Book

Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State
Verso, Jacobin book series, 2019
Also available as an audio book from Tantor Media
Soon to be published in Chinese from Yilin Press and in Thai from Sam Yan Press

Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer.

Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-led process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents.

Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.



Endorsements:
 
“Samuel Stein’s lucid explanation for how we got to where we’re at shines urgent light on the origins and development of what he incisively calls ‘the Real Estate State.’ Capital City places gentrification in a structurally extensive and intensive urban geography of dispossession. All who struggle for the right to the city should read this book, and realize afresh how capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism must provoke our political imagination.”
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag

Capital City casts a cold and brilliant light on the underlying political dynamics of global cities and rightly concludes that real estate and finance are in charge. This sobering book has to be part of our toolkit as we try to find the moorings for a powerful democratic pushback in local political struggles.”
—Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of Poor People’s Movements

“Want to know why the rent’s so high? Samuel Stein meticulously documents and analyzes the rise of the rip-off ‘real estate state,’ the instruments of its power, the invidious ‘plansplaining’ arguments of its defenders, and, above all, its accelerating ethnic and class cleansing of American cities, gentrification-frenzied New York in particular. This superbly succinct and incisive book couldn’t be more timely or urgent.”
—Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map

“Samuel Stein has written a book for those tired of merely describing gentrification and displacement, who are looking for explanations as well as new programs for action. Capital City puts it all together, the theory and the practices of urban transformation, with a timely and urgent appeal. This is a lively user's guide to the changing landscape of the American city."

—Peter Marcuse, coauthor of In Defense of Housing

Reviews:

"[Capital City] alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and neighborhoods... Explicit in Stein's narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities."
—Nikil Saval, The New Yorker

"The clarity and vehemence of [Capital City and Raquel Ronick's Urban Warfare] is a tonic for anyone used to the combination of boosterism and sentimentality that marks so much urbanist writing."
—Owen Hatherley, The Architectural Review

"Capital City is a fascinating read for anyone interested in cities, capitalism, racism, or housing.... Stein has produced a book that is concise and digestible, without sacrificing analytical heft. Socialists are re-entering the popular conversation about cities from coast to coast, reminding people that winning another world is not only possible but necessary, and that we can only do it together. Stein's work is an important addition to this movement, and, crucially, a promising tool for introducing people to these ideas."
—Tannara Yelland, LA Review of Books

"Stein writes for amateur urbanists and professional planners alike. Reaching back to the foundations of capitalism and property ownership, he methodically and accessibly lays out just how much influence the curious phenomenon of real estate has had in the shaping of our cities, the making of fortunes, and the production of extreme inequality."
—Gordon Douglas, Public Books

"Samuel Stein's Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is a radical view into the heart of the processes these professionals oversee, and is engaging enough to keep you reading right past the first dreaded mention of zoning."
—Andrea Gibbons, New Labor Forum

"Samuel Stein revolutionizes the way we understand cities, consent, and coercion in the age of planetary real estate capital. Stein’s analysis is new and revolutionary, yet it is also evolutionary in the spirit of an intergenerational multitude of critical urban consciousness. I savor the pain of cognitive overload reading through this remarkable book."
—Elvin Wyly, Society & Space 

"Capital City is unabashedly a polemic and reminds one of New York City muckraker classics like DuBruhl and Newfield’s The Abuse of Power (1977), Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974) or Fitch’s The Assassination of New York (1993).  As a heterodox critique of orthodox urban planning, the book harkens to works by Jane Jacobs (1961), Percival and Paul Goodman (1947), as well as radical texts from late 1960s and 1970s that encouraged insurgent planners to become 'guerillas in the bureaucracy' and dismantle technocratic 'complexes.'"
 —Suleiman Osman, Society & Space

"Written in easily digestible language, the book has become a favorite of New York City-based community organizers and academic theorists alike."
—Rob Robinson, Society & Space 

"Over years, activists and scholars have begun to understand gentrification more as part of state and city policy: not just the result of a collection of individual choices, or cultural trends. Sam does an excellent job bringing the point of the real estate state home, and crystallizing it."
—Amanda Huron, Society & Space

"Accessible to those who are unfamiliar with the field of urban planning, although no less interesting for those well immersed within it."
—Erin McElroy, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

"Capital City makes landmark contributions for theory, teaching, and housing movements alike."
—Keith Brower Brown, Antipode

"Capital City deserves attention from urban historians for its nuanced analysis of neoliberal urban policy and specific measures that generate inequality and may also be used in service of justice. This book will be a useful tool for a broad swath of people seeking a greater understanding of the urgency of this political moment which grows with every demolition."
—Amanda Boston, The Metropole

"Those searching for a means of warding off the almost inevitable disaster that awaits New York and other coastal cities around the world might consider paying serious attention to Stein's call that land be socialized and used for the common good."

