{"id":165,"date":"2019-03-08T19:42:34","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T19:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=165"},"modified":"2019-03-08T19:48:36","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T19:48:36","slug":"capital-city-gentrification-and-the-real-estate-state-next-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/165\/","title":{"rendered":"Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State \u2013 Next City"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcity.org\/features\/view\/capital-city-gentrification-and-the-real-estate-state\">nextcity.org\/features\/view\/capital-city-gentrification-and-the-real-estate-state<\/a><br \/>\nCapital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State Tapping into the remarkable power of city planning to reclaim urban life for all residents.<br \/>\nEDITOR\u2019S NOTE: Next City\u2019s Oscar Perry Abello spoke with author Samuel Stein last week about his new book, \u201cCapital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State,\u201d published by Verso Books. The following is an excerpt from the book\u2019s introduction, in which the author digs into the ways the state uses and is used by capital \u2014 in particular, the $217-trillion real estate industry \u2014 and how urban planners often find themselves conflicted between the need to make cities \u201cbetter\u201d and more liveable and the pressure to make decisions in service to rising real-estate values.<br \/>\nOn March 25, 1911, fire engulfed New York\u2019s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The bosses had locked the doors and 146 workers were killed. Two days later, the Jewish socialist newspaper The Forward printed an impassioned plea from its editor, Abraham Cahan. After describing the pain felt throughout Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side, Cahan wrote that mourners were beginning to see a figure through their tears: the biblical Angel of Death. \u201cWho is the Angel of Death? Who is the thug? Who is the mass murderer? Must we again say it is that gluttonous ravager of humans \u2014 capital?!\u201d<br \/>\nJust over a century later, a public housing complex in West London called the Grenfell Tower burst into flames. Though residents had warned that the building was a firetrap, public authorities allowed it to deteriorate. When the fire started, it quickly accelerated due to the highly flammable cladding that management had added to the building\u2019s exterior in order to make it more attractive to posh neighbors. The fire killed over seventy tenants.<br \/>\nWho is the Angel of Death? Who is the mass murderer?<br \/>\nToday, as a century ago, the culprit is capital, rushing in and out of spaces with abandon in search of profit and growth. In 1911, the arsonist was industrial capital, then the dominant force in urban politics. In 2017, it was real estate capital. 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 feel it every time you pay the rent or mortgage.<br \/>\nGlobal real estate is now worth $217 trillion, 36 times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world\u2019s assets, and the vast majority of that wealth \u2014 roughly 75 percent \u2014 is in housing. There are a number of reasons why capital is converging on land and buildings: a long period of financial deregulation, low federal interest rates and \u201cquantitative easing\u201d in the United States; massive urbanization programs in China, the United Arab Emirates and several other countries; a proliferation of predatory equity funds scouring the globe for \u201cundervalued\u201d investment opportunities and finding them in housing; economic polarization around the world, with extremely wealthy and somewhat nervous individuals viewing property as the safest place to hide their money; and more. When capital gains rise while rates of profit plummet across many once-dynamic sectors of the economy, real estate becomes the latest stop on what geographer Cindi Katz calls \u201cvagabond\u201d capitalism\u2019s eternal search for profitability.<br \/>\nIn the United States, homes are changing hands at a rapid pace, but homeownership is at a fifty-year low. In 2016, a record 37 percent of home sales were made to absentee investors. While some of those buyers were pensionless seniors who needed a retirement strategy, most of them were banks, hedge funds and private equity firms like Blackstone \u2014 now the world\u2019s largest landlord.<\/p>\n<p>Mary Bolton  202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>nextcity.org\/features\/view\/capital-city-gentrification-and-the-real-estate-state Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State Tapping into the remarkable power of city planning to reclaim urban life for all residents. EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: Next City\u2019s Oscar Perry Abello spoke with author Samuel Stein last week about his new book, \u201cCapital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State,\u201d published by Verso Books. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}