Hollow City

Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.
Writer-historian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg survey San Francisco's transformation skyrocketing rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city's architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory.
"Schwartzenberg's images survey more than thirty years of upheaval in the name of 'urban renewal, ' and Solnit's text brings urgency to the question of whether a place in which artists, activists, and members of diverse races and classes can no longer afford to live is fated to become 'a city of presentation without creation.'"--New Yorker

"So many of the people who kept American cities alive and creative through dark decades, when capital abandoned the city, have become victims of capital's recent triumphant return to the city. This beautifully composed and crafted book tells their story. It is a compelling vision of our emerging global culture of displaced persons."--Marshall Berman

"Passionate, potent, and to the point, Solnit's polemic embodies American political and social writing at its best."--Publishers Weekly

"One day, we all woke up and San Francisco had become a bohemian entertainment park, without bohemians. Those were the golden days of virtual capitalism. Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg help us to understand why this happened. Their book is necessary to understanding our new place in a brand new scary world."--Guillermo Gomez-Pena