Did not know Frederick Trump made his money off of brothel-keeping and exploiting miners.

Well-researched in the history and relationships within NYC land use planning, development, and resistance via tenant organizing. This is a brilliant and important read, so relevant today for movement-building around housing justice.

The chapters on Trump family wealth are particularly illuminating.

The Architecture of Dispossession

Samuel Stein’s “Capital City” stands as one of the most incisive analyses of contemporary urban politics, offering a devastating critique of what he terms the “real estate state”—a political formation where real estate interests exert disproportionate influence over urban development, governance, and daily life. Writing from his dual perspective as both urban planner and housing activist, Stein provides an insider’s view of how ostensibly neutral planning processes serve to systematically dispossess working-class communities while enriching developers and landlords.

The book’s central thesis is both simple and profound: gentrification is not a natural market phenomenon driven by consumer preferences, but a deliberately engineered process orchestrated by the state in partnership with real estate capital. This argument fundamentally reframes debates about urban change, shifting focus from individual actors (the much-maligned “hipsters with lattes”) to structural forces and policy decisions that create the conditions for displacement.

The Planner’s Dilemma: Complicity and Contradiction

One of the book’s most compelling aspects is Stein’s unflinching examination of his own profession. Urban planners, he argues, find themselves caught in an impossible contradiction: tasked with improving cities while operating within a system that ensures their improvements will drive up property values and displace existing residents. This creates what he calls the “planner’s dilemma”—the recognition that well-intentioned interventions often serve the interests of capital rather than communities.

Stein’s analysis here is particularly sophisticated. Rather than simply condemning planners as tools of capital, he explores how professional training, institutional constraints, and economic pressures shape planning practice. Planners are taught to believe they can create more “beautiful, sustainable, and sociable spaces,” but they operate within a system where private property rights and profit maximization severely constrain their ability to deliver on these promises.

This internal critique gives the book much of its power. Stein isn’t an outside observer throwing stones at the planning profession—he’s a practitioner grappling with the ethical implications of his own work. His analysis of how planners become “wealth managers for the capitalist class” is all the more damning because it comes from someone who understands the profession’s idealistic aspirations.

Rent Gaps and Value Gaps: The Mechanics of Gentrification

The book provides excellent analysis of the economic mechanisms driving gentrification, particularly Neil Smith’s concept of the “rent gap”—the difference between current rents and potential future rents after renovation or redevelopment. Stein expands this analysis to include “value gaps” where properties could generate higher returns if converted to different uses.

What makes Stein’s treatment particularly valuable is his attention to how planners and policymakers work to identify and exploit these gaps. Through zoning changes, tax incentives, infrastructure investments, and “quality of life” initiatives, the state actively works to close rent and value gaps, driving up property values while displacing long-term residents.

The concept of “geobribery”—using public resources to lure private investment—is especially illuminating. Stein documents how cities offer tax breaks, infrastructure improvements, and regulatory changes to attract real estate investment, essentially subsidizing gentrification with public funds. The irony is stark: public resources are used to facilitate private profit that often comes at the expense of the public good.

Trump Dynasty: A Case Study in Real Estate Power

The Trump saga is particularly illuminating because it spans multiple generations and historical periods, showing how real estate strategies evolved alongside changing government policies:

Friedrich Trump capitalized on westward expansion and mining booms, providing services (including prostitution) to miners while benefiting from state and bank investments in land development. His business model combined legitimate services with morally questionable enterprises, establishing a pattern of ethical flexibility that would characterize the family business.

Fred Trump mastered the art of government-subsidized housing development, particularly through FHA programs and Section 608 financing. He built segregated housing that benefited from federal subsidies while systematically excluding Black tenants—profiting from both government support and racial discrimination. His relationship with city officials was so cozy that Mayor Abraham Beame reportedly said, “whatever my friends Fred and Donald want in this town, they get.”

Donald Trump transitioned the family business to Manhattan luxury development, perfecting the art of leveraging tax breaks, zoning variances, and political connections to maximize profits. His career demonstrates how real estate developers don’t just respond to market conditions—they actively shape them through political influence and regulatory manipulation.

The Trump family history illustrates several key themes: the centrality of government support to private real estate profits, the racialized nature of housing development, and the seamless movement between business and political power. It’s a perfect case study of how the “real estate state” operates in practice.

Bipartisan Consensus: Bloomberg and de Blasio

One of the book’s most sobering insights concerns the bipartisan nature of pro-development policies. Despite their vastly different styles and stated priorities, both Republican Michael Bloomberg and Democrat Bill de Blasio pursued policies that fundamentally served real estate interests.

Bloomberg’s approach was explicitly pro-business, treating the city as a “luxury product” to attract wealthy residents and tourists. His administration passed 122 out of 123 proposed rezonings, affecting one-third of the city’s landmass. Predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods secured downzonings that protected them from development, while low-income communities of color were upzoned to accommodate growth.

