About the Author

Richard E. Ocejo is a 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. He 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.

About the Book

As the housing markets of large cities become too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities with more affordable real estate and diverse populations, initiating gentrification processes. Based on the case of Newburgh, a postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley, Sixty Miles Upriver is about what happens when white creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities in small urban contexts. It explores a fundamental moral problem at the heart of gentrification, namely that supporters of the process appreciate racial and social class diversity and recognize that their actions put these groups at risk of displacement.

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