LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the ...turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon ofpredatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans,Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the ...rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199568048/toc.html
Cities for Profitexamines the phenomenon of urban real estate megaprojects in Asia-massive, privately built planned urban developments that have captured the imagination of politicians, policymakers, ...and citizens across the region. These controversial projects, embraced by elites, occasion massive displacement and have extensive social and economic impacts. Gavin Shatkin finds commonalities and similarities in dozens of such projects in Jakarta, Kolkata, and Chongqing.
Shatkin is at the vanguard of urban studies in his focus on real estate. Just as cities are increasingly defined and remapped according to the value of the land under their residents' feet, the lives of city dwellers are shaped and constrained by their ability to keep up with rising costs of urban life. Scholars and policy and planning professionals alike will benefit from Shatkin's comprehensive research.Cities for Profitcontains insights from more than 150 interviews, site visits to projects, and data from government and nongovernmental organization reports and data, urban plans, architectural renderings, annual reports and promotional materials of developers, and newspaper and other media accounts.
The essential reference tool for all real estate, property, planning and construction students.
Real Estate Concepts provides built environment students with an easy to use guide to the essential ...concepts they need to understand in order to succeed in their university courses and future professional careers. Key concepts are arranged, defined and explained by experts in the field to provide the student with a quick and reliable reference throughout their university studies. The subjects are conveniently divided to reflect the key modules studied in most property, real estate, planning and construction courses.
Subject areas covered include:
Planning
Building surveying
Valuation
Law
Economics, investment and finance
Quantity surveying
Construction and regeneration
Sustainability
Property management
Over the 18 alphabetically arranged subject specific chapters, the expert contributors explain and illustrate more than 250 fully cross-referenced concepts. The book is packed full of relevant examples and illustrations and after each concept further reading is suggested to encourage a deeper understanding. This book is an ideal reference when writing essays, assignments and revising for exams.
Attention to 'sustainability' and energy efficiency rating schemes in the commercial property sector has increased rapidly during the past decade. In the UK, commercial properties have been certified ...under the BREEAM rating scheme since 1999, offering fertile ground to investigate the economic dynamics of 'green' certification in the commercial property market. This paper documents that, over the 2000–09 period, the expanding supply of green buildings within a given London neighbourhood had a positive impact on average rents and prices, but reduced rents and prices for environmentally certified real estate. The results suggest that there is a gentrification effect from green buildings. However, each additional "green" building decreases the marginal effect of certification in the rental and transaction markets by 2 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. In addition, controlling for lease contract features, like contract length and the rent-free period, modifies the impact of environmental certification on rental prices.
Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real estate agents have an incentive to convince clients to sell their houses too cheaply ...and too quickly. We test these predictions by comparing home sales in which real estate agents are hired to when an agent sells his own home. Consistent with the theory, we find homes owned by real estate agents sell for 3.7% more than other houses and stay on the market 9.5 days longer, controlling for observables. Greater information asymmetry leads to larger distortions.
The global pandemic has delayed many real estate plans while accelerating the adoption of many technology challenges. In turn, these technologies will disrupt the real estate industry, causing some ...to become irrelevant and useless. Combined with the increasing numbers of ageing baby boomers, what is Singapore's future going to look like? What plans should we make for our properties? Market commentator and respected real-estate expert Ku Swee Yong weighs in on some of these questions and shares his insights on the opportunities for investors and what is the future of real estate in Singapore.
This paper examines the impact of real estate prices on firm capital structure decisions. For a typical U.S. listed company, a one-standard-deviation increase in predicted value of firm pledgeable ...collateral translates into a 3 percentage points increase in firm leverage ratio. The identification strategy employs a triple interaction of MSA-level land supply elasticity, real estate prices, and a measure of a firm's real estate holdings as an exogenous source of variation in firm collateral values. Firms significantly change their debt structure in response to collateral value appreciation. The results indicate the importance of collateral values in mitigating potential informational imperfections.
A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but ...middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China.
Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves.In Search of Paradiseis a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era.
New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang's account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world.
We use a large housing transaction data set in Singapore to study whether real estate agents use information advantages to buy houses at bargain prices. Agents bought their own houses at prices that ...are 2.54% lower than comparable houses bought by other buyers. Consistent with information asymmetries, agent buyers have more information advantages in less informative environments, and agent buyers are more likely to buy houses from agent sellers. Agent discounts are from both “cherry picking” and bargaining power, and bargaining power contributes more to the agent discounts. Agents’ advantage consists in their information of available houses and previous purchase prices.
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