Book (Capital City) by Samuel Stein
Next City, 2019
Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and... more Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been encouraged by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.
[NOTE: this article is the book's introduction, as excerpted in Next City]
Verso Blog, 2019
The following, published on the Verso Books blog, is an excerpt from chapter 1 of my book Capital... more The following, published on the Verso Books blog, is an excerpt from chapter 1 of my book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State" (Verso, 2019).
Verso writes: "In this excerpt from Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Sam Stein explores the coercise role of planners who are part of a system that asks them to sort out who will go where, under what conditions and for whose benefit."
Progressive City: Radical Alternatives, 2019
This article, first presented at the 2018 ACSP conference, is an excerpt from chapter 3 of my boo... more This article, first presented at the 2018 ACSP conference, is an excerpt from chapter 3 of my book, Capital City: Gentrification of the Real Estate State. The conclusion also contains portions pulled from chapter 5. The article looks at how New York City planners, under both liberal and conservative administrations, have presented luxury development as the solution to all of the city's planning problems. In the conclusion, I consider how planners might organize to counter this logic.
Peer reviewed journal articles by Samuel Stein
Metropolitics, 2024
A few years ago, the New York tenant movement forced the state government to strengthen and expan... more A few years ago, the New York tenant movement forced the state government to strengthen and expand its rent regulation system. This was the greatest expansion of renters’ rights New York had seen in decades. In the years since, the movement has grown increasingly emboldened. But the state has grown increasingly intransigent, seemingly frozen in its tracks. While demands from tenants (and others, like single-payer healthcare advocates) have grown more and more visionary and expansive, the state government has shown only limited responsiveness, and has in some ways grown even more recalcitrant than it was prior to 2019.
Was 2024 a year of triumph or defeat for tenants? Did the housing policy fight mark the end of an era of expansion, or the growing pains of a new beginning? By taking a close look at the outcomes of the 2024 New York State legislative session, we aim to clarify the state of play and enumerate the tasks facing the movement in the short and long term. While the following analysis focuses on a specific time and place, it reflects challenges faced by many resurgent social movements seeking legislative change from reactionary local governments. It likely resonates strongest in places where, like New York City, the contemporary iteration of the Democratic party—nominally liberal, but unabashedly pro-landlord and committed to austerity—controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the city and state government. With this political orientation, the governing party aims to achieve two contradictory goals: securing capital’s continuing ability to expand and the general public’s ability to secure social reproduction.
European Urban and Regional Studies, 2021
In cities worldwide, the housing question has returned. As demands and proposals by housing movem... more In cities worldwide, the housing question has returned. As demands and proposals by housing movements have grown bolder, city governments are implementing new policies, ranging from small tweaks to major overhauls. This paper takes a close look at New York City, Berlin and Vienna, assessing their current housing policy landscapes. We evaluate to what extent those cities’ recent housing reforms depart from the dominant, neoliberal policy landscape of recent decades and can be categorized as ‘post-neoliberal’. We do so through the criteria of affordability, decommodification and democratization. The three selected cities display varying histories of housing systems and neoliberalization, enabling us to search for post-neoliberal policies in three distinct institutional contexts. We find a common pattern across cases: recent reforms have improved affordability and dampened hyper-commodification, but little has been done to address the democratization of housing and planning systems. By way of conclusion, we discuss some of the structural factors that impede attempts at developing a genuinely post-neoliberal transformation of local housing policies.
Urban Affairs Review, 2022
In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of... more In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of two locations for their second headquarters. While there had certainly been criticism and organizing against the proposed deal, given that it had the vocal support of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, most New Yorkers had assumed that the deal would be implemented. Then, rather surprisingly, on February 14th, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the deal and its decision not to come to LIC. This article uses the case of Amazon and other large scale developments in western Queens to discuss the conflictual and often messy politics of local economic development (LED) in working class communities. It argues that urban studies pays too little attention to how and why working class organizations participate in the politics of LED; and often thereby shape the enacted policies of LED.
European Urban and Regional Studies, 2021
In cities worldwide, the housing question has returned. As demands and proposals by housing movem... more In cities worldwide, the housing question has returned. As demands and proposals by housing movements have grown bolder, city governments are implementing new policies, ranging from small tweaks to major overhauls. This paper takes a close look at New York City, Berlin and Vienna, assessing their current housing policy landscapes. We evaluate to what extent those cities’ recent housing reforms depart from the dominant, neoliberal policy landscape of recent decades and can be categorized as ‘post-neoliberal’. We do so through the criteria of affordability, decommodification and democratization. The three selected cities display varying histories of housing systems and neoliberalization, enabling us to search for post-neoliberal policies in three distinct institutional contexts. We find a common pattern across cases: recent reforms have improved affordability and dampened hyper-commodification, but little has been done to address the democratization of housing and planning systems. By way of conclusion, we discuss some of the structural factors that impede attempts at developing a genuinely post-neoliberal transformation of local housing policies.
New Labor Forum, 2019
This article — an excerpt from my book, Capital City, with elaborations on a number of key points... more This article — an excerpt from my book, Capital City, with elaborations on a number of key points — argues that the housing crises endemic to contemporary capitalism must be understood as a result of the concentration of global capital into real estate and the the re-orientation of state planning capacities around the demands of the real estate industry. The first half of the article explains the dimensions of the crisis in the US and the rise of "the real estate state." The second half explores policy alternatives to contemporary urban neoliberalism and the kinds of movements necessary to bring them about.
International Planning Studies, 2018
Public land plays a central role in contemporary urban planning struggles. Using a comparative ca... more Public land plays a central role in contemporary urban planning struggles. Using a comparative case study approach focused on the north-eastern US cities of Newark and New York City, we uncover patterns of land acquisition and dispossession that fit five broad and often overlapping periods in planning history: City Beautiful, metropolitan reorganization, deindustrialization, and devaluation, followed by hyper-commodification in New York City and redevelopment amidst disinvestment in Newark. Through this periodization, we find that accumulation and alienation of urban public land has largely taken place through two modes of municipalization (targeted and reactive) and two modes of privatization (community-led and capital-led). Uncovering these complex and contradictory processes strengthens the case for a more intentional approach to public land than either city’s leadership is currently pursuing, but which social movements have persistently demanded – one which prioritizes democratic decision-making in long-term land management, as well as public access, use and purpose.
Metropolitics, 2018
This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by trac... more This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by tracing the history of land's passage between the private and public realms. The authors contend that government and community-controlled nonprofit organizations should govern the disposition of the city's remaining public land supply, deliberately deploying this scarce resource to promote the well-being of the people and neighborhoods most at risk in a speculation-fueled real-estate environment.
Journal of Urban Affairs, 2018
In both its historical Progressive Era roots and its contemporary manifestations, U.S. urban prog... more In both its historical Progressive Era roots and its contemporary manifestations, U.S. urban progressivism has evinced a contradictory tendency toward promoting the interests of capital and property while ostensibly protecting labor and tenants, thus producing policies that undermine its central claims. This article interrogates past and present appeals to urban progressive politics, particularly around housing and planning, and offers an in-depth case study of one of the most highly touted examples of the new urban progressivism: New York City’s recently adopted Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. This case serves to identify the ways in which progressive rhetoric can disguise neoliberal policies. The article concludes with a discussion of legally viable housing policy alternatives that would challenge inequalities without producing gentrification. Given neoprogressivism’s ideological slipperiness, it is crucial for analysts, policymakers, and social movement actors to look beyond rhetorical claims to “progressive” politics and ask the questions: progress for whom, toward what?
Metropolitics, 2015
How do rent hikes and labor precarity conspire to reinforce each other against tenants and worker... more How do rent hikes and labor precarity conspire to reinforce each other against tenants and workers? Samuel Stein explains the mechanisms that link these two trends affecting citizens and calls for a tightening of rent-control laws to stop the spiraling descent of American residents into poverty. Published April 14, 2015 on the online peer-reviewed academic journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.
