Who Owns Our Cities – and Why This Urban Takeover Should Concern Us All
4th December 2015
The Guardian, in Britain, is a tediously tendentious left-wing rag, whose writing is superior to The Daily Worker but whose political agenda — and lack of intellectual rigor — are exactly the same.
Does the massive foreign and national corporate buying of urban buildings and land that took off after the 2008 crisis signal an emergent new phase in major cities? From mid-2013 to mid-2014, corporate buying of existing properties exceeded $600bn (£395bn) in the top 100 recipient cities, and $1trillion a year later – and this figure includes only major acquisitions (eg. a minimum of $5m in the case of New York City).
Oh, noes! Things are being bought! Things are being owned! The sky is falling!
Well, not really. Because of land-use restrictions, urban property, especially urban core property, has skyrocketed in price to the point where only corporations, or extremely wealthy individuals, can buy it. Why this comes as a surprise to a ‘journalist’ escapes me; I have no trouble explaining it to a 10-year-old. (Of course, if extremely wealthy individuals were doing this buying instead of corporations, I suspect that the Guardian would still think that the sky is falling.)
I want to examine the details of this large corporate investment surge, and why it matters.
Prediction: Details will be few and far between, and airy generalities will rule. Like this one:
Cities are the spaces where those without power get to make a history and a culture, thereby making their powerlessness complex.
Actually, they go there to get jobs and support themselves and raise families. But nobody could do a Studies major in that.
If the current large-scale buying continues, we will lose this type of making that has given our cities their cosmopolitanism.
People are actually paid to write this stuff. If this guy wants to talk about ‘people without power’, he ought to look to small farmers and small businessmen, who have the least power in our society. But no — they aren’t fashionable, and the Guardian is all about The Narrative.
The rest is simply more of the same. Picking it apart is left as an exercise for the reader, not involving not much exercise at all.