In both its historical Progressive Era roots and its contemporary manifestations, U.S. urban progressivism has evinced a contradictory tendency toward promoting the interests of capital and property while ostensibly protecting labor and tenants, thus producing policies that undermine its central claims. This article interrogates past and present appeals to urban progressive politics, particularly around housing and planning, and offers an in-depth case study of one of the most highly touted examples of the new urban progressivism: New York City's recently adopted Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. This case serves to identify the ways in which progressive rhetoric can disguise neoliberal policies. The article concludes with a discussion of legally viable housing policy alternatives that would challenge inequalities without producing gentrification. Given neoprogressivism's ideological slipperiness, it is crucial for analysts, policymakers, and social movement actors to look beyond rhetorical claims to "progressive" politics and ask the questions: progress for whom, toward what? Amidst rising levels of inequality and inequity, it is now common to characterize the United States as having entered a "new gilded age" (Bartels, 2009; Grusky & Kricheli-Katz, 2012; Milkman, 2013). Reflecting historical parallels to the late 19th century, however, many analysts also see an emerging "new progressive era," led primarily at the local level by liberal mayors and their governing coalitions (Dreier, 2008; Green, 2016; Greenberg, 2015). In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected in a landslide victory as a self-identified progressive who highlighted the city's radical inequalities and pledged to end the "tale of two cities" that had characterized urban life and policy under his processor, the three-term billionaire technocrat Michael Bloomberg (Susser, 2014). De Blasio recently told The Nation, "I do believe this is the beginning of a new progressive era" (Murphy, 2017). One of Mayor de Blasio's signature achievements is a sweeping new housing policy, Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), which mandates the construction of affordable housing in areas where the city allows new and larger luxury development. De Blasio and his allies frequently refer to it as the country's most progressive housing program (de Blasio, 2016; Durkin, 2016b; Fermino, 2014), but activists have pilloried it as a gentrification plan in disguise (Real Affordability for All, 2016). As one of the most celebrated and contested progressive housing laws in the nation, MIH offers the opportunity to reinvestigate the contradictions of progressive urban politics, which have-in both their historical Progressive Era roots as well as their more recent manifestations-evinced contradictory tendencies that often promote the interests of capital and property while ostensibly protecting labor and tenants. This raises serious questions about the new urban progressive agenda. During both the Progressive Era and today, what kinds of programs have New York City p...

In cities worldwide, the housing question has returned. As demands and proposals by housing movements have grown bolder, city governments are implementing new policies, ranging from small tweaks to major overhauls. This paper takes a close look at New York City, Berlin and Vienna, assessing their current housing policy landscapes. We evaluate to what extent those cities’ recent housing reforms depart from the dominant, neoliberal policy landscape of recent decades and can be categorized as ‘post-neoliberal’. We do so through the criteria of affordability, decommodification and democratization. The three selected cities display varying histories of housing systems and neoliberalization, enabling us to search for post-neoliberal policies in three distinct institutional contexts. We find a common pattern across cases: recent reforms have improved affordability and dampened hyper-commodification, but little has been done to address the democratization of housing and planning systems. By way of conclusion, we discuss some of the structural factors that impede attempts at developing a genuinely post-neoliberal transformation of local housing policies.

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In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of two locations for their second headquarters. While there had certainly been criticism and organizing against the proposed deal, given that it had the vocal support of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, most New Yorkers had assumed that the deal would be implemented. Then, rather surprisingly, on February 14th, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the deal and its decision not to come to LIC. This article uses the case of Amazon and other large scale developments in western Queens to discuss the conflictual and often messy politics of local economic development (LED) in working class communities. It argues that urban studies pays too little attention to how and why working class organizations participate in the politics of LED; and often thereby shape the enacted policies of LED.