Carolina Planning Journal : Volume 43 / Planning for Uncertainty
A CO NVE RSATI O N WI T H PET ER MOS KOWITZ: G e n t r i f i c at i o n a n d t h e Fu t u re o f A m e r i c a n C i t i e s
SARAH SHAUGHNESSY Sarah Shaughnessy is a North Carolina native pursuing dual Master’s degrees in City and
Regional Planning and Public Health at UNC. She is interested in using interdisciplinary strategies to address health disparities related to the built environment.
PETER MOSKOWITZ Peter Moskowitz is the author of How to Kill a City, Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight
for the Neighborhood (Nation Books: 2017), which chronicles the transformation of four U.S. cities: New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. Moskowitz has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and others.
Writing both a narrative and deeply researched commentary on urban policy, Peter Moskowitz frames gentrification not as a product of individual preference, but a process deeply-rooted in economic inequality, highlighting its detrimental impacts and the changes needed to correct it. Sarah Shaughnessy spoke with Peter on the phone in February 2018, and an edited transcript of their conversation follows:
SAR AH SHAUGHNESSY: You frame the book as a counterpoint to the narrative of gentrification as a product of consumer and cultural choice. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about your motivation for writing the book. Who’s your intended audience?
PETER MOSKOWITZ: I guess I wasn’t thinking about my intended audience as much as I was thinking about what I wanted to understand about gentrification. When I first started writing the book, most things you were seeing in the popular press, in the New York Times and in other places, sort of framed gentrification as this unknowable phenomenon, this organic movement back to the city, and that seemed really inaccurate to me. But I couldn’t really find anything except super dense academic texts about gentrification. So I wanted to explore for myself, how does this really operate? Because nobody seemed to be looking into that. 44