Review of Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn

Abstract

InPreserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn, Aaron Passell responds to one of the most contentious issues in urban studies of recent years, the relationship between housing supply and housing prices in American cities. Preserving Neighborhoods engages with a particular aspect of the conversation, the question of whether urban preservation policy promotes gentrification by limiting new housing and thus raising the value of inner-city land. The notion that urban preservation causes gentrification has been a bugbear of real estate economists like Edward Glazer (2010), however it has not been subject to sustained empirical scrutiny. Passell’s book sheds great light on this important question through a comparative mixed-methods study of neighborhood preservation in Baltimore, a shrinking legacy city, and Brooklyn, a growing gentrification hot-spot. The book is exemplary in addressing questions of causality in neighborhood change through clearly articulated methodological choices. Passell combines...