Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World

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A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world

High Point, North Carolina, is known as the Furniture Capital of the World. Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the worlds furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildingsonce courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stationsare now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global expositions relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the worlds dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Points real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner.

Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Points deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.

Reviews

"John Joe Schlichtmans Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World is a fun book with a weird case...Can a place be gentrified if there are no gentrifiers present Can a place be economically dynamic but socially ossified Crummy fast food chains with cracked asphalt parking lots are not supposed to abut architecturally ambitious glass and steel office and exhibition buildings. And yet this is how life in High Point goesits weirdness is on full display."
Max Besbris, Contemporary Sociology

"The claim to fame may be esoteric, but the story is, in a way, a timeless one."
Bloomberg CityLab

A fresh understanding of how cities operate and, more importantly, how that can change."
Harvey Molotch, New York University (from the Foreword)

"What the Market has done to downtown High Point is extraordinary.."
Roger Goldman, Mountain Money

"The book was fascinating to read. The reviewer's copy is now full of underlining, exclamation points, circled phrases, and side notes.The in-depth study of High Point, NC, makes the reader consider how communities are shaped, grow and evolve, and how a community chooses to relate to the outside world, both locally and at large."
Kathleen Parrott,Family Consumer Sciences Research Journal

"Undoing the decades of racial, cultural and economic decisions that led to the current state of affairs in High Point will not be easy. But learning how it got to where it is now is the books value to anyone who makes their living buying, selling and creating furnitureor even sending it to the landfill."
Warren Shoulberg, Business of Home Magazine

"High Point defies most urban assumptions, classifications, and labels. Throughout his book, John Joe Schlichtman intersperses insights from his many interviewswith insights from the scholarly literature."
Katrin B. Anacker, Journal of Urban Affairs

"Part local history, part personal journal, part urban planning analysis and critique,Showroom Cityfor the most part is easy reading, filled with voices of High Point residents. It is a story with only a handful of identified good guysboth men and womenand many everyday people who see the downtown as in the grips of largely impersonal, international forces they dont understand."
High Point Enterprise

"Showroom Cityis an engaging and important analysis of how a small city like High Point, North Carolina, became an urban node of globalization with architectural gravitas and specialized flows of commerce, mediated by regional and racial complexities. Two competing global neoliberal logics of design shape High Point's transformation by generating new landscapes of power and conflict that bring nuance to our understanding of the spaces of flows/spaces of places framework."
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

"John Joe Schlichtmanimmersed himself in High Point, talking to market officials, vendors and other market stakeholders as well as High Pointers and city officials. His book,Showroom City, begins in the early 1960s and examines what High Point was, what it is and what it could be."
Thomas Lester, Furniture Today

Author Bio

John Joe Schlichtman is associate professor of sociology at DePaul University. He is coauthor of Gentrifier.

Harvey Molotch is emeritus professor of social and cultural analysis and sociology at New York University