Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State

Around the world, more and more money is being invested in real estate, the business of building, buying and renting land and property. You can sense it as you walk through most cities, and you can feel it every time you pay the rent or mortgage.

The price of land becomes a central economic determinate and a dominant political issue. The clunky term gentrification becomes a household word and displacement an everyday fact of life. Government, particularly at the municipal scale, becomes more and more obsessed with raising property values and redistributing wealth upward through land and rents. Donald Trump becomes first a celebrity and ultimately a president. Taken together, we witness the rise of the real estate state, a political formation in which real estate capital has inordinate power over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics, and ultimately the lives we lead. Capital City describes when, how and why real estate came to rule, and what urban planners - the people who have their hands on the levers of housing policy - can do under these circumstances.