“Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill succeed in constructing a corrective to overly deterministic analyses by focusing on gentrifiers’ motivations, situations, agency, and relationship to structural conditions and social forces. The breezy writing style makes this volume appropriate for undergraduates, activists, and anyone else interested in starting thorny conversations about one’s own participation in gentrification.”
Judith Halasz, Urban Geography
"Gentrifier is a noble attempt to enrich the vocabulary used in debates over gentrification. It aims to move beyond the paralysis of the conversation, where in there’s no hope of improving neighborhoods without the current cultural and economic displacement that gentrification so often entails.”
Tanner Howard, Chicago Reader
“While there has been much said on the issue of gentrification, Gentrifier encourages urban scholars to reframe conventional discussion and ensures the conversation remains fresh.”
Alfredo Huante, City & Community
“Arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of gentrification—held in university seminars, city council meetings, and street protests alike—will not fade anytime soon, and Gentrifier is highly recommended for anyone who wants to participate, in a self-aware and reflexive manner, in those arguments.”
Chase Billingham, Contemporary Sociology
“The co-authors of Gentrifier take a daring tack: Professors all, they break the third wall of social science to admit that their interest is not purely academic.” Gentrifiers themselves, Schlichtman, Patch and Hill “believe that by sharing their experiences, they can help make sociological sense of this fraught topic.”
Daniel Brook, The New York Times, Sunday, July 9, 2017
‘This book provides a welcome corrective to the slap-dash way ‘gentrification’ is used as an explanatory force in popular narratives … It would be a valuable addition to reading lists on urban studies, urban geography and urban planning.’
Peter Matthews, London School of Economics Review of Books blog August 2017
‘Highly Recommended.’
D. Fasenfest, Choice Magazine vol 55:04:2017
"This is a very interesting piece of work that is likely to draw some attention and may even create some controversy in the gentrification studies circle."
Aysegul Can, Urban Studies Journal Vol 55:09:2018
"[Gentrifier] is a powerful reminder of the need for a new framework for urban development that re-imagines and re-situates the position of a variety of actors in the urban/suburban landscape."
Sheila Foster, The Nature of Cities (online)
"The authors are well-aware that they risk being self-serving, defensive, or even ‘whiny’ as they attempt to stake a position in this complex terrain, as both academics and gentrifiers. But by making themselves and their choices part of the analysis, they have produced a unique and important contribution to the progressive literature on gentrification, one that truly does work in the much-sought middle ground between supply and demand side explanations of this form of urban change."
Amy Starechesk, Antipode, Radical Journal of Geography (online)
"In their book Gentrifier, instead of trying to solve the gentrification Rubik’s cube, they decide to pull it apart, block-by-block, naming each part and its role in neighborhood change. The book provides not only a glossary of terms, but also tools and rules of engagement for deploying this thing that—if we can all agree on nothing else—has now become a fully loaded and weaponized word. The function of this breakdown is that by using a more scrupulous lexicon for describing the changes happening to one’s neighborhood or environment, legislators and regulators can be more responsive and accurate in their policy proposals."
Brentin Mock, City Lab, "Books that influenced us in 2017" (online)
"Drawing together an accessible synthesis of the relevant scholarly literature with extracts from personal journals, field-notes and the systematic recall of past events, the book offers an interesting addition to the field that usefully and constructively engages some difficult issues that gentrification researchers have long been happy to overlook, presenting a series of informed, personalized, micro-level insights into how academics and activists who are ostensibly critical of gentrification can themselves become gentrifiers."
Lee Crooked, University of Sheffield, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol 34
“Gentrifier queries many canonical assertions about gentrification too often unchallenged by scholars. Considering the volatility of such pursuits, I was reassured to find that all three intrepid contributors appear to occupy safely tenured slots on their respective campuses.”
Dennis J. Gale, American Planning Association
“It’s a more nuanced take on what it means to join an existing community…”
101 Books About Where & How We Live 2019, Curbed
"Gentrifier does a masterful job of explaining, unpacking, and grounding the key analytical concepts that underpin debates on gentrification. In clear, readable, and entertaining prose, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill make gentrification more tangible and relevant as an important social topic worthy of rigorous and careful understanding."
John L. Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Professor and Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania
"John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill clearly engage in the theoretical and policy debates surrounding gentrification while offering very smart analyses of their own narratives. There is a lot out there on gentrification but Gentrifier is most definitely fresh"
Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Northwestern University
"Gentrifier is the sort of book that vintage, pre-Kardashian Kanye West might have written had he had a PhD in urban policy, supplying it with an irresistible hook: "We're all gentrifiers, I'm just the first to admit it." Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill help us shelve what we thought we knew about gentrification, and give us instead a brutally honest reckoning with the ills, conveniences and virtues – but especially the consequences on the vulnerable – of gentrification. They ably wrestle with a characteristic facet of modern existence, rescuing the term from automatic demonization while never once letting it off the hook for the damage it can do."
Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and author of 'Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America'