Public scholarship by Samuel Stein
N+1, 2024
The Apprentice portrays Trump, avant-garde master of 421-a, as a prophet of neoliberalism. The Gr... more The Apprentice portrays Trump, avant-garde master of 421-a, as a prophet of neoliberalism. The Grand Hyatt may have been achieved through blackmail, but once Trump and his enablers set the precedent, it became the paradigm still practiced in this city and many others. In the 1970s cities needed money, and rather than pursuing revenue by taxing the rich, many mayors—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically—embraced the idea that it would be better not to tax them outright, and instead inaugurate a race to the bottom between cities for who could create the climate most friendly to the rich (and, almost by definition, most hostile to the poor).
These dynamics are so calcified today as to seem unchangeable. As the architecture critic Owen Hatherley writes in his recent book Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects, the only way many New Yorkers can imagine “housing becoming affordable is through some sort of economic or natural disaster emptying the buildings so that you can squat them.” Disaster seems plausible enough; ending subsidies for luxury developers is preposterous. The Apprentice dramatizes a time when this was not so—when today’s Gramscian commonsense read as Trumpian bullshit (far-fetched, counterintuitive, crazy) and could only be achieved through Cohn’s covert ops.
Throughout the film, Trump equates his imaginary comeback with New York City’s. Confidence in the city means believing with perfect faith that money can and will be made by renting and selling its parts to the highest bidder, often with the active assistance of local government. Trump’s art is not the art of the deal so much as the art of the rent gap, the theoretical difference between what a property commands as it stands versus the amount it will command if it is “improved” (often by evicting tenants, sometimes by tearing it down and replacing it, always by altering it toward the tastes of those with more money than its current occupants).
Jacobin Magazine, 2024
Up to now, organizing and legislative work for social housing has taken place at the city and sta... more Up to now, organizing and legislative work for social housing has taken place at the city and state levels. For example, Seattle residents voted to create a municipal social housing developer, while the Rhode Island legislature opted to use COVID relief funds to create a state-level social housing program.
Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.
The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.
The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.
While the mechanisms are flexible, the standards for housing are fairly strict. In order to achieve the goals of decommodification and fair housing, at least 40 percent of the homes it creates must be affordable for those with the lowest incomes (defined as 0 to 30 percent of the local Area Median Income, or AMI). Another 30 percent can be available to people under 80 percent of AMI. (For context, the average New York City household makes 71 percent of AMI.) The final 30 percent are not income-targeted at all.
New York Review of Books, 2024
For New Yorkers, the years between 2020 and 2023 were a terrible game of musical chairs. When the... more For New Yorkers, the years between 2020 and 2023 were a terrible game of musical chairs. When the sirens started, hundreds of thousands packed up and moved. When they were ready to sit down again, they fought for the remaining seats. In this contest, those with the most money paid a premium for their chosen places, while those without the means were left standing outside the circle.
An alarming 761,200 New York households, or 22 percent, moved into their current homes in the years 2021 or 2022, according to data released last month by the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey—the country’s most comprehensive local housing study, which has been conducted every few years for the past six decades. This is an unusual amount of what real estate types call “churn.” 230,000 more households moved into their homes in this period than in 2019 and 2020—a 44 percent increase. It is unusual, too, from a national perspective. From 2019 to 2021, the national proportion of people who moved to new housing annually kept falling, even as it kept rising in New York. While there was a relatively small (0.3 percentage points) uptick in movers nationally in 2022, New York City’s trends are far more extreme.
What explains this state of affairs?
Radical Housing Journal, 2020
This Update reports from a webinar on the impacts of lockdown measures put in place globally amid... more This Update reports from a webinar on the impacts of lockdown measures put in place globally amid the Covid-19 pandemic on the right to housing and linked political struggles. Three main threads emerged from the conversation: the impacts of the pandemic are deepening pre-existing housing inequalities, while governments’ responses are largely insufficient; activists and contentious actors worldwide are changing their framings and repertoires to adapt to lockdown measures and attempt to radicalize their action; possibilities, albeit limited, are opening for the construction of global networks of struggle.
