Thread by @davidpoms

At the book talk for new @VersoBooks by @samuelbstein. Trends in global and national economy driving the real estate state (centrality of real estate to growth): massive urbanization, quantitative easing, climate and political instability, predatory equity, stagnant wages

"what is new is the relatively outsized power of real estate capital in global investment strategies and the power that gives within the state"

"private land market is essentially a spoils system. Whoever owns the land accrues the benefits whether or not they're responsible for them"

Urban planning without control over the land results in gentrification

Early example of planning as the center of finance, state power, and land use: Friedrich Trumps receipt of land from railroad companies out west (itself received from federal govt), where he bought a mining permit cheap and then built brothels and hotels on land w/blind govt eye

Similar story plays out with Friedrich Trump back in Queens, genesis of the Trump fortune which is a story of state power and investment creating new fortunes for first land buyers to get there

This goes on with Fred Trump in NYC, with the FHA and the genesis of modern comprehensive planning in the early and mid 20th century, which we know best today as periods that launched redlining and urban renewal, two key strategies to Fred Trumps business model

The innovation that Donald Trump added to the Trump family fortune and its use of the planning state was centrality of tax breaks and zoning entitlements - Trump Tower is one example, which went from 12 story to 58 story approval, and tax break for a public space (the lobby)

He later won a lawsuit to secure a massive tax break for it and recruited the head of the city's housing department to work for him lol

Stein's summary of Friedrich to Fred to Donald as the metaphor for the growth of real estate state to its current centrality: Opportunist (imperial expansion westward) to builder (direct state subsidies) to mogul (starving the state before seizing it)

The next step in this process is exemplified by De Blasio's Housing New York plan: upzoning 15 working class neighborhoods to raise land values and recapture some of that value for affordable housing

Obvious challenge to this solution is that it is impossible to make things cheaper for the people that live there by making it more expensive

Details a number of policy initiatives for transferring control of private land into public or trust control, for maintaining control over public land and for expanding new supply of public housing

Rethinking relationship between land and taxes also recommended

Taxing bank foreclosure activities? Lol I love that one. Also more heavily taxing higher end properties and the whole suite of Georgist tax ideas

And of course, raising wages. Put housing costs in the cross hairs of labor movements and put labor/wage issues on the agenda of planners

"whatever the problem, the solution is luxury development"

To wrest back control over real estate state, we need a number of movements, most importantly of which is the tenant movement

Also discusses need for community planning movement using the planning documents as organizing tools to envision the cities we need

Also need movements at different scales - local, state, federal - because so much of real estate is regulated at those different levels (zoning locally, rent control at state in many places, public housing federally)

Question around purposeful vacancies. All sorts of people are hiding wealth in property. Can become xenophobic though - just as common for American wealth to be doing this.

Another question from a senior who lives in ward 5 who talked about the number of seniors on her block who have lost their homes in the last two years through massive assessment increases.

Another question about community planning as organizing, talks about the usage of neighborhood plans that have been ignored by cities, but how these plans can still help local coalitions form and coalesce to exercise power elsewhere, such as electorally.