Simultaneously history and current events, Peter Moskowitz’s How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood exposed the underlying forces behind the recent trends of gentrification in four major cities: Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco and New York.

Gentrification is often lamented as a natural occurrence that displaces the poor and destroys the local culture of urban neighborhoods. Sometimes it is even celebrated as a “cleaning up” of a previously seedy or unsafe area. But rarely are the economic, social and political forces behind it examined.

Moskowitz does just this in his book, with surprising breadth and depth. He details the historically racist red-lining that created economically depressed areas ripe for gentrification in the first place. He talks about government grants given to new, primarily white-owned businesses in historically minority neighborhoods. About city investment that creates enclaves of wealth few can afford, or even enjoy. In…