Gentrification in places like Kingston, Newburgh, Albany, and elsewhere in the country follows a legible pattern: deindustrialized cities that fall into disinvestment until the "creative class" moves in and begins to make it over in their own image--and make it unaffordable for everyone else in the process. 

This forum brings together academics, journalists, artists, and activists who approach this issue from a variety of critical, structural, and solutions-oriented perspectives. Featuring David A. Banks, Richard Ocejo, Leonard Nevarez, and Pastor Rob Sweeney, and moderated by Nona Willis Aronowitz, the discussion will dig into the signs, causes, and effects of gentrification in our region and beyond. 

Copies of the authors' latest books will be for sale thanks to Oblong Books. 

About the Speakers: 

David A. Banks is the author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (2023). He is a lecturer in the Geography and Planning department at University at Albany, SUNY and secretary of the Troy Area Labor Council.

Richard Ocejo is professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author or editor of five books, including Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton University Press, 2024), Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014). Ocejo’s work has appeared in such journals as Social Problems, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Sociological Perspectives, City & Community, and Poetics. He is the Editor of City & Community, the official journal of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Leonard Nevarez is Professor of Sociology, former Director of the Urban Studies Program, and former Tatlock Director of Multidisciplinary Studies. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and joined Vassar’s Sociology Department in 1999. An urban sociologist by training, his research examines how markets and their cultures transform places, formal organizations, and labor reproduction. Currently Nevarez is the primary investigator of a 2018 Poughkeepsie food security survey, which replicates the survey he oversaw for the Poughkeepsie Plenty community food assessment. Currently, he is co-editing (with Ryan Center, London School of Economics) a forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Sociology. He blogs at Musical Urbanism and remains at work on a book about Martha and the Muffins, the break-out act of Toronto's new wave music scene.

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a journalist who has followed gentrification debates for a decade. She is the author of Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution (2022) and an editor at The Doe, which publishes anonymous personal narratives. She's written for the New York Times, The Cut, Elle, and VICE, among many others. She lives in Kingston with her family.

Rob Sweeney is the pastor at Old Dutch Church in Kingston, a 13th-generation Kingston resident, as well as an artist and community organizer.