We have been here for over two years and we are very excited to be here on the Upper West Side supporting these great importance works and i am so happy to have Peter Moscowitz here i loved this book and i think you will all love it, too mac. We do not charge admission so we would ask you to keep supporting great people and great work. For those of you that dont know his work, he is a freelance journalist whos covered a wide variety of issues from disasters to the racist urban planning. A former staff writer at Al Jazeera America hes written for the guardian, New York Times, others. He is a graduate at the school of journalism and joining him in moderating the discussion will be the host of the difficult to name reading series that brings together journalists and others. He is a writer and currently working on a novel. If you noticed booktv is here from cspan and they will be recording. After the talking portion if you could wait for me to come and find you and give you a microphone so that way they can hear you, also. Thats everything i need. Lets welcome peter. [applause] [cheering] hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. I took the train to the Upper West Side and it makes me feel like im in high school again. So basically i wrote how to kill a city because i was interested and couldnt explain it or find a good explanation for it. I grew up in the west village. My parents still live there and i kind of saw it change before my eyes from a middleclass place for artists and Young Professionals and oligarchs. Then when i came back from college i couldnt afford to live there anymore so i ended up moving to brooklyn and found myself on the other side of that process. I knew i was helping displaced people and i was getting the same glances on the street i would give to new people in my Old Neighborhood like why the hell are you here. And i really didnt have an answer to that so thats why i wrote the book. I decided to look at the gentrification in four cities which are in new orleans, detroit, San Francisco and new york and i spent a month living in each. The book takes you through each city and introduces you to a host of characters like people that are being gentrified out, activists against gentrification, developers and politicians who are pro gentrification. You get a lot of statistics along the way. And its not just about a hipster in a coffee shop but there is a personal strategy included in what the government to help the cities are funded and in a way that disadvantages the buck. So there is a lot of that. But i wanted to read from a narrative section. Reading out loud is probably boring so i want to read from the detroit section. Just to give you a little context, its kind of an exodus and its what Developers Call as building up the new condo and the rest of the city is just being forgotten so that is the term you will hear which means point square miles of greater downtown so that gives you a sense of how small an area they are focusing on. She is black and navigates the two worlds. Until recently a Community Engagement loveland developed software that allows the city of detroit along with anyone else with an Internet Connection to get detailed information about any piece of land in the city, the owner, the status and there needs to be demolished and also a photograph. The technology is used by the city and Major Players including for some context the owner of quicken loans has approximately 90 in the greater downtown and is now renovating most of them. She told me her work left her feeling unfulfilled and recently quite so she occupied the state and is part of the professional city and lives at 7. 2 but is other a part of detroit thats being pushed out of the city by by the government and the legacy of racism. A fourth generation needed her parents were part of the black middleclass adult detroit and her mom worked as an administrator for the government and her father for gm and the have seen their detroit nearly disappear as it now takes shape seemingly overnight. I made up this character that told me on a recent drive that goes from downtown, midtown and out when people are like all this development is good, i said its good for those like you but is it good for ms. Jenkins, the woman that has been here for decade after decade that owns a home on the east side all of these are good which one are they good for. On the way out of midtown was an apartment located a block away from the hockey arena and complex. She points to the tracks that are being laid for the streetcar that only goes like 2 miles to buildings that are being converted. Then as we got farther and farther away she points to a different kind of things. When i was growing up all these places were occupied, she said. All these people had solid jobs. What happened . It turned more and more desolate until it was dark and there was nothing open on either side of the road. The drivers seemed concerned only with going further north. Eventually they turned left into a neighborhood near southern mile and areas filled with dilapidated housing and she then made another turn down a residential street where the plywood chains and padlocked reflected from the doors and houses without the plywood were already scavenged and turned into shopping with one piece of shelf thatll do. Out of place in the neighborhood of most industrial American Cities it showed dk and cracked windows and at least she said it was occupied as she told me this is where i grew up. She comes to check on the house of every kind of speaks to remid herself that shes fighting for and says it is her responsibility to make sure it doesnt fall apart like other houses data. Think about how this happened. We didnt notice the people leaving and properties deteriorating. It could be her own mother. They were closed in as