Samuel Stein – författare

Around the world, more and more money is being invested in real estate, the business of building, buying and renting land and property. You can sense it as you walk through most cities, and you can feel it every time you pay the rent or mortgage.The price of land becomes a central economic determinate and a dominant political issue. The clunky term gentrification becomes a household word and displacement an everyday fact of life. Government, particularly at the municipal scale, becomes more and more obsessed with raising property values and redistributing wealth upward through land and rents. Donald Trump becomes first a celebrity and ultimately a president. Taken together, we witness the rise of the real estate state, a political formation in which real estate capital has inordinate power over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics, and ultimately the lives we lead.Capital City describes when, how and why real estate came to rule, and what urban planners the people who have their hands on the levers of housing policy can do under these circumstances.

In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. This book is both a road map and a reckoning. Drawing on his own experience of on-the-ground organizing, Samuel Stein presents practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself.With raw honesty, he then explores why these visions founder on the rocks of political reality. He reveals the forces blocking our path-from the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions-and captures the complex feelings of a left that has lost faith in the future.Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani's historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt-an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.