[Published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2024, https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492241279408]
Richard E. Ocejo
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024, $29.95, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-691-21132-9
Reviewed by: Leonard Nevarez, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
Richard Ocejo examines new spaces and enduring inequalities of gentrification in Sixty Miles Upriver, an ethnography set in a satellite city of metropolitan New York transformed by creative-class newcomers. Ocejo invites readers to update their understandings of what and where gentrification looks like. Beyond the colonization of big-city neighborhoods by renters and other consumers of space, gentrification in smaller, deindustrialized cities involves the pursuit of homeownership, business establishment, and neighborhood curation by social groups with newfound powers to produce urban space. In the small riverfront city of Newburgh, NY, this trajectory draws upon newcomers’ reflections on their geographical journeys. In an earlier era, they were New Yorkers proud of their abandoned neighborhoods, artistic commitments, and racially diverse environs. Now displaced from the big city by its cost of living, they embrace Newburgh’s “gritty” urbanism as they restore architecturally historic houses and undertake creative endeavors. In fine detail, Sixty Miles Upriver explores the ideological and civic contradictions of the displaced-by-gentrification becoming gentrifiers themselves.
Racial difference and racial inequality inflect the built environment and social landscape that these gentrifiers navigate. Most of Newburgh’s newcomers are White, which places them in contrast to the city’s demographics and hierarchies of privilege. With less than 30 thousand residents, Newburgh is the second most populous city, and only one of three cities with a majority-minority population, in the surrounding Hudson River Valley region. Poverty is high among non-White Newburghers due, first, to the region’s post-WWII history of Great Migration, white flight, racial segregation, and Urban Renewal displacement. Second, in the 1990s shifting immigrant geographies brought Mexican immigrants in large numbers to the region at large and Newburgh in particular. Until 21st-century arts, tourism, and Airbnb drew New Yorkers to the metro hinterland, Newburgh languished in economic disinvestment, political stasis, and brief distinction as “Murder Capital of New York.”
Gentrifiers are undeterred by this racialized history and reputation, Ocejo finds. Moving to Newburgh confirms their identities as progressive urbanites who reject “white bread” places, and anyway they soon learn how Newburgh’s gulf in life chances is mostly confined to certain demographics in certain areas. Ocejo analyzes these views through the lens of a “moral dilemma” in which gentrifiers who seek urban authenticity are compelled to acknowledge their capacity to displace residents and transform the city they’ve chosen. One way that White newcomers manage this moral dilemma is a generic “diversity” racial discourse that describes local racial relations without references to particular groups or structural perspectives on urban inequality and disenfranchisement. “Instead, they treat the mere presence of ‘friendly’ non-White groups — and a selection of their cultural products — as virtues, assets of an urban place to consumed and enjoyed” (pg. 58).
Gentrifiers further manage their moral dilemma by collectively envisioning and wielding opportunity for the city’s revitalization. Here Newburgh’s size is relevant: in a small city, big-city out-migrants can “make a difference” through creative livelihood, business ownership, and civic participation. Sixty Miles Upriver examines an array of activities and initiatives that newcomers frame as creative potential, from offering high-school internships at a community kitchen (where customers are keen to ask students if they plan to become chefs), to resurrecting a city festival with a program cut from creative placemaking cloth, to establishing an arts and cultural commission within city government. Gentrifiers’ efforts are conspicuously self-serving, curatorial, and — a key finding — rationalized through colorblind perspectives. A particularly fascinating chapter examines the city’s proposal for a large residential development with subsidized affordable housing, located in a downtown area still underdeveloped by Urban Renewal. In coalition with real estate interests and conservative opponents, newcomers criticize this mitigation of their impact on housing affordability as “more of the same” — a “wasted opportunity” that extends Newburgh’s impoverished and racialized legacy when market-based “conditional gentrification” (Ocejo’s concept) seems to promise race-neutral economic development and tax benefits.
Ocejo maps Newburgh’s social landscape carefully along race and class, noting the atypical contexts (e.g., non-White gentrifiers) in which local opinion and civic action shift into race-conscious modes. Separate chapters are devoted to the (mostly White) lifelong residents and returners who champion gentrification with a parochial set of interests, and to residents of color and their community organizations who criticize gentrification but struggle to challenge its progress. For better or worse, Ocejo organizes his setting’s ethnographic complexity through the analytical filter of gentrification. One imagines quite different Newburgh studies could result from greater attention to the city’s majority-minority population; as it is, the book offers scant discussion of immigration, the carceral system, and public schools, to cite just three key contributors to the city’s racialized inequality.
In fashioning the story of Newburgh’s gentrification into a concise read suitable for undergraduate classrooms, Ocejo skirts the edges of undertheorization by avoiding conceptual terminology and leaving scholarly debates for the footnotes. So let me make explicit the book’s place in gentrification scholarship. Sixty Miles Upriver spotlights the demand-side of the gentrification process: the world of gentrifiers and their locational preferences, local activities, and community feelings. Conversely, it neglects the supply-side: the absentee landlords, large-scale speculators, and local elites who, many scholars contend, exercise structural power over the spatial contexts that gentrifiers enter into. Ocejo suggests this lop-sided analysis is warranted because of the nature of small, deindustrialized cities like Newburgh, where local growth coalitions have previously failed to attract the reinvestment that now comes via the housing market, one new occupant of a restored Victorian at a time. Ideally, in a longer book readers could review evidence for the counterhypothesis through greater coverage of Newburgh’s pre-gentrification development efforts and the region’s record of large-scale capital investment. As it stands, Sixty Miles Upriver provides a compelling inquiry into racialized discourses and processes of small-city gentrification, creative placemaking, grassroots urban preservation, and other contemporary pursuits of ‘authentic’ urbanism.