The most recommended books on gentrification

The best book I’ve ever read about organizing. Max Rameau is a visionary organizer who, in the midst of the housing crisis of 2008, began seizing empty houses and helping homeless people move in. In this book, he goes into deep detail on a previous campaign to reclaim land and turn it into housing, explaining both the successes and failures, as well as the strategy and ideas behind the tactics. Read this to learn the fundamentals of how to plan, organize and win.

Richard Price’s propulsive plots revolve around crime, but the novels are always about something much bigger, and Lush Life merges many of his favorite themes into one masterpiece: ambition and compromise, race and class, gentrification and crime, the push-and-pull of a city’s progressive leanings against reactionary forces for law and order and property values. Price’s city is constructed on a bedrock of conflict between those who’ve come to New York struggling to create art, those who were born here struggling to get by, and the cops struggling to hold the middle, in a spectacular kaleidoscope of a downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, of hipsters and gangsters, housing projects and trendy restaurants, all these subcultures clashing in one microcosm of urban life.

This book offers insight into how Black DC residents think about their changing city.

For many Black long-term residents, DC has long been a “Chocolate city,” a city where Black people held both the demographic and political majority, and where Black people created their own spaces of belonging, pride, and self-reliance.

This book draws from oral histories and ethnographic data with long-term African-American residents of DC to explain both how gentrification has enhanced the vulnerability of low-income residents and how Black residents of DC are reclaiming spaces in their city.

When I finished this book, I put it down and ugly cried for about 20 minutes. It is a beautiful portrait of love and loss within a family I came to love, warts and all.

The characters were so nuanced and realistic I felt their emotions right alongside them. Loosely (and deftly) based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a book that will live in my heart for a long, long time. 

The civil rights movement was a great triumph, but I’ve always suspected that we lost something along the way–or maybe this solution just created new problems.

Lance Freeman shows how the pre-civil rights ghetto, enforced by racist laws, was often a hothouse of Black culture, Black-controlled institutions, and Black power. The contemporary Black ghetto, largely abandoned by the middle class, is a place of concentrated poverty and despair.

We never want to go back to Jim Crow, but we need to address the concentrated poverty that is eviscerating many neighborhoods. Rejecting simplistic understandings of gentrification, Freeman shows that Black gentrification, under the right circumstances, could make Black spaces havens again. Freeman is not only smart, I think, but brave in challenging conventional wisdom. 

This book demonstrates that prose doesn’t have to be lyrical to leave an indelible impact on readers.

Lutie Johnson is a single mother living in a rundown building on the street. Her desires are simply articulated as are the barriers keeping her from achieving them. Lutie spends most of the novel dodging the clutches of men who think they deserve her just because they desire her, and a neighborhood snake-eyed madam who wants to exploit Lutie’s beauty.

Petry begins the book describing a cold November wind and continues with an icy precision that will entrance the reader until the very last page.  

Read this book if you want to understand the nuances of blackness in the nation’s capital.

Brandi Thompson Summers argues in her book, Black in Place, that gentrification along the H Street Corridor in DC has involved the embracing of blackness as an aesthetic alongside the displacement of actual Black people. Summers explains how blackness came to be valued as a prized aesthetic at the same time that Black people experienced the heavy policing, predatory lending, and displacement that both make possible and accompany the gentrification of Black neighborhoods.

Corner grocery stores are everywhere in New York City, but most of the time we never really think very hard about them. Ben Ryder Howe on the other hand, drew on his own experience running the family bodega. The store he ran was on the border between a rapidly gentrifying section of Brooklyn and a neighborhood with public housing. The changing customer base meant his store shelves began to gentrify like the neighborhood around him, but as he soon learned, too many changes too quickly are bad for business. Part memoir, part researched journalism, Ryder Howe provides a fascinating look into a New York City staple. 

Giles does a wonderful job with a current hot topic that might come up a lot for kids: gentrification. Take Back the Block made me want to leap into action, and that’s a pretty magical thing to be able to say about a book! Not only did I want to read more about these characters, but I wanted to get involved in my own city to preserve homes and mitigate gentrification. Change is constant, and kids will love this book for talking about the changes we can control and those we cannot, and how to see the difference. Parents will appreciate a way to concretely illustrate what gentrification is, and to have honest conversations about it with their kids.

This is the book that launched a thousand essays about gentrification in urban neighborhoods and reinvented the term “revanchism” for use in critical geography.

From the French noun revanche, revanchism refers to a policy or movement focused on reacquiring a nation's lost territory. The Revanchist City as it became known after Smith’s book, describes city residents under siege by their own city governments.

Starting with a description of the battles over who could use Tompkins Square Park in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 90s, and moving on to other case studies (some global), Smith shows how cities are transformed into zones of international capital investment and class privilege through neoliberal policies enacted at the municipal level.