her work there left her feeling unfulfilled, and recently she quit. Still, she occupies a space few others do: she’s black, she’s part of the professional class in the city, and she lives in the 7.2. But she’s also part of that other Detroit, the people being pushed out of the city both by the government’s current focus on the 7.2 and by a legacy of racism. Hood is a fourth-generation native Detroiter. Her parents were part of the black middle class that built Detroit. Her mom was an administrator for the state government; her father worked for GM. And Hood has seen their Detroit nearly disappear as the new Detroit she’s part of now takes shape seemingly overnight.

“I made up this character named Ms. Jenkins,” Hood told me on a recent drive up Detroit’s main street—Woodward Avenue, which goes from downtown through Midtown and out toward the deteriorating residential sections of the city and eventually to the suburbs. “When people are like, ‘Oh, all this development, it’s good for Detroiters,’ I’m like, ‘It’s good for Detroiters like you, but is it good for Ms. Jenkins? The woman who has been here for decade after decade, who owns a home on the East Side? All these things that are good for Detroit, which Detroit are they good for?’”

On the way down Woodward out of Midtown, Hood pointed to her loft-style apartment, located a block away from where the new taxpayer-funded hockey arena and entertainment complex will be built. She pointed to the tracks

being laid for the M-1, to buildings that are being converted from abandoned shells to luxury condos. Then, as we got farther and farther away from the city’s center, she pointed to different kinds of things—closed stores, homes burned to the ground, improbable signs of life such as a well-kept lawn on an otherwise desolate block or a clothing shop still in business on a street with little else.

“When I was growing up, all these places were occupied,” she said. “All of the people here had good, solid jobs. What happened?”

We continued driving north, and Woodward turned more and more desolate until it was dark. There was virtually nothing open on either side of the road. The drivers around us seemed concerned only with speeding further north to Detroit’s suburbs.

Eventually Hood turned left off Woodward into a neighborhood near Seven Mile (which is, as the name implies, seven miles from Detroit’s downtown) into an area filled with grand but dilapidated houses. She then made another turn down a small tree-lined residential street where plywood, chains, and padlocks had replaced front doors—an attempt to prevent scavengers from stealing copper wiring. The houses without the plywood were already scavenged, turned into unusable shells one piece of cheap metal at a time. They had no windowpanes, no lights. Hood stopped in front of a house on the corner. It was two stories, simple but nice. It wouldn’t be out of place in the tonier neighborhoods of most industrial American cities. The house showed signs of decay at its fringes—paint chipping, a cracked window. At least, she said, it was occupied. And then she told me, “This is where I grew up.”

Lauren comes to check on the house every couple of weeks as a kind of ritual to remind herself whom she’s fighting for. She feels as if it’s her responsibility to make sure her childhood home doesn’t fall apart like most of the houses surrounding it did.

“I think about how fast this all happened,” Hood said. “What were we paying attention to that we didn’t notice that people were leaving, that properties were deteriorating? It seems like it happened overnight.”

If Hood is looking for a Ms. Jenkins, it could be her own mother. Detroit was never very friendly to Ida Hood or her husband, Lawrence, but they stuck it out year after year, through multiple break-ins and car thefts, as their favorite stores and restaurants closed during the period of white flight, and as many of their friends left for the safer suburbs. But on a cold January day in 2013, a group of teenagers ran up to Ida and Lawrence as they carried groceries from their car to their house. One teen pointed a gun at Lawrence’s head. They robbed the Hoods of everything. The cops took half an hour to show up. And that was what finally convinced them to get out.

“I think I have PTSD,” Ida told me, speaking from her new home in Farmington Hills, a suburb twenty miles northwest of Detroit. “The level of anxiety just increased day by day. We couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t eat. We had to get out of there.… The first good night’s sleep I had was once we moved here.”

Lauren isn’t a conspiracy theorist, but she struggles to figure out the underlying logic in the redevelopment of a city in which people like Ida and Lawrence Hood are forgotten while money and praise are lavished on the new,

largely white Detroit.

“Maybe that was the idea all along,” Lauren told me. “To get rid of them.”

After pausing for a minute at her former home, Lauren began the journey back toward her loft in the city center with me in the passenger seat. If the drive out made it feel like the city was slowly disintegrating into nothing, the drive back made it feel as if we were seeing a city being constructed in real time—burned husks of buildings turning into fully formed ones, sidewalks becoming bright with the yellow of streetlights and the white-blue hue of shopping centers and gas stations. There was a brief lull as we drove through Highland Park, the municipality within Detroit’s borders that’s so poor its fire department’s alarm system involves a fax machine pushing an empty soda can onto the floor. But rather quickly after that, things looked more lush again. You could see the locational seesaw of capital in real time. When we crossed back into the 7.2, it was as if we had entered a dome of luxury tightly sealed at its borders. This is where capital has decided investment is important, and so this is where the people who can afford it live the good life.

“The 7.2 is turning into the Hunger Games,” Lauren said as she pulled up to her house. “They might as well put a barbed-wire fence around it, and everyone else can fight for scraps.”

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