William Wong

“If we are serious about moving toward a saner housing future, the options in terms of federal policy are relatively clear: we can prevent land from being subject to market forces, either through government ownership of land (housing projects) or through heavy regulation (rent or land-price control), or we can prevent the ever-increasing value of land from displacing people (programs such as Section 8 vouchers would fall in this category of solution). Instead, we do almost nothing and hope the market works it out. Without major new regulations, we can expect what's happening in San Francisco to continue in virtually all major US cities. In the same way that the suburbs were once inaccessible to the poor, in the near future American cities will become gilded jewel boxes, and the exodus of the poor to the suburbs will continue unchecked - that is, until the rent gaps in cities become too small to make gentrification profitable, and a new form of spatial filtering begins.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Gentrification is often presented as a sort of corrective to the suburbs: instead of white flight and unsustainable cookie-cutter planning, we get dense, urban, and diverse cityscapes. But gentrification is simply a new form of the same process that created the suburbs; it's the same age-old, racist process of subsidizing and privileging the lives and preferred locales of the wealthy and white over those of poor people of color. The seesaw has just tipped in the other direction. Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over, or that cities are becoming more diverse. All it means is that our geography of inequality is being redrawn. Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation. The borders around the ghettos have simply been rebuilt.”
― Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood