On the Hamiltonian form of 3D massive gravity

We present a Chern-Simons-like action for the general massive gravity model propagating two spin-2 modes with independent masses in three spacetime dimensions (3D), and we use it to find a simple Hamiltonian form of this model. The number of local degrees of freedom, determined by the dimension of the physical phase space, agrees with a linearized analysis except in some limits, in particular that yielding topologically new massive gravity, which therefore suffers from a linearization instability.