Verso
Review by Brian Tanguay
Many years ago I wrote a letter to my county supervisor protesting the proposed development of an avocado orchard near where my in-laws lived. I was upset on two fronts. First, the loss of yet another orchard, and second, because the proposed new homes started at $500,000, which at the time seemed an astronomical figure, out of all reasonable proportion to the wages working people, myself included, were earning. As the saying goes, those were the good old days. I saw a recent news story that claimed that most homes in California are now selling for $900,000 or more.
California has a terrible shortage of decent, affordable housing, and this is one reason why the state faces such a stubborn problem of unhoused people, many of whom work full-time jobs but are simply, through no fault of their own, priced-out of the housing market. It’s a dilemma from the far north of the state all the way to the Mexican border. Coastal cities, like my hometown of Santa Barbara, have always been pricey, but now the high-cost phenomenon is widespread, a topic of endless debate, consternation and anxiety. Everyone understands that stable housing is essential for a healthy life, and ultimately forms the bedrock of healthy communities, but more often than not, politics and money conspire to sideline proposals that construe housing as a human necessity rather than a capitalist commodity.
When you rent in Santa Barbara as I do, housing is an unavoidable preoccupation. What if the rent increases beyond what my family can afford? What if the landlord sells the house? Why are rents skyrocketing in the first place, not just here, but almost everywhere? What’s going on with the American housing market, what unseen forces and hands are driving rents ever higher, putting the squeeze on students, working families, and the elderly?
I know I’m not alone in asking these questions. As The New Republic reported in an article titled “Rent Control Now!” in its June 2024 edition: “Renters comprise just over a third of all Americans, and more than half of those households (upward of 22 million) are now rent-burdened, meaning they pay over 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities.”
It was with such preoccupations in mind that I came across Capital City by Samuel Stein, a writer and urban planner based in the real estate capital of the world, New York City. Published in 2019, Stein offers one of the most lucid explanations about what he calls the Real Estate State I’ve encountered. While NYC is his particular focus, the fundamental elements of his analysis apply wherever gentrification is remaking neighborhoods and inner cities at the expense of people currently living there. NYC real estate is unique, dominated by entrenched political and economic interests (including the former president of the United States about whom Stein devotes an entire chapter), with a long history of land use favoring developers, but the framework Stein describes is universal.
Early on Stein declares that the contemporary politics of planning are stacked against working people. This squares with my personal experience of my hometown, where the dance between city and county planners and real estate developers rarely results in housing that is affordable for average wage earners. As Stein writes, “I realized that capitalism makes the best of planning impossible: any good that planners do is filtered through a system that dispossesses those who cannot pay.” With every proposed project come demands for more than the minimum number of “affordable” units, a demand which developers counter by claiming that increasing the number of such units makes the project unworkable, meaning, of course, not profitable enough.
As Stein so ably argues, gentrification is a political process as well as an economic and social one. Developers invariably build for the high end of the market, where the greatest profits lie, and while planners might wring their hands over this, the rising property values that invariably result are a critical element of a city’s tax base.
“Everyone plays their part,” writes Stein. “Financiers make derivatives that spin housing into abstractions; architects make boxes for high-end investment; politicians make promises to build, build, build; and planners bend space toward profit.”
Capital City is a concise and powerful critique that deserves to be read by urban planners, politicians, and ordinary citizens. As Stein frames it, planning is always a political act, but it’s not an immutable law that planners must follow the whims of political leaders or the demands and dictates of the real estate industry.