many of the friends left in 2013 a group of teenagers ran up and carried groceries from the car to the house. I think that i have ptsd speaking from a suburb the level just increased day by day. We had to get out of there. Morgan is not a conspiracy theorist but struggled to find off of a logic of the city which people are forgotten while on detroit. Maybe that was the idea all along. After pausing for a minute in the center of the city if the drive out made it feel like nothing but drive back was like it was constructed in real time. Sidewalks becoming yellow and the blue Shopping Centers and gas stations. There was a brief wall as we went through Highland Park within the borders and Fire Department alarm systems. Rather quickly after that you could see in real time you cross back and it was as if we entered luxury tightly sealed the borders. This is where people that could afford it lived the good life. I was turning into the hunger games. They might as well put a barbed wire fence around it and people can fight for the scraps. [applause] it was interesting reading the book because you hear Something Like gentrification and think it is going to be dry or complicated. But you do a good job of making it understandable to the reader and breaking down the different parts and then you spend all the time in these cities and these are good profiles of the people that are living there so it is kind of taking away the element of how did you figure out the schedule and going about writing the book . I knew this wasnt an issue just affecting new york. It made it seem unknowable and like a random phenomenon like all of a sudden the whole prices are rising and no one was connecting the dots. I knew i wanted to see it in places its just starting in places like detroit and new orleans and places like San Francisco where it is pushing out entire populations. I chose them because they had the different phases of gentrification and i knew that in order to show what was happening, i would need to connect with local people because obviously they are the ones experiencing it firsthand and i didnt want to write a boring book. It wasnt meant to be a textbook it was meant to be something that people like me who read a million battl battle pieces abot gentrification or whatever. One thing pointed out in San Francisco they had a Marketing Company that basically filters down and abandoned the New York Times ends up writing about it. I dont know if that is almost nefarious in the way that it is publicized as this kind of beautiful thing for the city all the time and that nittygritty effective things that are not written about as much. When you see Something Like the New York Times piece how detroit is, before that there was maybe a year ago a nonprofit funded by the City Government working with Small Business owners that happened to all be a way to come together to put out positive articles about detroit and then jus death turns into a local media story and then thats eventually picked up by the New York Times, so the narrative is being crafted. To take away i have from the book is theres also things people can do to stop the gentrification but it seems like its always the same thing like you cant just send in articles. You have to go to these Community Board meetings and get involved. Is there a way to be lazy and still fight gentrification . No. The overall solution is to overthrow capitalism. I think when we talk about if we are talking about the form of globalization and capitalism so there are people working on housing issues for years and years before and there were people working on this stuff for years and years so when we think of it as a new thing, we are ignoring all of this for the entire history of the United States so i think it means acknowledging that its not just about the new phenomenon and then linking it with the people that know how to fight and that have been fighting these battles for decades. This team that i feel like they are the people who will say you have to lift yourself up by your bootstraps, but in your buck you explain how they get so many tax subsidies and spend billions and billions of dollars funding these real estate projects so they dont have to pay taxes for ten years. How do you think that can be publicized . You dont hear about these things in the news. The first thin the first thing you have to understand is for decades, the government has been subsidizing the white middle class through housing. We consider it a natural thing that happens but what actually happened is the government insuring mortgages for people in the suburbs would demand the people that get the mortgages being white and the houses be suburban style and no one in the cities get them so what that essentially did is create an entire new class of people that live in the suburbs and could take their money and invest it in housing and have capital that way so now we are seeing all of that capital that accumulated running back into the cities. So thats where the kind of inequality comes from what people have been denied the ability to get the same kind of housing and capital so its not just a matter of who wants to live where but its inequality in this country. And also thinking about people that grew up in the suburbs and the west village where you just kind of knew everybody in the neighborhood like me growing up in the suburbs like i dont talk to my neighbors so you live in the neighborhood where i feel like its so im not used to talking to my neighbors but im trying to get better at that and its almost like the fact the government has so much to do with this. Its this situation of isolation and that becomes the opposite of what you write about in a great city and a great neighborhood. I think obviously waving at your neighbor isnt a solution to gentrificatiothe solutionto