In Detroit today, politicians promise that real estate development—coupled with police violence—will guarantee the city’s spiritual redemption.
Tag: Gentrification
How to House America
Fixing the American housing crisis will require constructing more houses, but also increasing subsidies and protections for existing tenants.
Cities Run by Real Estate
After decades confined to the desk drawer of important but boring things, the minutiae of urban planning policy are now attracting some popular attention. Transit-oriented development might come up ...
Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home ...
When Did Nature Become Moral?
When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations ...
On Christopher Street Pier
This month, Public Books mourns the loss of the writer, teacher, and editor Ellis Avery to leiomyosarcoma, a rare uterine cancer. Ellis’s essay about a beloved ...
The Pasajlar of Tunalı Hilmi Çaddesi, Ankara
Bookended by Koçatepe Mosque and Kuğulu Park, Tunalı Hilmi Çaddesi is a leafy anomaly in a city that worships concrete ...
Living on the Edge: Outer Richmond, San Francisco
Ascend the stairs of an apartment building called Bay View, a misnomer, since the view of the northern waters is blockaded by Seacliff, where faux-historic mega-mansions loom over Baker Beach …
The Street and the World: Rua do Benformoso, Lisbon
A short walk from Lisbon’s central Baixa district—where tourists flock …
The Gowanus Overpass: Brooklyn, New York
In 2012, I moved into a Sunset Park apartment with a kitchen window nearly perpendicular to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway ...
The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor ...
The “New York Values” of “City on Fire”
Some readers will come to Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire with chips on their shoulders. Hallberg’s youth; the seeming ease with which he parlayed his manuscript into an enormous advance ...
How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the ...
Safe Space
The geography of gay life has shifted dramatically over the past decades. In 1949, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal described homosexuality as located almost exclusively in spaces of moral depredation—in ...
Mexico City Chronicles
According to the latest version of the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, a crónica is both “a history that obeys the order of the times” and “a journalistic piece … about ...
Up from the Willamette
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. If you tell people you live in St. John’s, everyone says, “Oh, that’s a really ...
All Eyes On Brazil
With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now well under way, and the Olympics coming in 2016, Brazil is assuming its place on the world stage. The current tournament has generated more coverage of the ...
How to Buy a Guitar in Chicago
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In its still relatively new location on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s Northcenter neighborhood ...
That Silver Building on Powers
East Williamsburg is fast becoming one of the most dramatically gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with glass-fronted condo buildings shooting up in their narrow lots like beanstalks in a ...
On Christopher Street Pier
This is the inaugural installment of Public Streets, a series of observations on urban life curated by the novelist Ellis Avery. I’ve seen that child before, a boy of 10 or 12 in suspenders and a ...
