Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City

In Sixty Miles Upriver, Richard Ocejo (John Jay College, CUNY) explores how race, culture, and rising housing costs combine to shape gentrification in Newburgh, a small, postindustrial, majority Black and Latino city in the Hudson River Valley sixty miles from NYC.

Like many other small cities across the US, Newburgh was beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Ojeco tells 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 the US in places where it unfolds in new ways. 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.

This is an intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification that 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.

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The Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC) is a global urban research center founded in 2014 that serves as an interdisciplinary hub for urbanists, connects research and practice, and creates place-based experiential learning opportunities for students.