Fight Gentrification: Read a Book on the Subway
A defunct newsstand, a pop-up bookstore, and models for revitalizing NYC communities.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking nonstop. When I’m not waxing poetic in this newsletter, I’ve been deep in the promotion cycle for my forthcoming novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, which publishes on January 4. Because the book deals, in part, with a family in the cross-hairs of gentrification in Brooklyn, gentrification has, naturally, been a topic in many of the interviews I’ve done. One of the most provocative questions on the matter came from Maris Kreizman of The Maris Review.
“What,” she asked, “can a person who transplants here [to New York] do to not be a part of the problem of gentrification?” I’m not an urban planner, so I’m not sure I’m fully qualified to answer that question. But what
