Princeton University Press
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City
Key Metrics
- Richard E Ocejo
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691211329
- -
- -
- Social Science > Sociology - Urban
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
An unvarnished portrait of gentrification in an underprivileged, majority-minority small city
Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been left beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Sixty Miles Upriver tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when white creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities, and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in places where it unfolds in new ways.
As New York City's housing market becomes too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities like Newburgh, where housing is affordable and historic. Richard Ocejo takes readers into the lives of these newcomers, examining the different ways they navigate racial difference and inequality among Newburgh's much less privileged local residents, and showing how stakeholders in the city's revitalization reframe themselves and gentrification to cast the displacement they cause to minority groups in a positive light.
An intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification, Sixty Miles Upriver explains how progressive white gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color.
Author Bio
I am professor of sociology at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where I also direct the MA program in International Migration Studies. I have been the Editor-in-Chief of City & Community, an official journal of the American Sociological Association, since 2021. My most recent book, Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press; 2017), is about the transformation of low-status occupations into "cool," cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers).
And my first book, Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City, about nightlife and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods, was also published by Princeton University Press in 2014. My work has appeared in such journals as Social Problems, Sociological Perspectives, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Review, City & Community, Poetics, and Ethnography. I am also the editor of Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 16: Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012), and serve on the editorical boards of the journals Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.
My current research and forthcoming book examine economic growth, gentrification, and race, focusing on a small city. My overall research and teaching interests include urban and cultural sociology, community studies, work and occupations, and research methods (especially qualitative methods). Finally, I am a podcast host of the Sociology channel on the New Books Network.
Source: John Jay College of Criminal Justice
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