How to kill a city Gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood

"The coffee shop is the tip of the iceberg," Moskowitz writes in this exacting look at gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York, exposing how large institutions - governments, businesses, foundations - influence street-level processes that might appear as organic as the coffee shop's dark roast. In nations that fiscally support their cities (including, once upon a time, our own), municipalities develop low- and moderate-income neighborhoods for their citizens. Stripped of such support, cities scramble to prop up their tax bases by luring wealthy residents with shiny, bland streetscapes. Moskowitz, a journalist, has seen this firsthand. He grew up in a Greenwich Village whose nonconformist edge got sanded off just when his gay teenage self needed it most. But the scowls Moskowitz gives his parents' well-heeled neighbors echo those he draws as a gentrifier in the parts of Brooklyn where he relocates. While moving nimbly from neighborhood observations to broad national and international contexts, Moskowitz occasionally stumbles into unexamined platitudes. "Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation," he says of Michigan millennials moving from lilywhite suburbs to America's blackest city, a conclusion that ignores the complicated disjunction between individual and institutional racism. Still, more often than not, "How to Kill a City" elucidates the complex interplay between the forces we control and those that control us. DANIEL BROOK is the author of "A History of Future Cities" and "The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-AH America."