Toward Being a Better Gentrifier

Reading about gentrification, it’s often not difficult to sense the distance between the subject and the author when the scribe is an academic, a politician, or even a journalist. The writer might easily be part of the gentrification problem, unwittingly or not, and hence reticent to have real talk about the situation.

The authors of the new book Gentrifier deal with those deficits upfront while tackling the topic that tends to rile up housing activists, mystify mayors, and delight CityLab readers. Gentrifier’s authors—John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill—are all professors at major universities, earning middle-income salaries and choosing to live in cities and neighborhoods in which they were not born and raised. Schlichtman and Patch are both white and are living or have lived in neighborhoods that were predominantly non-white at some period in time. Hill once elected to live in a mostly low-income community suffering from disinvestment in hopes of improving it. That is to say, they all have gentrified or are currently helping gentrify a neighborhood.