Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City

by Richard E. Ocejo

An unvarnished portrait of gentrification in an underprivileged, majority-minority small city

Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Sixty Miles Upriver tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in places where it unfolds in new ways.

As New York City’s housing market becomes too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities like Newburgh, where housing is affordable and historic. Richard Ocejo takes readers into the lives of these newcomers, examining the different ways they navigate racial difference and inequality among Newburgh’s much less privileged local residents, and showing how stakeholders in the city’s revitalization reframe themselves and gentrification to cast the displacement they cause to minority groups in a positive light.

An intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification, Sixty Miles Upriver explains how progressive White gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology

288 pages, Hardcover

Published April 23, 2024

Reviews

[Sabeena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an academic text and reads like one but is well written and isn't as dry as it could be. The scope will probably feel limited for some readers (it's an exploration of gentrification and not meant prescribe solutions) but that exploration and its findings were fascinating for me. This book was especially good at highlighting and demonstrating the "quiet parts" that are not said out loud when it comes to race and class in White liberals' political machinations.

I am not a White gentrifier, but reading about their approach to the creative economy and prioritization of market forces in improving their city I found a lot of overlap with my own thinking. As a result, I have been reflecting on my own identity and how I can use the power I have to influence and shape the society around me, so definitely worth the read.

[Jonathan Wynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book of familiar and wide ranging themes (e.g., cities, culture, and gentrification), spun in a new and more generalizable case. Well researched, and readable, this is a book that should be of interest to many!

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book feels like a cross between a magazine article describing what Newburgh residents think, feel and say and an academic text designed to study gentrification in Newburgh. The book sometimes felt a bit one-sided, as if the author was trying to make the book seem deeper by throwing around anti-gentrification jargon again and again and again.

More importantly, I'm not really persuaded that gentrification is a huge problem in Newburgh: the poverty rate is 27 percent, about the same as stagnant industrial cities like Utica and Buffalo. And as a practical matter, if "gentrification" means "middle-class people moving to a place" isn't the alternative to gentrification segregation? Would Newburgh's poor residents really be better off if Newburgh was an higher-poverty, all-minority ghetto like East St. Louis, Ill.

Having said that, the last couple of chapters were an improvement on the rest of the book: I thought the discussion of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) opposition to a building filled with low-income housing was an interesting example of how gentrifiers can become NIMBYs, and the author's suggestion that this scenario is especially likely where gentrifiers are homeowners rather than renters was worth thinking about. Additionally, the end of the book seemed to be less one-sided in his treatment of gentrification than earlier chapters.

On the other hand, I wonder if the author was squeezing the facts of the low-income housing dispute to fit his story: the low-income housing was targeted towards "individuals living with psychiatric disabilities" rather than the working poor, and I suspect that some low-income residents might be uncomfortable living near the mentally ill. This book doesn't suggest that this was the case. However, the author interviewed more than three times as many gentrification stakeholders as existing residents of color, which makes me think that more interviews might have at least partially supported my hypothesis. (And I'm not sure how many people in either category were interviewed about this particular project).

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his new book, “Sixty Miles Upriver,” urban sociologist Richard E. Ocejo explores the complex dynamics of gentrification in Newburgh, a city in the Hudson Valley with a population of 28,000. Ocejo's extensive four-year research reveals the significant influence of race on the gentrification process, demonstrating how the racial makeup of an area impacts the speed and extent of gentrification.

Ocejo's study uncovers a noteworthy trend where white residents are more likely to move to diverse areas, driving gentrification. This trend is evident in the rapid gentrification of predominantly white cities like Beacon, Kingston, and Hudson in comparison to their minority-majority counterparts. Notably, changes in Newburgh's racial demographics over the past 25 years have created increased potential for gentrification, as Ocejo astutely observes.

While “Sixty Miles Upriver” critically examines gentrification and its adverse effects, Ocejo emphasizes that the intent is not to demonize individuals. Instead, the book offers a thought-provoking analysis of the complexities of gentrification, encouraging readers to consider its broader implications.

[Alyssa Bickle · Rating 5 out of 5]

So weird to read about this city from another’s perspective. Newburgh ♥️