Cover art for How to Kill a City
Published
Perseus, October 2025
ISBN
9781645030744
Format
Softcover, 288 pages
Dimensions
21cm × 14cm

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

Not yet released
Due October 14, 2025.
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"An exacting look at gentrification.... How to Kill a City elucidates the complex interplay between the forces we control and those that control us."?New York Times Book Review

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance.

P. E. Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. In the new preface, Moskowitz stresses just how little has changed in those same cities and how the problems of gentrification are proliferating throughout America.

The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities and how we can get it back.

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