Molly Vollman Makris: Public housing and school choice in a gentrified city: youth experiences of uneven opportunity

This book addresses the important issue of how gentrification may positively affect the lives and opportunities of lower class residents that manage to stay in a gentrified area. There is a wide body of literature that demonstrates that the positive effects of gentrification on lower class long-term residents are limited at best, and detrimental at worst. Many studies show that meaningful interaction between lower class and middle class residents is scarce and relations are tectonic (Butler and Robson 2001): they may live close to each other but rarely truly interact because they have different everyday practices. One of the few locations where different classes, and for that matter different ethnicities, could potentially meet are day cares and schools. Schools may therefore both offer real potential for the transfer of resources from middle class children to lower class kids. On the other hand, exactly because schools are sites of encounter, they are at the forefront of middle class disaffiliation strategies. The book investigates the case of the city of Hoboken, close to New York City, which has become thoroughly gentrified. Hoboken, a majority upper middle class area, has an interesting demographic composition. As with most gentrifying and gentrified areas there are clear differences in age cohorts between new and old residents. Hoboken has a clear majority of college-educated residents, of whom most have no children or only very young kids. Among the school-aged kids of the area, however, a (slight) majority is non-white and a substantial part lives in poverty. This stark contrast is the backdrop of this study. By studying primarily the experiences of disadvantaged youth this book fits into a small but expanding literature that focuses on the ‘‘other side’’ of gentrification. Where most gentrification and school choice studies investigate the difficulties and dilemma’s op gentrifiers that have to deal with neighbourhood diversity (Boterman 2013), this book usefully