How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

by P.E. Moskowitz

In nearly every other industrialized nation besides the United States, there is near-consensus that purely private land markets will not meet the needs of the poor, and so measures have been taken to ensure that at least some land remains off the market or subject to regulations that make it affordable. In Hong Kong, for example, which has economics that mirror those of other global cities such as San Francisco and New York, 60 percent of all new construction has been set aside for low-income people. In Sweden, local governments have much greater control over land use decisions. In Stockholm, virtually every piece of undeveloped land is owned by the municipal government. In Berlin, which is gentrifying relatively rapidly for a European city, legislators recently approved a law capping new tenants’ rent at a maximum of 10 percent above the area’s average rent, so landlords cannot inflate rent as soon as an apartment becomes vacant, and have little incentive to evict long-term tenants. Though the governments of Sweden, Hong Kong, and Germany are by no means anticapitalist, they have accepted a truth that few in the United States are willing to grapple with: unregulated capitalism cannot provide a complete solution to the housing question.