CAPITAL CITY: GENTRIFICATION AND THE REAL ESTATE STATE - SAMUEL STEIN

I was disappointed in this one. I’ve lived in a lot of cities in my life. I’ve lived a year or more in LA, Chicago, Seattle, Mexico City, and I’ve lived for months at a time in Pune Antananarivo, Kolkata, Havana, and visited dozens of others. I’m very pro-city, spend a lot of time thinking about how cities work and believe that they are only going to become a bigger part of the way we live in the future. I think of myself as a “city guy".” My entire life living and moving between cities has also been concerned with gentrification. How it works, what it is, who benefits and who/what forces drive it, what it means for the future of cities, are all important questions that I’d love to know more about. This book didn’t go deep enough into these issues for me. For one, the book is very focused on NYC, where Stein is a city planner and college lecturer, and I’m not an NYC guy. New York does act as the testing grounds and birthplaces for some trends that work themselves out in other cities, “broken-windows policing” comes to mind, but there are more aspects that make it unique and unlike anywhere else in the world (which NYers are always squawking about). Secondly, the book is a bit two surface-level. We get a basic rundown of how gentrification works and how our national economy switched from industry to Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (FIRE) starting in the 80’s (it coincides with and is part of the neoliberal turn) and what this has meant to city real estate and the politics of cities. All this is fine but again, a little 101. There’s a long section in the middle about the career of the Trump Family, from DJT’s grandfather to The Donald himself, which seeks to show how developers have responded to different governmental incentives over time, ie his father built cheap (shitty) housing for workers in Queens while DJT himself built expensive (shitty) housing for rich people in Manhattan, both of them following the government incentives, tax-breaks and money. Again, this information is somewhat interesting as history and biography, but it’s very specific to Trump and NYC and doesn’t connect out to gentrification writ large. Finally, Stein feigns at solutions but doesn’t flesh any out. He suggests that city-planners need to be more radical. He suggests we need large scale social movements to challenge capitalism and, thus, to change the conditions our cities operate under. I agree with all that, but I’d like more theory as to what we could build in the aftermath. He suggests looking to places like Havana for solutions, which, again, I agree with (and I’ve been to Havana, he right that it does have very interesting housing and housing laws) but I wish he’d spend a whole chapter talking about how things work in Havana, what their challenges have been, how they’ve adapted over the years, etc. Or had any chapters about non-NYC places and the ways they experience gentrification being similar and different from one another. I could see this book being more interesting if you’re an NYC person who’s deeply familiar with the neighborhoods and specific issues but to a person who’s interested in gentrification in general, it leaves one wanting more. 1624 gentrified neighborhoods