New York Review of Architecture, 2023
It’s no shortcoming that the New York housing left has no definitive solutions to the quandaries ... more It’s no shortcoming that the New York housing left has no definitive solutions to the quandaries raised by the social housing question, which, in its basic parameters, isn’t so different from that posed by Friedrich Engels in his famous 1872 pamphlet The Housing Question. Contradiction is intrinsic to capitalist society, no less so today than 150 years ago. Perhaps hewing too closely to historical models of change, however, is itself a liability. What we need is a theory of the way things are and the way we want them to be; a grasp of how these ideas have worked in past cycles of struggle; a willingness to look closely at the present conjuncture and understand the complexities of the balance of forces; and the determination to go forward with campaigns that will have to be revised and rerun many times over. This may not be a satisfying answer, let alone an expedient one, but it’s the only honest one.
N+1, 2023
The classic Moses story isn’t fiction, but nor is it exactly fact. The idea that everything in mo... more The classic Moses story isn’t fiction, but nor is it exactly fact. The idea that everything in modern New York City can be explained in whole or in part by Moses is an oversimplification of his legacy, not to mention an oversimplification of The Power Broker itself. Explanations that rely heavily on Moses’s most famous antagonist—the urban planning critic and activist Jane Jacobs—suffer from the same problem. But this myopia is a trap many self-styled urbanists get caught in. Coming to terms with Moses’s legacy and his role in shaping New York should be a gateway to a greater understanding of urban political economy. Instead it often serves as the end of the road.
Tenant/Inquilino, 2022
Here are 10 basic principles we realized after visiting Vienna’s social housing.
1) Social housin... more Here are 10 basic principles we realized after visiting Vienna’s social housing.
1) Social housing offers communal luxury.
2) Continuous reinvestment must be mandated.
3) Privatization must be banned.
4) Public housing needs to go everywhere.
5) Social housing is part of a larger orientation toward housing as a public good.
6) Feminist planning makes social housing more social.
7) Social housing exists within a network of social-democratic programs, rights, and guarantees.
8) A strong and broad social housing sector is politically popular, but social democracy is vulnerable.
9) “Fortress Europe” must be breached.
10) The U.S. already has versions of the Vienna social-housing model’s components – they’re just weaker and worse.
New York Review of Architecture, 2022
Amanda Burden, the New York City planning director under Michael Bloomberg, once likened gentrifi... more Amanda Burden, the New York City planning director under Michael Bloomberg, once likened gentrification to cholesterol, which is to say, a necessary, organic substance capable of manifesting in good and bad ways. The same administration, reacting to the sensitivity around the "G-word," substituted a euphemistic metric in its place: livability. Cynical, sure, but "gentrification" -- deriving from an archaic, Old World class signifier -- is hardly descriptive. One inevitably reaches for metaphors when trying to explain it.
In her new book, Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso),
Leslie Kern analyzes the discursive dimension of the term and the
tradition of urban prescriptivism more generally. Among other
things, she clarifies how our metaphors can help us better understand
processes of gentrification and its primary movers. But is
there a danger in arresting the matter at the level of language, as
Samuel Stein implicitly argues in his 2019 book Capital City: Gentrification
and the Real Estate State (Jacobin)? In the following
dialogue, Kern and Stein discuss vital issues—social reproduction,
expropriation, contesting models of valuation—that often get left
out of gentrification debates.
Uploads
Book (Capital City) by Samuel Stein
[NOTE: this article is the book's introduction, as excerpted in Next City]
Verso writes: "In this excerpt from Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Sam Stein explores the coercise role of planners who are part of a system that asks them to sort out who will go where, under what conditions and for whose benefit."
Peer reviewed journal articles by Samuel Stein
Was 2024 a year of triumph or defeat for tenants? Did the housing policy fight mark the end of an era of expansion, or the growing pains of a new beginning? By taking a close look at the outcomes of the 2024 New York State legislative session, we aim to clarify the state of play and enumerate the tasks facing the movement in the short and long term. While the following analysis focuses on a specific time and place, it reflects challenges faced by many resurgent social movements seeking legislative change from reactionary local governments. It likely resonates strongest in places where, like New York City, the contemporary iteration of the Democratic party—nominally liberal, but unabashedly pro-landlord and committed to austerity—controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the city and state government. With this political orientation, the governing party aims to achieve two contradictory goals: securing capital’s continuing ability to expand and the general public’s ability to secure social reproduction.
