The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the 21st Century

The groundbreaking oral history that tells the stories of New Yorkers effecting and affected by gentrification

If you live in a city—and every year, more and more Americans do—you’ve seen firsthand how gentri­fication has transformed our surroundings. It has so altered the way cities look, feel, cost, and even smell to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise.
 
Over the last few years, journalists, policy­makers, critics, and historians have all tried to ex­plain just what it is that happens when new money and new residents flow in, yet we’ve had very little access to the human side of this phenomenon.
 
Up and Coming captures the stories of the many kinds of people—brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians and everyone in between—who are being shaped by—and are shaping—the new New York City. In this extraordinary oral history, DW Gibson takes gentrification out of the op-ed columns and the textbooks and brings it to life. Gibson explains— in the voices of the people living through it—what urban change really looks and feels like.
 
In the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, Up and Coming is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.