Ginger Jentzen – Minneapolis’ Housing Plan Rewards Developers, Punishes Working People

Link to an article by Ginger Jentzen:

“Minneapolis’ Housing Plan Rewards Developers, Punishes Working People”

 

Bonus links: “When Capitalists Build Too Much” and “Residents an Afterthought in Public Housing Privatization Coverage” and “‘Poor Door’ Tenants of Luxury Tower Reveal the Financial Apartheid Within” and “The Corporate Steamroller of Gentrification is a Deliberate Process” and “Turning Libraries Into Condos” and “Capitalism Can’t Give Us Affordable Housing” and “Euphemisms All the Way Down” and “Why Rent Control? An Interview with Kshama Sawant” (and “Amazon Is on the Attack Against Kshama Sawant”) and “MPHA Enlists Rep. Ilhan Omar for Its Privatization Campaign” and “What a Bernie Sanders Agenda on Affordable Housing Should Look Like” and “Universal Rent Control Now” and “We Can Have Beautiful Public Housing” and “A Communist Designed Your Kitchen” and “Marxism, Space and a Few Urban Questions: A Rough Guide to the English Language Literature” and “Why Rent Control Works” and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and “The New Deal State and Segregation” and “When Capital Threatens to Strike in Your City”

Bonus quote:

“This is the real estate state: a government . . .  fine-tuned to ensure that government actions are calibrated toward rising profits for developers, landlords, speculators, and flippers. Like other state assemblages (the welfare state, the carceral state, the warfare state, etc.) the real estate state is never totalizing, but its influence is particularly strong at the local level, where most US land use decisions take place.

Whatever problems planners attack, the solutions they propose are likely to include luxury development as a key component — even when that problem is a lack of affordable housing. Planners in the real estate state are tasked with stoking property values: either because they are low and investors want them higher, or because they are already high and . . . their deflation could bring down an entire budgetary house of cards. Working to curb speculation and develop public and decommodified housing seem like absurd propositions to a planning regime whose first assumption is that future public gains come first through real estate growth.

In this system, gentrification is a feature not a bug.”

“Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalist Urban Planning” (for what it’s worth, this article makes a very confused reference to real estate developers et al. as “capitalists”) see also The Social Structures of the Economy