Public scholarship by Samuel Stein
These dynamics are so calcified today as to seem unchangeable. As the architecture critic Owen Hatherley writes in his recent book Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects, the only way many New Yorkers can imagine “housing becoming affordable is through some sort of economic or natural disaster emptying the buildings so that you can squat them.” Disaster seems plausible enough; ending subsidies for luxury developers is preposterous. The Apprentice dramatizes a time when this was not so—when today’s Gramscian commonsense read as Trumpian bullshit (far-fetched, counterintuitive, crazy) and could only be achieved through Cohn’s covert ops.
Throughout the film, Trump equates his imaginary comeback with New York City’s. Confidence in the city means believing with perfect faith that money can and will be made by renting and selling its parts to the highest bidder, often with the active assistance of local government. Trump’s art is not the art of the deal so much as the art of the rent gap, the theoretical difference between what a property commands as it stands versus the amount it will command if it is “improved” (often by evicting tenants, sometimes by tearing it down and replacing it, always by altering it toward the tastes of those with more money than its current occupants).
Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.
The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.
The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.
While the mechanisms are flexible, the standards for housing are fairly strict. In order to achieve the goals of decommodification and fair housing, at least 40 percent of the homes it creates must be affordable for those with the lowest incomes (defined as 0 to 30 percent of the local Area Median Income, or AMI). Another 30 percent can be available to people under 80 percent of AMI. (For context, the average New York City household makes 71 percent of AMI.) The final 30 percent are not income-targeted at all.
An alarming 761,200 New York households, or 22 percent, moved into their current homes in the years 2021 or 2022, according to data released last month by the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey—the country’s most comprehensive local housing study, which has been conducted every few years for the past six decades. This is an unusual amount of what real estate types call “churn.” 230,000 more households moved into their homes in this period than in 2019 and 2020—a 44 percent increase. It is unusual, too, from a national perspective. From 2019 to 2021, the national proportion of people who moved to new housing annually kept falling, even as it kept rising in New York. While there was a relatively small (0.3 percentage points) uptick in movers nationally in 2022, New York City’s trends are far more extreme.
What explains this state of affairs?
1) Social housing offers communal luxury.
2) Continuous reinvestment must be mandated.
3) Privatization must be banned.
4) Public housing needs to go everywhere.
5) Social housing is part of a larger orientation toward housing as a public good.
6) Feminist planning makes social housing more social.
7) Social housing exists within a network of social-democratic programs, rights, and guarantees.
8) A strong and broad social housing sector is politically popular, but social democracy is vulnerable.
9) “Fortress Europe” must be breached.
10) The U.S. already has versions of the Vienna social-housing model’s components – they’re just weaker and worse.
In her new book, Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso),
Leslie Kern analyzes the discursive dimension of the term and the
tradition of urban prescriptivism more generally. Among other
things, she clarifies how our metaphors can help us better understand
processes of gentrification and its primary movers. But is
there a danger in arresting the matter at the level of language, as
Samuel Stein implicitly argues in his 2019 book Capital City: Gentrification
and the Real Estate State (Jacobin)? In the following
dialogue, Kern and Stein discuss vital issues—social reproduction,
expropriation, contesting models of valuation—that often get left
out of gentrification debates.
[NOTE: this article is the book's introduction, as excerpted in Next City]
Verso writes: "In this excerpt from Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Sam Stein explores the coercise role of planners who are part of a system that asks them to sort out who will go where, under what conditions and for whose benefit."
Was 2024 a year of triumph or defeat for tenants? Did the housing policy fight mark the end of an era of expansion, or the growing pains of a new beginning? By taking a close look at the outcomes of the 2024 New York State legislative session, we aim to clarify the state of play and enumerate the tasks facing the movement in the short and long term. While the following analysis focuses on a specific time and place, it reflects challenges faced by many resurgent social movements seeking legislative change from reactionary local governments. It likely resonates strongest in places where, like New York City, the contemporary iteration of the Democratic party—nominally liberal, but unabashedly pro-landlord and committed to austerity—controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the city and state government. With this political orientation, the governing party aims to achieve two contradictory goals: securing capital’s continuing ability to expand and the general public’s ability to secure social reproduction.