—Ted Steinberg, Journal of Urban History

"A challenging and heartfelt read.... Too often in books of this nature, authors limit themselves to criticism of the status quo. Stein, however, has the temerity to resist the easy way out."
—Dennis E. Gale, Journal of Planning Education and Research

"Capital City offers ample historical context and a big-picture view of the financialization of housing from the 19th century to the present.... The boon of Capital City is that it provides a clarifying language through which to understand the byzantine world of affordable housing in the 21st century, and its analysis rejects premises about the inevitability of displacement. Our solutions will inevitably be untidy and fragmentary, but a book that strengthens our collective moral imagination will only improve those designs."
Roshan Abraham, Pacific Standard

  "Capital City offers a powerful critique of how urban planners use their power to shape U.S. cities and unearths the structural reasons why the development of high-value real estate is the answer to seemingly any problem in the contemporary city....What sets this book apart from critiques of market-oriented urban policy is Stein's effort to offer a path out."
—Oksana Mironova, Progressive City

"The relative brevity of the text does not detract from Stein's timely and compelling 'finger on the pulse' analysis of the real estate state. Capital City is, then, a welcome and highly accessible contribution to the field of urban studies and planning. Stein shines a light on the underlining political dynamic that lies at the heart of our cities, and in doing so reveals to us the rise of the real estate state within capitalist urban planning. For this reason, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in gentrification and displacement."
—Conor Wilson, London School of Economics Review of Books

"In this cogent and clear work, Stein is able to explain the jargon-laden discipline of urban planning to the non-wonk. He demonstrates how tax schemes, zoning and the prioritization of increasing land values in order to increase the city’s tax base leads to uneven investment, resulting in gentrification and displacement in some neighborhoods and disinvestment in others. The book is a challenge to the bipartisan consensus that for-profit real-estate development is the solution to all that ails the city: underfunded schools, overcrowded or under-serving public transit, segregation."
—Derek Ludovici, The Indypendent

"Stein [has] laid out the motivations for, and tools to fight against the FIRE industries that would sell us back society at a premium."
David A. Banks, Real Life

"Stein brilliantly maps the history of housing in the US first by describing it, and then matching it with the story of the Trumps."
Charles Mudede, The Stranger

"It's refreshing to read an analysis about gentrification that avoids wallowing in moral outrage about upscale restaurants or painting sentimental portraits of an embattled community's 'good old days.'"
—Yutaka Dirks, Briarpatch

"Stein wants urban planning to democratize cities, making them places that belong to everyone, not just an economic and racial elite. His analysis of what fuels gentrification and his willingness to think outside the neoliberal box lead him to some solutions that defy conventional wisdom."
—Valerie Schloredt, Yes! Magazine

"Vital and devastating.... The book isn't simply an analysis. It's unabashed in its advocacy of a more equitable distribution of land and housing."
—Joshua Barnett, New York Labor History Association

"[Stein] addresses with startling clarity the growing centrality and concentration of capital into real estate, largely through the lens of urban planning, the process by which we design our cities.... Urban planning must also be reimagined, inspired in by interventions such as Stein's."
—Colin Gannon, Verso Blog 

"In Capital City (2019), Samuel Stein's essential new book on gentrification, real estate, and urban planning, the logic of this dynamic is laid bare."
—Jacob Blumenfeld, The Brooklyn Rail

"A cogent and expertly-written breakdown of how cities have churned through their working class communities to build playgrounds for the rich."
—Annie Lloyd, Knock LA

"A profoundly knowledgeable take."
—Louis Proyect, CounterPunch

"An amazing book... that explains why housing in U.S. cities is becoming too expensive for millions of people."
—Julia Stein, City Watch

"Stein's approach... helps him to address and describe how planning decisions are made and how the results play out. This is an approach that architects can learn from."
—Susanne Schindler, Footprint

"Excellent and accessible.... Capital City is a great primer for those with little background in planning policy. It makes transparent the mechanisms and tools that officials and developers have made so rigourously opaque and diffuse over the years. For planners and policymakers with an eye towards the future, however, Stein also provides a blueprint."
—Emily Holloway, The Advocate

"In Capital City, Stein draws a compelling picture of the ideas and forces that have changed our social, political, and economic landscapes in the post-World-War-II era, and of how these ideas and forces relate to land and buildings."

—Damian Sligo-Green, Counterfutures

"In a similar manner to Howard Zinn's telling of US history in A People's History of the United States,  Stein's Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is very much a "people's history" of American planning history."
Evan King, Angles from the Carolina Planning Journal

"Stein is ready to imagine and build a better system."
Doug Trumm, The Urbanist