I wasn't aware until now that "city planning" was so much marxist navel gazing. Am I supposed to just assume that rising rents and gentrification are a bad thing?
Indeed. I waded through the whole thing, trying to mentally rewrite it in a wikipedia NPOV voice. I failed.
I was also heartily amused that IPO deserved a footnote, but the reader is expected to swallow 'neoliberal urbanism' whole.
An interesting undertone is introduced very early on, there is a quote:
“many first-stage (sweat equity) gentrifiers have sold their property to new (very well-off gentrifiers), who are regentrifying property in the neighborhood”
To me this implies the idea that a tech workers income is not sweat equity, that it is either undeserved or un-earned—while this may be true for some, it fails to recognize the work that most of us put in at every level of schooling, at work and on our own time
"sweat equity" specifically means doing repairs to a property to increase its value, as opposed to building equity by making payments. A tech worker's income is not sweat equity.
I've never heard a real person complain about Google offering free buses and keeping the killer traffic on the roads down. It's just something journalists and other professional personalities like to use as an excuse to talk as far as I've seen.
