The Atlantic senior associate editor Gillian B. White examines the many meanings of gentrification with D.W. Gibson, author of The Edge Becomes The Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the 21st Century.
Gibson talks to New Yorkers on all sides of the argument—from developers and soon-to-be-displaced residents, to landlords and community activists. In the interview with White, he says:
There are a lot of class issues at the heart of capital coming to the neighborhood and displacement and all of these factors that are a part of what we loosely call gentrification. But at the end of the day, we can’t operate in a bubble in 2015. We have to acknowledge all the historic context, all the different forms of discrimination, particularly red-lining, these sorts of practices, that have made the class issue a race issue. At it’s heart it’s a class issue, but in the States, through our history, we’ve made it a race issue.