The book's pretty much just about New York City ( )

The cost of housing has skyrocketed in the past two decades. Average rents have more than doubled while wages stagnate. In Black and Latinx neighborhoods, people on average spend nearly half their income on rent.

For those living in cities, new luxury condos and rising rent are hard to ignore, but gentrification’s causes remain elusive and unclear. The blame is usually laid either on bohemians moving into poor neighborhoods or vague “structural forces.” Regarding the latter, we know that the real estate industry is proposing many new luxury and market-rate developments, but why now compared to decades ago?

Samuel Stein, an academic and trained urban planner, highlights one explanation for gentrification. He blames “the Real Estate State”, or the increasing power of landlords, developers, and financiers to influence municipal governments.

For a political party to rule a city, it needs to have a coalition with local powerful institutions. In the past, coalitions have often included manufacturing companies and trade unions. Both made demands to city administrations for cheap land and housing. Manufacturing companies benefitted from cheap land since it was just an expense for operating their factories and buildings. Higher rents meant workers would demand higher wages, so companies pushed for more affordable housing together with the unions. But during the postwar period, manufacturers trickled away from unionized and regulated Midwest and Northeast cities. They relocated to other countries and Southern rural areas with weak union power and regulations. This left a power vacuum in city government which has slowly been filled by the real estate industry.

It’s not just real estate that benefits from increasing property value. Gentrification also means more tax revenue for municipal governments. Stein writes that city planners who facilitate gentrification have contradicting goals. They are tasked with both increasing real estate values and looking out for residents’ best interests. Planners could claim that beautification efforts or increased public services are beneficial to residents, but these programs increase property values (and thus rents), displacing the very people they supposedly intend to benefit.

Planners who go against the wishes of real estate have structural forces working against them. Until the Nineties, most cities in the United States experienced capital flight as middle class people moved to the suburbs, taking jobs and tax revenue with them. If real estate divests from a city due to radical planners regulating them, there is risk that the city will slump back into a state of urban decay.

Planners who would go up against the Real Estate State also risk their city receiving a poor credit rating from municipal credit rating agencies. Having a good credit rating is now crucial for city budgeting. City governments are legally forbidden from deficit spending, no longer receive much money from the federal government, and are discouraged by taxpayers and federal guidelines from increasing taxes. To raise money, city governments must now sell bonds which investors will only buy if they have a good credit rating. Stein writes that these municipal credit rating agencies are ideologically neoliberal, actively working to ensure capital accumulation through neoliberal policies including deregulating industry, increasing police power, and keeping workers in line.

Planners justify gentrification with theories like “value recapture,” when developers are permitted to build market-rate or luxury developments in exchange for supplying a public good. This usually looks like including a handful of “affordable” or “workforce” units in a market-rate housing development. This argument is flawed because it implies that landlords pay the extra costs, when they are more likely passed on to other tenants via increased rent. And even if they provide some affordable housing units, the relative increase in number of market-rate or luxury developments contributes to increased property values and thus gentrification.

The planning profession has always involved maintaining elite control. Napoleon III used planners to widen the streets of Paris so the working class couldn’t erect barricades as easily. The first zoning laws in the United States were made to exclude Chinese people. Postwar urban renewal displaced hundreds of thousands of working-class people, replacing their neighborhoods with freeways and other developments. NYC planners in the mid-Seventies intentionally closed city services to nudge poor people to leave the city. Nowadays, planners use public financing or “geobribery” to entice real estate investments. This basically means they use different tax loops to get developers to build in their city.

Gentrification is also abetted by what economist Anthony Downs has dubbed the “Niagara of Capital” into real estate. Basically, a combination of financial deregulation, capital generated from third-world industrialization, and lack of other secure investment opportunities has led to an excess of global capital that is largely invested in U.S. real estate. Stein is focused on NYC where so many are renters, so he doesn’t mention another reason for the lack of affordable housing throughout the country: homeowners almost always financially benefit from rising property values. Downs points out that once an area is gentrified, efforts to lower the cost of housing by building affordable units or laxing zoning laws are resisted by homeowners, whose homes are usually their primary asset.