These dynamics are so calcified today as to seem unchangeable. As the architecture critic Owen Hatherley writes in his recent book Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects, the only way many New Yorkers can imagine “housing becoming affordable is through some sort of economic or natural disaster emptying the buildings so that you can squat them.” Disaster seems plausible enough; ending subsidies for luxury developers is preposterous. The Apprentice dramatizes a time when this was not so—when today’s Gramscian commonsense read as Trumpian bullshit (far-fetched, counterintuitive, crazy) and could only be achieved through Cohn’s covert ops.
Throughout the film, Trump equates his imaginary comeback with New York City’s. Confidence in the city means believing with perfect faith that money can and will be made by renting and selling its parts to the highest bidder, often with the active assistance of local government. Trump’s art is not the art of the deal so much as the art of the rent gap, the theoretical difference between what a property commands as it stands versus the amount it will command if it is “improved” (often by evicting tenants, sometimes by tearing it down and replacing it, always by altering it toward the tastes of those with more money than its current occupants).
Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.
The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.
The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.
While the mechanisms are flexible, the standards for housing are fairly strict. In order to achieve the goals of decommodification and fair housing, at least 40 percent of the homes it creates must be affordable for those with the lowest incomes (defined as 0 to 30 percent of the local Area Median Income, or AMI). Another 30 percent can be available to people under 80 percent of AMI. (For context, the average New York City household makes 71 percent of AMI.) The final 30 percent are not income-targeted at all.
An alarming 761,200 New York households, or 22 percent, moved into their current homes in the years 2021 or 2022, according to data released last month by the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey—the country’s most comprehensive local housing study, which has been conducted every few years for the past six decades. This is an unusual amount of what real estate types call “churn.” 230,000 more households moved into their homes in this period than in 2019 and 2020—a 44 percent increase. It is unusual, too, from a national perspective. From 2019 to 2021, the national proportion of people who moved to new housing annually kept falling, even as it kept rising in New York. While there was a relatively small (0.3 percentage points) uptick in movers nationally in 2022, New York City’s trends are far more extreme.
What explains this state of affairs?
1) Social housing offers communal luxury.
2) Continuous reinvestment must be mandated.
3) Privatization must be banned.
4) Public housing needs to go everywhere.
5) Social housing is part of a larger orientation toward housing as a public good.
6) Feminist planning makes social housing more social.
7) Social housing exists within a network of social-democratic programs, rights, and guarantees.
8) A strong and broad social housing sector is politically popular, but social democracy is vulnerable.
9) “Fortress Europe” must be breached.
10) The U.S. already has versions of the Vienna social-housing model’s components – they’re just weaker and worse.
In her new book, Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso),
Leslie Kern analyzes the discursive dimension of the term and the
tradition of urban prescriptivism more generally. Among other
things, she clarifies how our metaphors can help us better understand
processes of gentrification and its primary movers. But is
there a danger in arresting the matter at the level of language, as
Samuel Stein implicitly argues in his 2019 book Capital City: Gentrification
and the Real Estate State (Jacobin)? In the following
dialogue, Kern and Stein discuss vital issues—social reproduction,
expropriation, contesting models of valuation—that often get left
out of gentrification debates.
Jaw ajar, I read on to learn about his students’ perverse pleasure in plotting their targets. One “reasoned that we should ignore the ugly buildings and bomb their designers instead,” and he came to class prepared with their addresses.
This macabre game was lively, but it had its limits. “We were having too much fun to reflect on the fact that the system would immediately reconstruct itself with SCI-Arc grads seduced into business suits, or that avant-garde experiments depend on powerful private patrons.”
From there, Davis set his sights on his true target: the pillars that uphold private property. He takes readers on a quick tour of the previous years, playing out a counterfactual in which Wall Street Occupiers took seriously the ideas of progressive journalist Henry George and his Marxist critics, and the Barack Obama administration had been pushed to convert the United States’ financial and real-estate sectors into public ventures.
