Class monopoly rent and the urban sustainability fix in Seattle's South Lake Union District

Abstract

The paper contributes to the recent renaissance in Marxian land rent theory by examining the dynamics of rent in the context of contemporary urban sustainability policies and practices. It specifically examines the ways in which landowners, developers, and the local state work together to pursue class monopoly rent through a variety of policies and practices normally treated as separate, such as tax-increment financing, discursive-branding, urban growth boundaries, business improvement districts, and transfer of development rights. We implicate each of these practices as fundamentally linked insofar as they function as strategies for myriad invested actors in collaboratively pursuing class monopoly rent. In the process, we present a heuristic tool to conceptualize how these policies converge to the benefit of myriad rent seekers in the context of Seattle's rapidly redeveloping South Lake Union District. The study peels back the discursive and ostensibly progressive façade of urban sustainability to reveal a collaborative network of landowners, developers, and state actors whose goal is to increase rents. The multi-scalar dynamic of class monopoly rent is revealed as a constitutive feature of an urban sustainability fix embedded within wider processes of uneven neoliberal urbanization.

Geographies of ground rent: Periodizing ground rent theory, spatializing ground rent refusal

“…Similarly, Capps (2016: 468) shows how capital investment in the South African platinum belt must navigate landownership by tribal authorities which had to “assume the ‘class function’ of modern landed property in relation to large-scale capital” in order to “assert independent property rights” such that they might collect ground rent from capitalist production and mining companies. In the urban context, Anderson et al (2022) mobilize Harvey's Golden Age theory of “Class Monopoly Rent” to parse the complex multiscalar practices by which “a collaborative network of landowners, developers, and state actors” raise rents in Seattle.…”

Contested densification: Sustainability, place and expectations at the urban fringe

“…As Harris and Lehrer (2018) and Anderson et al (2022) examplify, change in urban peripheries is largely related to who actually controls the land, the powers of the growthregulating authorities, and the actual practices of enforcement, exception, or negotiation that take place (2018, p. 307). In their study of densification policies in the Ottawa region (Canada), Leffers and Ballamingie (2013, p. 1) note that zoning is often explicitly used as a flexible policy tool for "achieving 'highest and best use' of private property" through an exercise of power that favors the market over community priorities.…”

“…In recent years, however, an important contextual change has affected the reception of citizen opposition to development in urban peripheries. Indeed, opposition to dense development goes against the hegemonic norm of sustainability-by-density, which has become part of the urban sustainability fix (While et al, 2004;Goodling et al, 2015;Anderson et al, 2022). Charmes and Keil (2015) argue that the discourse of density as a new environmental norm serves the interests of growth-oriented coalitions by dismissing the opposition of residents who advocate preserving quality of life, the local environment, and the original vision of a rural setting or a suburban utopia.…”

“…The urban perimeter is not only a boundary for policies to control urban sprawl, it is also becoming a boundary for development and real estate profitability, with land prices already skyrocketing in anticipation of the possible urbanization of agricultural land (Harris and Lehrer, 2018;Anderson et al, 2022). The strategy of directing growth into urban perimeters creates an even greater real estate boom in the intrametropolitan space, given the higher profitability of dense real estate projects.…”