From the State to the Shareholder: Rent and the Production of Shareholder Value in Real Estate

Abstract

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the use of real estate tax credits to generate shareholder value for investors increased significantly. While tax credits are lauded as crucial to the delivery of social goods like affordable housing, the multiplier effects they supposedly generate fail to account for the hollowing out of the state that occurs as public funds are transferred to shareholders. Through a detailed case study of the historic tax credit industry in the United States, this research shows how many of the banks and financial institutions investing in tax credits have come to rely on overly engineered forms of landownership, deeply discounted credit pricing, and a wave of stock buybacks to boost their corporate profitability. This paper therefore develops a theoretical framework to understand taxation as a financialised accumulation strategy where the state serves as an important—if not problematic—source of real estate profit.

Age Segregation, Intergenerationality, and Class Monopoly Rent in the Student Housing Submarket

“…The somewhat banal case of student housing demonstrates an application of the concept beyond race and class exploitation (Wyly et al 2006(Wyly et al , 2009(Wyly et al , 2012 or high-end urban redevelopment schemes (Anderson 2014(Anderson , 2019. More importantly, it joins recent research in linking land rent to broader dynamics of capitalist urbanisation (Baxter 2014;Slater 2017;Tapp 2020), and in doing so, illustrates how studentification, and therefore certain forms of age segregation, are intrinsic to these dynamics. Other forms of age segregation, such as retirement communities, may also exemplify CMR.…”

“…Recent re-engagements have sought to reconnect theorisations of land rent to broader capitalist dynamics and to interrogate the mechanisms of rent extraction, rather than treat rent as a heuristic to explain landlord behaviour (Anderson 2019;Baxter 2014;Slater 2017;Tapp 2020).…”

“…Yet despite consensus between neoclassical and Marxian perspectives that land rent plays an important coordinating function for urban land uses (see e.g. Alonso 1964; Harvey 1982), 1 land rent has received sparse attention in critical urban research in recent decades, and is beginning to see a flourishing of contemporary re-engagement (Anderson 2019;Baxter 2014;Tapp 2020;Ward and Aalbers 2016). Therefore, the application of theories of urban land rent to diverse urban phenomena suggests possibilities for fruitful research.…”

Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy's extractive fiscal geographies

“…The investigation in this paper builds particularly on Tapp's (2019Tapp's ( , 2020 recent examination of the US Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit (HRTC) (also significant for a Green New Deal as a subsidy for energy efficiency retrofits, Knuth, 2019). With the ITC and PTC for renewables, the HRTC, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) for affordable housing, and New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) for economic development in low-income neighborhoods are the central federal credits that feed today's tax equity market.…”

Land financialisation, planning informalisation and gentrification as statecraft in Antwerp

“…An emerging literature on the ‘fiscal geographies’ (Tapp and Kay, 2019) of land financialisation surveys diverse land-use orientations amongst landowners, investors and state actors; with recent work offering invaluable insights on the structuring role of state policy (Christophers, 2018; Hyötyläinen and Haila, 2018; Olsson, 2018; Whiteside, 2017). But in focusing on agents operating at the meso scale, such approaches often curtail a connecting analysis to the wider political economy of rent creation in favour of sophisticated analysis of the mechanisms of its distribution (see Tapp, 2020).…”