Naomi Klein Quotes

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well.

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

I'd lived in Portland on and off for a decade before I'd even heard of Vanport. It was this town of 20,000 people that washed away from north Portland.

There's a lot to be said for not displacing people.

There's no way New Orleans will ever be the city it was. I think it will have half the population. They may create a sort of Disneyland at the French Quarter for tourists. The rest I don't know.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

Gentrification is what brings in all the money to the cities, but it also pushes some people out.

I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.

You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people.

'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

I'd hate to see new housing building accelerating while taking down buildings where there's 50 people living in rent-stabilized apartments.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

This thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification. On one hand, yes, you're cleaning up this area, you're making it more livable for people. But you're not saying anything about the people that live there.

I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." But they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, "they shouldn't have done it." The world is looking at America and it is really beginning to show up for what it is really like. "Go Tell It on the Mountain." We can no longer ignore this, that America is not "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.

In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.