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

· Hachette Audio
Audiobook
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This book will become available on August 12, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.

About this audiobook

“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 exposé, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities and how we can get it back.

 

About the author

P. E. Moskowitz is a former staff writer for Al Jazeera America. They have written for publications including the Guardian, New York Times, New Republic, Wired, and more. They are the author of The Case Against Free Speech. A graduate of Hampshire College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, they live in New York City.

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