{"id":202,"date":"2019-04-01T19:39:19","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T19:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=202"},"modified":"2019-04-01T23:45:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T23:45:16","slug":"capital-city-on-how-planning-follows-real-estate-citylab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/202\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Capital City’ on How Planning Follows Real Estate – CityLab"},"content":{"rendered":"

www.citylab.com\/equity\/2019\/03\/urban-planning-gentrification-capital-city-samuel-stein\/585262\/<\/a>
\nAre Planners Partly to Blame for Gentrification? In his new book Capital City, Samuel Stein contends that real-estate interests have co-opted urban planning and made planners complicit in gentrification.
\nTanner Howard Tanner Howard is a freelance journalist and master’s student in urban policy and planning at the University of Illinois\u2013Chicago. They write about housing issues, queer culture, and Chicago history, with clips in the Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, and more. Mar 29, 2019 The new ultra-tall towers Central Park Tower, 111 W 57th Street, and 53W53 being constructed just south of Central Park in New York City. Lucas Jackson\/Reuters Are Planners Partly to Blame for Gentrification?
\nIn his new book Capital City, Samuel Stein contends that real-estate interests have co-opted urban planning and made planners complicit in gentrification.
\nThe world\u2019s real estate is worth an estimated $217 trillion, making up more than 60 percent of global assets. Even though three-quarters of that amount is tied up in housing, it hasn\u2019t translated to secure shelter or prosperity for many: U.S. homeownership levels hit a 50-year low in 2016, and that same year, 37 percent of all home sales in America were made to absentee investors.
\nWith Wall Street-backed Invitation Homes (owned by the Blackstone Group) now serving as the nation\u2019s largest landlord of single-family homes\u2014snapping up many of the same properties that were foreclosed on a decade ago\u2014it\u2019s hard to recognize the promise of home ownership as a tenet of the American Dream. Not that renting is much easier: Average move-in rents in the U.S. have more than doubled over the past two decades.
\nThese challenges raise an obvious question: What can be done? Although many urban planners want to solve the housing crisis, redevelopment projects that garner millions or billions of dollars of public subsidies force them into compromises, argues Samuel Stein in his new book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, $17.95).
\n (Verso) Stein argues that the combined forces of development, finance, and a global elite parking its wealth in luxury housing swamp planners\u2019 best intentions. With most industrial activity now pushed outside of city limits and public services dependent on property taxes, real estate, he contends, has come to dominate urban planning; the technology and finance sectors are beholden to it and offer no political counterweight.
\nThe state is \u201ca central actor\u201d in gentrification, Stein writes. Planners lure developers and landlords with land-use and tax incentives on the one hand, while enticing new residents and shoppers with amenities on the other\u2014all of which push prices up. \u201cA planner\u2019s mission is to imagine a better world, but their day-to-day work involves producing a more profitable one,\u201d he writes. One chapter of the book tracks the real-estate dealings of three generations of the Trump family, boosted at intervals by public policies and incentives seized on for personal profit.
\nFor Stein\u2014a doctoral candidate in geography at the City University of New York, an instructor at Hunter College, and a trained planner\u2014the question of planning is front and center to understanding our current economic order as experienced in city life. CityLab asked him about the rise of real estate, radical planners, and how would-be planners should approach the role. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
\nHow do you think the rise of real estate and the fall of industrialism, which needed low land costs and affordable housing for workers, are changing the relationship between planners and the population?
\nIt\u2019s definitely getting harder for planners to be responsive. In the growing concentration of money in real estate, planners are becoming less responsive to everyday people, and they don\u2019t have a separate group of capitalists, industrial capitalists, barking at them for an entirely different set of demands.
\nI think we often want to be able to tell planners why what they\u2019re doing is bad, and then have them do something else, but that\u2019s not how the system is set up. Planners are following the commands largely of commissioners and mayor-appointed heads of planning departments, and mayors in most big cities are getting lots of money from real estate, even those who take on the mantle of fighting gentrification, as in New York City. It\u2019s really hard for planners to simply see that something is wrong and fix it. I don\u2019t want to let them off the hook for the consequences of their actions, but I also don\u2019t want people to expect them to change simply because they should. It\u2019s a very difficult task with the way things are structured right now.
\nWhy do you emphasize the significance of planning in increasingly unequal urban areas?
