Richard Ocejo (Sociology, John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)) will visit Cornell to present a talk on his newest book Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City.

As housing markets in large cities become too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities, and initiating gentrification processes as they do. An example is Newburgh, a postindustrial, majority-minority city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork, Sixty Miles Upriver tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is unfolding in new ways outside large city centers. It explains how progressive White gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color. The book argues that small city gentrification is distinct from large city gentrification because in smaller places middle-class people have more opportunities to become property owners and investors, get more involved civically and politically, and shape their new home’s future. When small cities revitalize through gentrification, the social and economic stakeholders in the process end up occupying powerful roles that lead them to morally justify their actions, which includes accounting for social difference, especially race, in fundamentally self-serving ways.

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, and has published in such journals as Social Problems, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, 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 master's program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.