How to Recognize Gentrification

Leslie Kern, author of Feminist City (one of Planetizen's top urban planning books of 2020), has written a new book called Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies.

The author sat down for an interview with Roshan Abraham for Next City, discussing how the book challenges the conversations about gentrification on multiple sides of the issue—both how some frame gentrification rhetorically as a benefit to communities while others emphasize “the aesthetic markers of gentrification.”

Among the topics of conversation in the full interview, linked below, are how the remote work of the pandemic has changed the conversation about the pandemic (“It’s brought gentrification to the doorstep of smaller cities and communities that weren’t really facing it on any large scale,” says Kern), how communities can develop new services and amenities without catering to forces of gentrification (“the strongest barriers to that happening are when there is a solid stable supply of social housing in a neighborhood,” says Kern), and how to identify the differences between good faith and bad faith opposition to development.