Returning to reality, he turned to the conditions facing US cities today.
Let’s be blunt: unregulated real-estate speculation and land inflation and deflation undermine any hope of a democratic urbanism. Land-use reforms in themselves are powerless to stop gentrification without more municipal ownership or at least “demarketization” of urban land.
The public city is engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the private city, and it’s time to identify large-scale private property as the disease.
“Bombs away,” he closed the essay
It fails as high-density housing, however. In all, 111 West 57th contains just sixty condominiums. Of those, fourteen are in the old Steinway Hall. So the new part of the building—the assemblage of steel, glass, and terra-cotta that one sees lifting off into the skyline—has just forty-six apartments. The units are between one and three full floors each, with up to fourteen-foot ceilings and floor plans ranging from 3,873 to 7,130 interior square feet. Many have balconies and terraces. By contrast, the average size of a Manhattan rental apartment is 747 square feet. Instead of sixty gigantic condos, this building could fit 442 normal-sized apartments....
The problem with super-thin high-rises is not their size per se; it’s that so few people live in them. Towers like 111 West 57th are an extreme example of vertical sprawl: a spatial and social development pattern normally associated with suburban development, turned upward on its axis. In effect, these are gated, oversized, exclusive single-family homes stacked skyward. They are an ostentatious waste of space, their tenants conspicuously consuming the tremendous chunk of a crowded sky they have claimed as their own.
These are the two paths facing us today: widening inequality and corporate profiteering, or expanded affordability and community well-being for decades to come.
These recent events and forces represent a significant shift in the overall function of multi-ethnic Chinese neighborhoods in New York City, and their relationship to both the broader U.S. and Chinese economies. Whereas historically U.S. Chinatowns were developed as strategies to absorb Chinese surplus workers and provide for their social reproduction in a manner that generally benefited U.S. manufacturing capital, today these neighborhoods are being reshaped as strategies to absorb Chinese surplus capital and provide lucrative investment opportunities for transnational capitalists in a manner that largely benefits U.S. real estate capital, including locally based immigrant growth coalitions.
This shift represents an attack on Chinese workers—both those who have already immigrated, and those seeking to immigrate—who are forced to either find other, more disparate spaces to live and work, or pay an impossibly high proportion of their wages towards rent and living expenses. Though it is felt at the scales of the body, the home, the workplace, the neighborhood and the city, the gentrification of New York’s multi-ethnic Chinese neighborhoods is a reflection of global changes, where people and money are shifting positions and remaking spaces to suit the fickle demands of “vagabond capitalism.” While New York City’s “Chinatowns” are typically viewed as peripheral to urban processes because they are largely immigrant neighborhoods of color, these neighborhoods can, in fact, provide important insights on the interconnectedness between finance capitalism and post-2008 urbanization marked, in part, by the significant
influx of Chinese foreign direct investment in the property markets of global cities.
This essay utilizes employment data from the New York State Department of Labor (DOL) to document
fundamental shifts in Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park’s local economies, and examines the
transition of New York City’s “Chinatowns” from sites of surplus labor to sites of surplus capital.17 The
Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW ) provides an enumeration of private sector businesses,
the number of employees, and total wages for employers covered by New York State Unemployment
Insurance (UI) laws. QCEW is available by zip code, but the data may be subject to an undercount since
it represents employers that pay contributions to fund the State’s UI. Even so, QCEW provides a comprehensive
profile of the types of private sector firms that make up a local economy by industry sectors, the
size of the local labor force, and average wages. Using this data, we compared the neighborhood economies
of New York City’s “Chinatowns” during two periods, in 2000 (pre-9/11 crisis), and in 2015 (post-2008
“Great Recession”).
Gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color are major issues in New York City and the city’s zoning policies are a major cause. Race matters but the city ignores it when shaping land use and housing policies. The city promises “affordable housing” that is not truly affordable. Zoned Out! shows how this has played in Williamsburg, Harlem and Chinatown, neighborhoods facing massive displacement of people of color. It looks at ways the city can address inequalities, promote authentic community-based planning and develop housing in the public domain.