“Creative Destruction:” The Political Economy of the Failed US Housing Market

In the Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi described how the capitalism created abstract market forces which detached people from place. Two years earlier, in his treatise on economic history, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter made similar observations about the immense destructive power of markets. Capitalism, Schumpeter remarked, was a “perennial gale” that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” In the contemporary political economy capitalism’s “creative destruction” is acting wildly to destroy landscapes and recreate new geographies of power.

The continued centralization of decision making in financial centers such as New York, London, Tokyo and Shanghai has further removed the (abstract) market from place. Banks and corporations move further and further away from the places that depend on their services, these entities know and care less about the communities that provide them with surplus-value, and even less about the people that work for them. Finance, in particular, has globalized the search for higher profit margins, further detaching itself form the material realities of everyday urban life.

The recent meltdown of the US housing market can, in large part, be connected to market tendencies described by Schumpeter and Polanyi. In its revolutionary search for new forms of capital accumulation, US financial and insurance institutions developed an abundance of securities for the mortgage market (including the much maligned high-interest rate mortgages), selling an ever-expanding menu of packaged securities to a thirsty international capital market (including unsecured debt). The securitization of the mortgage market increased the distance between the asset (the home) and the debt (the security). As a result the financing and servicing of mortgage debt has become ever more distant from the homeowners, and the number of intermediaries has exploded. On the global level, large financial institutions such as UBS and Crédit Agricole had no idea what kind of debt they held. On the local level, homeowners were unable to negotiate with their banks to hold onto their houses. The result was dire: Banks with write-offs and cities such as Cleveland with large swaths of empty, abandoned areas. The failure of the housing market is indicative of the detachment from place, and the incessant “creative destruction” of urban landscapes.

Privatizing Parking: The Revanche Strikes Again

In an earlier piece, I gestured at the impending repercussions of Larry 0’s false prognostication of the City’s doomsday fiscal picture. In the recent budget debate O'Brien's run-by-the-seat-of-his pants reforms - partially filled in with suggestions for ‘transformation’ from his DND-buddy and man-for-hire Gordon J. Hunter - were in large part rejected by City Council. However the past budget debate cast the discourse of inflexibility and set the parameters for our own local ‘shock doctrine.’ Denizens were told that the City is plain out of cash: any variation of the City’s budget is unmanageable; any extra cost a doomsday scenario and solutions were to be cast in the 'free' market.

This discourse has recently resurfaced in the debate over Ottawa’s parking regime. To recall the details, council recently approved the shift from meters to pay-and-display for on-street parking. With lower maintenance and collection costs, municipalities across North America have successfully implemented this shift – to the benefit of City coffers, while still holding onto public ownership of the resource, and more maintaining control over public policy decisions. However, in Ottawa’s case, our current Council headed by Revanchist Larry 0, with the support of right-wing-rural-fringe henchmen, has argued that the City cannot front the money to buy the machines up-front. The solution: privatize the whole operation. The Mayor, with his background accumulating his own mini-fortune through contracting-out and privatization, has once again shown his zeal for private appropriation of public goods. Under the plan, a messianic Toronto company will set-up the system, and front money in exchange for the City’s on street parking revenues i.e. cash. To sweeten the pot the company promises to increase the City’s annual take by $1.7 million per year. Upfront this deal seems like a great deal: the City gets machines and increases its revenue without any investment.

However, the myth of P3’s and the tactics used to market former public goods has to be systematically disproved. In almost every instance promoters of P3’s offer the same juicy goodies: in return for a monopoly on a public utility they will dish out increased revenues to the state. This privatization of public resources - sometimes referred to as accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005) - has largely been discredited.

The reorganization of state functions along these lines externalizes public control through privatization and de-regulation, quasi-private institutional development while interiorizing neoliberalism into urban policy regimes. Various "shock treatments” such as place-marketing, enterprise/empowerment zones, urban development corporations, private-public partnerships, property redevelopment and boosterism are deployed by local boosters, planners, engineers, property developers and politicians to meet the parameters of reconfigured neoliberal urban policy regimes.

The techniques associated with the “golden path” of entrepreneurialism are part of a more assertive networked style of governance, where a host of actors compete for the urban policy agenda, and where flexibility, efficiency, competitiveness, state entrepreneurship and collaboration have become the standard bearer and the “best practices” of urban governance (Rodriguez, 2001). Informal, networked based governance structures have become the norm, resulting in "a new constellation of governance articulated via a proliferating maze of opaque networks, fuzzy institutional arrangements, ill-defined responsibilities, and ambiguous political objectives and priorities" (Swyngedouw, 2005: 17). These non-transparent, ad-hoc, context dependent and networked institutional ensembles render existing power-geometries even more exclusive, and less democratic (Fainstein, 1994; Swyngedouw, 2005). The conduct of P3's raise questions of public accountability, representation and exclusion (Rodriguez, 2001; Leo and Fenton, 1990) since they provide, at best, limited and formalized democratic participation (Swyngedouw, 2005). They also offer greater possibility that concealed dealings will lead to public loss of control and to a “great deal of scope for abuse” (Leo and Fenton, 1990).

The move by the Toronto-based company to forge a parking P3 adheres to the general pattern for these contracts. In attempting to wrest control of public resources, companies offer added incentives such as amusement parks, bribes, cash, etc, in order to sweeten the pot. In most cases, users are gauged, contractors provide less revenue than anticipated and face financial losses on the contract. In many cases, the contractor comes back to the state asking for better contract terms, with full knowledge that they have an edge over the public in these negations. Having wrestled the infrastructure from the local state, and being a monopolistic provider, the public is left with little choice but to renegotiate more favourable terms to the contractor.

A parking P3 is also suspect public policy – from an urban planning perspective. Parking policy is a key aspect of urban planning toolkit. Pricing has been used to manage supply of parking, and in case of parking shortage short term limits allow access to on-street businesses, limiting the need for parking lots. Pricing can be used to encourage alternative uses of transportation and to alleviate congestion, and to encourage a move towards sustainable cities, no small consideration in face of climate chagne. In short, it is a complex policy tool that works beyond a simple source of cash for the City’s coffers and P3’s obfuscates public oversight over urban planning, and flexibility of using parking policy for multiple policy goals.

Finally, the effectiveness of such a parking regimes is also highly questionable. The City of London Ontario was one of the first Canadian jurisdictions to put out their parking services to private tender, and the evidence points to the folly of such an enterprise. The City of Ottawa should learn from such examples: P3’s rarely pan-out, and City Council should consider this evidence, and for once to show some long-term thinking.

All of this may be cast in the light of Karl Polanyi's prescient note on the paradox of the economic liberalism: "Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not." A lesson on economic history that wears well in the urban planning affairs of this current City Council.