De Blasio’s approach was ostensibly more progressive, with rhetoric about fighting inequality and creating affordable housing. However, his signature housing initiative—Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH)—relied on upzonings in low-income neighborhoods that often accelerated gentrification. The “affordable” housing created was often unaffordable to existing residents, while market-rate units served higher-income newcomers.

This analysis reveals how the “real estate state” transcends partisan politics. Regardless of ideological differences, both administrations were constrained by their dependence on property taxes and campaign contributions from real estate interests. The structural power of real estate capital shapes policy outcomes regardless of who holds office.

Strengths and Analytical Clarity

The book’s greatest strength lies in its ability to make complex urban processes accessible without sacrificing analytical rigor. Stein successfully bridges academic theory and activist practice, providing tools for understanding gentrification that can inform both scholarly analysis and grassroots organizing.

His concept of the “real estate state” is particularly valuable because it moves beyond individual explanations (greedy developers, hipster gentrifiers) to examine structural relationships between capital and government. This systemic analysis is essential for developing effective responses to displacement and housing inequality.

The book also excels at showing how seemingly neutral technical processes—zoning changes, tax assessments, infrastructure investments—serve particular class interests. By demystifying planning jargon and revealing the political content of technical decisions, Stein provides activists with tools for challenging development projects and policies.

Critiques and Limitations

While “Capital City” is an excellent analysis of New York’s experience, its focus on a single city limits its broader applicability. New York’s real estate market is uniquely expensive and globally connected, which may make some of Stein’s insights less relevant to smaller cities or different regional contexts. The book would benefit from more comparative analysis showing how the “real estate state” operates differently across various urban contexts.

The book’s solutions chapter, while thoughtful, feels somewhat underdeveloped compared to its powerful diagnostic analysis. Stein calls for “public stewardship” over land and planning, “socialized land” ownership, and “radical regionalism,” but provides limited detail about how these alternatives might be implemented or what they would look like in practice.

Additionally, while Stein acknowledges that his proposed reforms still operate within capitalism, he doesn’t fully grapple with the tension between reformist housing policies and more radical anti-capitalist goals. The relationship between immediate housing struggles and longer-term systemic transformation could be explored more thoroughly.

Contemporary Relevance and Movement Building

Understanding how developers use zoning changes, tax incentives, and political connections helps organizers develop more effective counter-strategies.

The book’s timing was particularly prescient. Published in 2019, it anticipated many developments that would become central to housing debates during the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of real estate speculation in housing instability, the inadequacy of market-based affordable housing solutions, and the need for more fundamental challenges to private property relations.

Recent victories like the Amazon HQ2 campaign in Queens (which Stein references) demonstrate the potential for organized opposition to disrupt even massive development projects. The book provides analytical tools for understanding why such campaigns succeed or fail and how they might be replicated elsewhere.

The Limits of Planning Reform

One of the book’s most important contributions is its critique of technocratic approaches to housing policy. Many housing advocates focus on reforming zoning laws, improving affordable housing programs, or electing better planners and politicians. While not dismissing these efforts entirely, Stein shows how they often fail to address the fundamental problem: the treatment of housing as a commodity rather than a human right.

His analysis suggests that meaningful housing justice requires challenging private property relations themselves, not just regulating them more effectively. This insight has important implications for housing movements, suggesting the need for strategies that go beyond policy reform to question the basic structure of urban land ownership.

Global Context and Local Struggles

While focused on New York, the book situates local struggles within global processes of financialization and real estate investment. The transformation of housing into a globally traded financial asset helps explain why local housing markets are increasingly disconnected from local wages and needs.

This global perspective is crucial for understanding why local solutions often prove inadequate. When international investors can park money in urban real estate, local housing markets become subject to global capital flows that dwarf local policy interventions. This dynamic requires responses that operate at multiple scales, from neighborhood organizing to international financial regulation.

A Manual for Understanding Urban Power

Ultimately, “Capital City” succeeds as both scholarly analysis and activist resource. It provides readers with tools for understanding how urban power operates, who benefits from current arrangements, and where points of intervention might exist. The book’s combination of structural analysis and concrete examples makes abstract concepts like “financialization” and “rent gaps” tangible and actionable.

The Trump saga isn’t just gossip about a notorious family—it’s a window into how real estate fortunes are built through exploitation, subsidy, and political influence.

The book’s lasting contribution may be its reframing of gentrification debates. By showing how displacement is actively produced through state policy rather than naturally occurring through market forces, Stein provides a foundation for more effective organizing and policy responses. This analytical clarity is essential for building the kind of housing justice movements that can challenge the “real estate state” and create more equitable cities.

In an era when housing costs consume ever-larger portions of working-class incomes and homelessness reaches crisis levels in cities across the country, “Capital City” provides essential analysis of how we got here and what it might take to chart a different course. It’s a book that should be read by anyone seeking to understand contemporary urban politics and the possibilities for transformative change.