Despite his criticism of planners, Stein is not only optimistic of their potential to oppose gentrification, he claims that “planning itself is not itself inherently racist; in fact, it is central to racism’s negation.” With the help of social movements, he writes, planners have tools at their disposal to make more equitable cities and confront the Real Estate State. Inclusionary zoning laws which force developers to include affordable units could be used in exclusively wealthy areas, essentially reverse-gentrifying them. Planners could designate public housing and working-class neighborhoods as preservation districts, making them less prone to further development. Rent control could be expanded. Cities could use Right of First Refusal to buy foreclosed properties and convert them into public housing. Residents could use community land trusts to buy land collective, protecting themselves from changing markets and speculation. He even suggests re-industrializing cities to bring a counterweight to the influences of the real estate and finance industries over municipal governments. Ultimately, he wants large-scale planning to combat concentrated economic and political power, and to eventually achieve popular control of workplaces, buildings, cities, and regions.

Stein describes “NYC Not For Sale” as an exemplar of tenants movements resisting the Real Estate State. The group calls for universal rent control, ending homelessness, transferring distressed buildings to public ownership, the repair and expansion of existing public housing, and elections for community boards that can veto development decisions. While recognizing these demands as not “visible on the current political horizon”, he argues that demanding these things publicly is a way to show city residents that they don’t need to tear down the city to have better urban life. In the same vein, he references the Cuban capital of Havana, which has buildings from the pre-revolutionary period though with allegedly different and better social relations.

This book was published by Verso’s Jacobin Series imprint, so it’s not surprising to see praise of Cuban state socialism. While using the state for good should be unconvincing to anarchists, the argument about taking over pre-existing cities is alluring in how feasible it appears. But to an anarchist schooled in anti-civilization ideas, this pragmatism quickly runs into the critique that a city cannot grow enough food for all its residents, so it needs to coerce a labor force to feed and maintain it. The extensive division of labor cities require probably creates specialists and thus eventual authorities of planners and administrators. It seems unlikely that a large city, especially one as dense and thus complexly administered as New York, could exist without coercive institutions and drastic inequalities of power.

We can point all this out and more but resigning oneself to always being the naysayer just feeds pessimism and nihilism. If one desires social transformation, how can we go from over half the world’s human population living in cities to some other kind of life? The alternative of just embracing what’s here but administering it differently is flawed, but it’s a visible path forward, which is probably why such naïve socialist ideas can be seductive.

Most of Steins’ solutions rely on riding the coattails of “social movements” to transform the state from the inside. He believes their power can act as a counterweight to the Real Estate State, allowing sympathetic planners to implement meaningful reforms. “Social movement” essentially means a large number of people organizing to transform society. While social movements surely can create social change, such hype for them is counterproductive. Most of the time there aren’t any for us to be part of, or their goals are contrary to our own. Sure, taking part when they’re happening or seemingly about to makes sense. But their reputation as the magic wand to fix society’s problems prompts radicals to invest all their time and energy trying to “build them” from scratch, which is impossible. Social movements probably come about due to many factors including material conditions, recent history, and visible symbols of struggle that resonate with masses of people. Trying to build them, especially when not struggling against one’s own immediate conditions, often results in burnout and adopting quantitative notions of success.

Regarding his embrace of planning as part of the solution, the more we use the state, the more we validate its hold on us and neglect building any meaningful counter-existence of our own. That applies whether your project is to overthrow this society or make a total break with it by dropping out. He claims there exist anarchist planners. But working to actively shape a city through its government seems antithetical to anarchism. At best, it would facilitate our ideas being co-opted to make capitalism more efficient.

Stein isn’t arguing for anarchism or any stateless society. He’s a socialist who believes that central planning is necessary to overcome the enormous power of concentrated wealth. Regardless, his analysis of why gentrification is happening will be useful for anyone trying to understand the ground we stand on. ( )

I was expecting something about the effect of market forces, laws, demographics on real estate. Instead I got a repetitive diatribe about gentrification. Halfway through the book I was just waiting for the author to start quoting Marx and was only surprised by how late in the book that happens. ( )

This had the potential to be a timely manifesto on how the left can respond to the financialization of shelter, but the author unfortunately never got there. It was more of a laundry list of the gentrification-induced problems that New Yorkers, mostly renters, are facing, and it wasn't until the last few pages that a small list of possible solutions finally appeared. They felt tacked on and were scarcely specific enough to salvage this title. If you are seeking actions to take in response to real estate speculation and/or gentrification or even a new original take on the issues, skip this. ( )