Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Jacobin)

“This superbly succinct and incisive book couldn’t be more timely or urgent.”
—Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map

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 driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but 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.

• How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood
• The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America
• The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (Jacobin)
• Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City
• Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance
• The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It
• Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Jacobin)
• We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality