David Levering Lewis Quotes

The nation can no longer afford to continue policies that hasten the flight of persons to the distant suburbs.

Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.

I was a little lacking in vision as mayor - I failed to understand the significance that housing and the revitalization of housing means for a city.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

Mulberry Street was the beating heart of the Italian-American experience, but you don't find those gangsters now. I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.

As the population of Georgia increased dramatically, so did development.

Reggie Campbell and Kathleen Goldsmith are participants in an American success story, the unprecedented boom of home-buying by African-Americans in the 1990s. Only he is black and she is white. When he moved into the neighborhood, she moved out.

Urbanization is the dominant demographic trend of our time.

The suburbs of yesterday do not look at all like the suburbs of today.

In about 2002, I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, to Red Hook.

Park City is developing itself, almost to death.

The refurbishing and rebuilding of Fenway Park since 2001 has created a new urban neighborhood in Boston.

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

I've lived through a lot of different neighborhoods.

The Millennial Generation - the biggest American generation in history - is reversing the migration into rural areas and moving back to city centers.

I want to buy up a gang of properties in my neighborhood and give people the chance to live in new buildings. We should make our areas nice.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

Young people are choosing cities before the country - they have their own ranking.

This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.

Gentrification is a problem of poor planning.

That's the beauty of Mumbai. While some parts have grown rapidly, there are places like Churchgate that have retained their character.