Policy Play

Vacancy holds a paradoxical place in capitalist urban political economy. Real estate operators scramble to maximize profits, yet even in the tightest markets, buildings are left to sit empty.

In their 2016 book In Defense of Housing, the late urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden describe the “hyper-commodification” of housing, where “a structure’s function as real estate” comes to take “precedence over its usefulness as a place to live.” Vacancy could well be read as an extreme case of this wider “decoupling” of exchange values from use values in the neoliberal city. When real estate’s perverse logic prevails above all else, sometimes unused buildings result in higher profits. That’s true of Midtown’s ultrathin, super-prime towers, which more often park cash than house people, and it’s apparently true of the twenty thousand rent-stabilized units that a real-estate cabal is currently holding “hostage” (i.e., vacant) in protest of …