Jeremiah Moss’s “Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul” illustrates how gentrification has turned New York into a tale of two cities. Detailing several waves of gentrification from the 1970’s through the present, Moss traces the roots of gentrification to Colonial racism in America. Mixing of the classes and races, Moss states, has always been a threat to the powerful elite, and just like in Colonial times, the elites of New York tried to maintain their positions of power by squeezing the middle class, reducing jobs and opportunities, and pitting immigrants and Blacks against each other. “Gentrification is about class,” Moss states, “and the places where class intersects with race…it is always about an imbalance of power. And in every scenario, the gentrifiers have more power.”
In our earlier readings about Robert Moses, we began to explore the roles of race and class in urban planning. In Moss’s book we see that these trends continued all the way to the present. During most of the twentieth century, New York’s mayors, including Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, were all influenced by these attitudes and fell into the trap of rezoning and gentrifying stable neighborhoods, destroying their unique characters and creating a haven for the wealthy, where the middle class, people of color, and other marginalized groups were no longer welcome. As Mayor Koch bluntly stated in 1984, “We’re not catering to the poor anymore. There are four other boroughs where they can live. They don’t have to live in Manhattan.”
- How can we, as a city, make New York a city that caters to all of its residents and where they all feel equally welcome?
- Politician often use fears about race and taxes t turn the white working class against poor people of color. Why is that tactic so successful?
