Urban Policy Scholar
Dr. Hyra's research focuses on processes of neighborhood change, with an emphasis on affordable housing, urban politics, and race.
He is a leading expert on gentrification and equitable economic development.
LATEST BOOK
In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities.
Howard Gillette, Jr., author of The Paradox of Urban Revitalization
By exposing the deep roots of contemporary racial unrest, Derek Hyra lays bare the failures of urban policy to overcome social inequalities as they have metastasized over time. His prescriptions for addressing the multiple effects of what he calls slow violence in such places as Ferguson and Baltimore cry out for action in the private as well as the public sector.
Patrick Sharkey, William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University
Slow and Sudden Violence goes beyond the immediate, surface-level explanations for the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore. Hyra provides a rich historical account combined with vivid interviews to make a powerful argument: What happened in Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis and many other cities is not simply about the police. It is about social policies that have destabilized, oppressed, and in some cases destroyed Black communities.
Lance Freeman, author of A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in America
From the draft riots of the civil war to the urban unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, America’s cities have been the sites of episodic spasms of violence. Hyra revisits these spasms offering up fresh insights into their occurrence and possible solutions to dampen the likelihood of such outbursts. Slow and Sudden Violence is a must read for anyone seeking to understand cities and unrest.
George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara
In this well-researched and well-written book, Derek Hyra presents a perceptive and persuasive argument that interprets seemingly sudden urban uprisings in response to police violence as predictable outcomes of sustained prior histories of segregation, divestment, displacement, and gentrification. He argues that the anger expressed by masses mobilized in the streets in response to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Freddie Gray in Baltimore stemmed from long simmering grievances. Hyra’s Urban Renewal Unrest Framework reveals how housing discrimination and biased community development policies in both cities (albeit in different ways) produced serial displacements, community destruction, concentrated poverty and police brutality. The battles that took place in these cities between neighborhood residents and armed city, county, and state forces deployed to repress them and the destruction of property that occurred need to be understood in Hyra’s framework in the context of the already existing spatial violence against Black people through disparate and multilevel yet fully linked public and private policies of exclusion and exploitation.
Rafia Mallick and Deirdre Oakley, Georgia State University
Hyra’s work makes a significant and innovative contribution to understanding gentrification’s broader social implications—including its slow violence. He expands the scope of existing discussions about displacement and urban inequality that focus on class conquest and economic exploitation by highlighting the cultural and emotional violence experienced by displaced communities. His rigorous research and clear writing make the book accessible to both academic and general readers. Slow and Sudden Violence is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the complexities of gentrification in a hypergentrified city. We highly recommend this book to those studying sociology, urban policy, race, or class with an emphasis on American cities.
IN THE MEDIA
American Magazine
December 16, 2024
In Slow and Sudden Violence, Hyra argues that local, state, and federal housing policies and decisions to knock down public housing and spend hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop luxury- and mixed-income housing, sports venues, breweries, coffee shops, and other businesses have created “chronic displacement trauma” for residents of color who are forced to leave. An unjust police killing can trigger “suppressed painful memories and anger” linked with that trauma, he writes.