You Do Have to Live Like This: Narrative Foreclosure and the Opening of the Detroit Frontier in Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This

Detroit exemplifies the problems and potential of gentrification. Lured by cheap real estate and an aura of authenticity and possibility, educated, mostly white people around the turn of the millennium began moving to the city, especially areas with historic or aesthetically interesting architecture. Politicians, investors and journalists proclaimed gentrification the solution to the problem of Detroit, which they described as a frontier in need of development. Ben Markovitz's 2015 novel You Don't Have to Live Like This narrativises the fraught class and racial politics of such efforts at "renewal," demonstrating how gentrifying spaces function as sites of personal development for middle-class people while further entrenching racial and class inequities. The narrative reinscribes the view of Detroit as wasted land in need of settlers, by foreclosing alternative approaches to regenerating the city and accepting colonisation as a fact of American life that can be neither critically explored nor effectively resisted.