y it is a start if you have like some radical thought behind it and if youre trying to build communities and take responsibility for the place you put yourself in and acknowledge you are part of a neighborhood and not just living in a condo like to reevaluate how you consider your life in the journey and everything or is it about being part of a community so i think it can be part of that. You also write about how the Community Board nine, could you tell people a little about her . Its this great woman that lives in prospect garden and has lived there about 30 years needy and she realized that all the neighborhoods around her were being gentrified really rapidly and she had a lot of research and realized the first step was the local Community Board submitting a request to the Planning Department to evaluate a rezoning because once the city Planning Department because they are pro gentrification, once they start the review then they are bound to say lets redevelop all of this in the entire neighborhood. So she realized that she prevented the border from ever requesting reconsideration that they couldnt get the process startestarted so she goes to evy Board Meeting and yells at them like really loudly cursing with the camera at the Community Board members until they get mad at her and slip and Say Something stupid and then she records them and they get kicked off the committee for it. [laughter] some people think she is crazy or out of control and she said i know exactly what im doing. This strategy is the only thing keeping the community from being redeveloped. Its one of the only brooklyn neighborhoods that hasnt been considered for zoning. Another thing is how a lot of cities that have different unique things are kind of all becoming very similar. Do you think that there is a way to kind of stop that from happening . I think as another journalist wrote about like the airspace which is like air bmb and all these coffee shops that look exactly the same where it essentially because there is a class of people that is mobile between the cities and london and new york and San Francisco we are just creating neighborhoods in every single city and the scariest version of that is this Co Working Space and they are trying to build an ecosystem you can travel anywhere and they all look the same so i think that its i think it is when you think about this idea like a global class of people that has that type of place and thats what the neighborhoods are for. What is interesting is when you try to explain a situation but do you think of the book as being prescriptive and saying heres what we need to do to fight this . A little bit. There are comments and solutions and in the back of the book it has ten or 15 or something things that need to be done, just simple step dislike that. Once you add all of the steps it starts to look like socialism. All these small things look good but we needed a new system that doesnt create this massive inequality in the first place. I am encouraged by people protesting and if you think of the gentrification and rent increases, the association is like the number two lobbyist yet you never see campaigns against them like you do with the corporations. Housing is their number one living expense. The idea of private property is hard to politicize so that makes me less hopeful as they political thing it is not just where i live but ive encouraged people are starting to realize that things are messed up right now. It also seems when you asked the city i if your apartment is rent stabilized that seems wrong. Can you explain to everybody how that works . I filed a letter saying can you check my apartment and basically because they took so long to process the application we were waiting a year to find out because my landlord wont sign a lease for me until it is over. I think that we will open up for questions. Thank you very much for the discussion. Jeffrey at columbia says it is the Interest Rate that agreed it drives people as well as private equity which fires the Company Employees and then sends the jobs wherever. It is a global problem happening everywhere but right out of the front door of the store where landlords gain upon people and it was three or four weeks ago that meir announced he will supply lawyers to people in housing court. If there is approximately 260,000 people that have been evicted in the last ten years does that sound about right for you that was under bloombergs watch. [inaudible] this is booktv i am antithe policy of. He promised to fix the tale of two cities but tired of the branch as the housing economic used to be two offices that makes sense and now they are one office so she is trying to simultaneously develop the ideas to gentrified them and find Affordable Housing for people providing lawyers for people but the problem is a larger problem. The gentrification between new orleans and Hurricane Katrina i thought the timing suggested that there would be a consequence i wanted to look at new orleans. Hurricane katrina gave the city and the state of louisiana a oneofakind opportunity. There were 100,000 in the city anthan there were before the katrina. There was a euphemism like we dont need game show watchers. Even though it wasnt damaged by the storm. They had oneway tickets and didnt provide them a way to return. You said you talked to somebody and you could go back to new orleans. Someone i interviewed said she lied and said she was staying in atlanta. Now ten years later, they are richer than ever a but the rent has doubled and meanwhile they are saying look how far we have come in making the city a better place. Can you talk about how the charter system works and how they work. The governor of louisiana created a new system to evaluate schools. Basically every school except for ten plus shuts down and turned into