The Gentrification Panic: The media's obsession with a handful of trendy neighborhoods obscures the real story of urban America.

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Standi, Will

Newcomers: Gentrification and Its Discontents

by Matthew L. Schuerman

University of Chicago Press, 320 pp.

Gentrification is all around us," declares Matthew L. Schuerman in his new book, Newcomers. "It's in the neighborhoods we walk through, the conversations we have, the blogs we read." That will ring true to many college-educated professionals living in the core of booming cities like New York and San Francisco. To this class, gentrification is the dominant experience of living in an American urban center. But what about everyone else?

Human beings, who exist at the scale of the neighborhood, have trouble understanding the full scope of urbanized America. The United States contains 107 metropolitan areas of at least a half-million residents. The largest member of that vast patchwork, New York City, contains more than eight million people within its limits, but that's less than 4 percent of America's overall metro population. Other cities that loom nearly as large in the national consciousness are much smaller. San Francisco is home to less than one-half of 1 percent of the country's metro population. Neighborhoods themselves are fractions of a fraction. San Francisco's famous Mission District makes up one-twentieth of the city. Less than one in every hundred New Yorkers lives in sprawling Park Slope.

And yet, Schuerman, an editor focusing on urban development at the New York public radio station WNYC, tries to unpack the history of urban change through a focus on a handful of these neighborhoods. In the end, his method illustrates the peril of trying to understand American cities by looking at only a few unrepresentative examples.

Newcomers mostly sticks to well-known locales. Schuerman describes the decades-long history of economic transition in the Mission and Park Slope, plus New York's Brooklyn Heights, S0H0, and DUMBO: famous areas virtually synonymous with gentrification. He also spends time in Chicago's public housing system, particularly the infamous Cabrini-Green project, well-trodden ground for housing and urban policy scholars.

Schuerman proves an able neighborhood historian, with an eye for detail that makes familiar terrain feel unexplored. In the early chapters, he follows residents, community leaders, and developers from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s as they work to build, and then preserve, their urban enclaves. In the late 1950s, competing neighborhood associations face off over urban renewal in Brooklyn Heights, with the...