Gentrifier: A Memoir - by Anne Elizabeth Moore

In the midst of a financial crisis, and in a bid to reshape Detroit’s neighborhoods and cultural narrative, an organization set out to give houses to writers. Anne Elizabeth Moore was one of them. In Gentrifier, she chronicles what unfolds: the slow, hopeful work of connecting to a neighborhood that had offered her a gift — and the parallel realization that this gift came entangled in a web of obligations, hidden costs, and a bureaucracy shaped by long-standing inequities.

What Moore uncovers isn’t just personal frustration. It’s a story about how race, power, and economics determine who is supported, who is surveilled, who is left to fend for themselves, and who gets to be seen as “revitalizing” a place. Through her eyes, you watch Detroit’s complicated systems play out on an intimate, human scale.

At its core, though, this is a book about belonging. The relationships she builds with her neighbors — many of them Bengali immigrants — become the real anchor in a city where the professional and cultural supports she expected simply aren’t there. Those connections become her way into understanding the neighborhood, and her way of staying grounded when the “gift” becomes a burden.

The story is both charming and hard-hitting. I’ve never spent time in Detroit, but I’m looking forward to my first visit next summer for Placemaking Week. The city has changed dramatically since organizations were luring creatives with free homes, and there’s a genuine renaissance happening now.

I’m excited to learn more — and to see how Detroit is telling its own story today.