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Capital City:Gentrification and the Real Estate State
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Gentrification isn't driven by latte sipping hipsters – it's engineered by the capitalist state
Our cities are changing. Global real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, 36 times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world's assets, and the most powerful person in the world – the president of the United States – made his name as a landlord and real estate developer.
As Samuel Stein makes clear in this tightly argued book, its through seemingly innocuous profession of city planners that we can best understand the transformations underway. Planners provide a window into the practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state uses and is used by organized capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government. But crucially, planners also possess some of the powers we must leverage if we ever wish to reclaim our cities from real estate capital.
Reviews
Stein’s lucid explanation for how we got to where we’re at shines urgent light on the origins and development of what he incisively calls “the Real Estate State.” Capital City places gentrification in a structurally extensive and intensive urban geography of dispossession. All who struggle for the right to the city should read this book, and realize afresh how capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism must provoke our political imagination.
Capital City casts a cold and brilliant light on the underlying political dynamics of global cities and rightly concludes that real estate and finance are in charge. This sobering book has to be part of our toolkit as we try to find the moorings for a powerful democratic pushback in local political struggles.
Want to know why the rent’s so high? Samuel Stein meticulously documents and analyzes the rise of the rip-off “real estate state,” the instruments of its power, the invidious “plansplaining” arguments of its defenders, and, above all, its accelerating ethnic and class cleansing of American cities, gentrification-frenzied New York in the van. With the sleaziest of real estate developers now the rent-subsidized tenant of the White House bent on engorging his crony kin and kith by doubling down on the corrupt system of “geobribe” giveaways, backroom deals, and public theft that underwrites their ravages, this superbly succinct and incisive book couldn’t be more timely or urgent.
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Samuel Stein has written a book for those tired of merely describing gentrification and displacement, who are looking for explanations as well as new programs for action to do more. Capital City is a place that puts it all together, the theory and the practices of urban transformation, with a timely and urgent appeal. This is a lively user’s guide to thechanging landscape of the American city.
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[Capital City] alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and livelihoods...Explicit in Stein’s narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities.
, The New Yorker -
Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is a radical view into the heart of the processes [urban planners] oversee
, New Labor Forum -
Capital City deserves attention from urban historians for its nuanced analysis of neoliberal urban policy and specific measures that generate inequality and may be also used in service of justice. This book will be a useful tool for a broad swath of people seeking a greater understanding of the urgency of this political moment which grows with every demolition.
, The Metropole -
Vital and devastating ... [Capital City is] unabashed in its advocacy of a more equitable distribution of land and housing. ... A powerful companion to studies of the global rise of informal cities such as Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, the racist history of housing in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, [and] the horrid effects of losing one’s home in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted.
, New York Labor History Association