\nIn the U.S. context, planners are under-appreciated\u2014not just as individuals, but the act of planning is underplayed. I think it\u2019s important for anyone to figure out what\u2019s going on in their city, and why their housing costs are so insane, and not to blame it all on planners, but to use them as a way in, as a way to understand the relationship between capital, the state, and the working class.
\nI\u2019m trained as a planner, so I understand who they are and what they do, and I do believe that it is an inordinately nice group of people. I sent the manuscript to a friend who\u2019s an architect, and that claim resonated with her: She said, \u2018That\u2019s really true [that planners are nice people], and nobody would ever say that about architects.\u2019 So it\u2019s interesting that this group of well-meaning people can be in some ways responsible for such enormous and negative transformations in terms of the cost of living for working-class people.
\nYou have a chapter dedicated to the real-estate career of the Trump family\u2014not just the president, but also his father and grandfather. Why do you think their story helps explain the current dynamic of real estate and politics?
\nNow that he is the president, it\u2019s all the scandals and daily outrages that we tend to obsess over. But I wanted to remind people that it\u2019s not just the abstract real-estate capital that\u2019s gaining in power. It\u2019s manifested in the number-one position in our political hierarchy.
\n[The Trump] family allows us to see the flip side of urban-planning history\u2014that it\u2019s not just the planners and what they do to cities, it\u2019s also about who\u2019s pushing them to do those things. The Trumps were a way of personifying that, but the point is not that they were exceptional; the point is that they were ordinary [in how they took advantage of public policies and subsidies for personal gain, and because they were never at the pinnacle of New York real estate]. What\u2019s exceptional is that one of them is now president.
\nYou discuss a legacy of radical planning, which taught activist planners that \u201cwhile they may be alone in their workplace, they are not alone in their workforce.\u201d
\nThere\u2019s been a history of insurgent planners for a long time, with a few different models rising up in the \u201960s and \u201970s. There was Planners for Equal Opportunity (PEO), which was trying to link urban planners with the movement against urban renewal. There was the Planner\u2019s Underground, which was a bit more militant movement of planners who were sneaking out information about what their cities were doing to activists and writing anonymous testimonies and letters to the editor.
\nThe Architects\u2019 Renewal Committee of Harlem is an interesting history, where planners were actively building up the capacity for working-class folks in Harlem to imagine what self-determination would look like in spatial terms. And then you get the Planners Network, rising out of [PEO], as an organization of left urban planners that could stand in opposition to the American Planning Association. That one is still around, and I think it\u2019s an important resource for planners who want to think outside of the constraints of neoliberalism and their particular job.
\nI think there is still a role for this kind of activist urban planner, not just outside the system, but in it. People have to organize, and not just do it personally, in their free time, but do it collectively, in part so you can get out of the groupthink that\u2019s imposed on planners. When you work inside of the system, you tend to be told that certain things are impossible that are actually just undesirable for people in power. I think it\u2019s important for planners who think differently to get together outside of work and think and strategize about the ways they can be resources to the movements that are challenging their bosses.
\nWhat would you tell people interested in the field of urban planning as they consider that work?
\nI would encourage them to always think critically and not get discouraged. I think there\u2019s a strong pragmatic strain in planning, which can be valuable, if it\u2019s about translating radical ideas into an actionable program. But it can also be a dampener on radicalism and visionary thinking, and even utopianism, which is useful too in knowing where we\u2019d want to be if we could.
\nI encourage people to hold onto those impulses, and to find others who think the way they do, or who challenge their own thinking. In isolation, the system swallows us, but collectively we can imagine a better way to do urban planning and connect to the social movements that are challenging them. The trick there is not to impose the strictures that are imposed onto us as professional planners, but instead to be a resource to those movements in aiding them in their success.
\nCORRECTION: The original version of this article misidentified where Samuel Stein is a doctoral candidate; it is the City University of New York.<\/p>\n

Mary Bolton 202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

www.citylab.com\/equity\/2019\/03\/urban-planning-gentrification-capital-city-samuel-stein\/585262\/ Are Planners Partly to Blame for Gentrification? In his new book Capital City, Samuel Stein contends that real-estate interests have co-opted urban planning and made planners complicit in gentrification. Tanner Howard Tanner Howard is a freelance journalist and master’s student in urban policy and planning at the University of Illinois\u2013Chicago. They write about housing […]<\/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-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","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=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}