In 2018, Scott Wiener, a California state senator representing San Francisco, introduced a co-authored bill that detonated a debate over housing. The aim of Senate Bill 827 was to override local regulations on building height in order to allow denser, high-rise construction near transit hubs. At once radical and simple, its target was nothing more, and nothing less, than zoning—the most common American way to control land use. Zoning determines whether a building is commercial or residential, how big it can get, whether it’s a single-family home or a high-rise tower. Though zoning is a legislative act, it is sometimes influenced by the efforts of a handful of well-connected people at a neighborhood association, or sometimes by a single, well-connected member of a zoning board. S.B. 827 would have overridden many such rules and made it easier to build. The bill derived its intellectual force from a growing consensus among economists that rising rents and housing prices in California—a state in which the median home price is more than twice the national average, and in which more than twenty per cent of residents spend more than half their income on housing—are due to a dearth of multifamily housing and to the cumulative effect of zoning rules that stopped that housing from being built.

S.B. 827 elicited heated arguments, along with a few bizarre political coalitions. In supporting the bill, housing advocates found themselves allied with wealthy developers. Meanwhile, in opposing it, anti-gentrification activists found themselves allied with rich homeowners from places like Beverly Hills. A portion of the anti-S.B. 827 crowd simply didn’t want to change their neighborhood’s “character”—often a racialized code word—but many others came from multiracial working-class neighborhoods, and, for them, the bill was essentially a gift to developers, who would take the opportunity to build market-rate housing and augment ongoing gentrification. In the end, the opposition won out—the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles City Council both voted against endorsing it—and, despite late-breaking attempts to include anti-displacement measures, the bill failed to make it out of committee, losing 6–4. Of the votes in its favor, only two were from Democrats, Wiener and his co-author—further proof that the housing debate involves some strange bedfellows.

S.B. 827 nonetheless has spurred a more substantial conversation about zoning reform, of all things, than any urbanist could have predicted. Unfortunately, much of this conversation has taken place online, meaning that it’s resembled people screaming past one another and then shrinking into two opposing crags of congealed vitriol. On one side are the YIMBYs—the acronym stands for “Yes, in my back yard”—who believe that prices are too high because of market distortions that limit the amount of housing people actually want and need. For them, the solution is to increase market-rate housing, which, over time, will result in a reduction in prices and rents. Opponents of YIMBYs—often called “NIMBYs,” meaning “Not in my back yard” (as a term of opprobrium, it of course predates YIMBY)—have a variety of rejoinders to this argument, but they center on the idea that building market-rate housing will never deliver the amount of housing that people need, at prices they can afford. Furthermore, they argue that the immediate effect of introducing such housing is gentrification and displacement. It is at this point that the argument devolves into accusations that the YIMBYs are tools of rich, white real-estate developers, and that the NIMBYs are tools of rich, white homeowners, and the space in between these two positions is quickly converted into a muddy field, where no one dares show a white flag.

The particular airlessness of this debate is only partly due to its growth in the complexity-free vacuum of the Internet. The more significant constriction is that it is an argument that takes place almost entirely according to the terms of real-estate development. In a recent book, “Capital City,” the geographer Samuel Stein puts this debate into context, and adds to it. He argues that our housing dilemma derives from an unholy fusion of development and politics, which he calls “the real estate state.” Stein, a geographer at the City University of New York, tries to establish how industrial cities, in becoming postindustrial, opened the way for real estate to enter the breach. “Landowners have been determining the shape of cities for centuries, and the idea of housing as a commodity—even as a financial asset—is not exactly state of the art,” Stein writes. “What is relatively new, however, is the outsized power of real estate interests within the capitalist state.” Deriving his insights from left-wing geographers and urban historians, and also from interviews with activists in New York City, he alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and livelihoods.

But Stein’s special aim is not just to show how real estate controls everything, which, if you were halfway paying attention during the financial crisis—rooted as it was in the predations of housing markets—you already know. His principal point is that the power of the real-estate state flows from the dynamic between development and the profession of city planning. Planners are usually thought of as bureaucrats, though sometimes they take on the aspect of legend: Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who tamed rebellious Paris into wide avenues that couldn’t be barricaded; imperious Robert Moses, who pummelled New York with expressways. Stein’s planners are at once lesser and greater than these. Though they may look like mousy cubicle denizens—determining the right sort of window treatment for a historic house, or calculating the Area Median Income for a smattering of affordable units in a luxury building—they’re more influential than they appear. Planners, he writes, “are tasked with the contradictory goals of inflating real estate values while safeguarding residents’ best interests.” The position is an inherently uncomfortable one. But planning holds out the promise that the future is, at least in part, knowable. Explicit in Stein’s narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities.

Like many professions with a broad, metaphorically resonant name, planning has a history that can be dated back centuries. In the Americas, planners domesticated forests, dammed rivers, laid out grids. But city planning as we know it today arose in the late nineteenth century, as a response to the growing chaos of industrial life. At first, the profession was meant to ameliorate conditions of congestion, sanitation, and shoddy construction, especially where they intersected with the lives of workers and the urban poor. Benjamin Marsh, the first secretary of the New York City Committee on Congestion of Population (CCP), was one of the twentieth century’s most energetic thinkers on planning. He decried tenements and sweatshops, pushed for government control of factory-owned land, and advocated for a progressive tax on land values to help fund the social needs of workers. Marsh’s proposals, like those of many planners, were essentially based on the hope that the rich could be shamed into supporting the poor. This was a gambit that, in time, left planners frustrated and power imbalances intact.

Marsh and figures like him embody what Stein, following the historian Richard Foglesong, describes as a twinned set of contradictions in planning. Developers need planners, but a conflict arises when the former look to the latter for interventions in public space. “They demand that the state build the infrastructure that makes their land usable,” Stein writes of developers. At the same time, they are “fiercely protective of their property rights” and suspicious of planning insofar as it threatens their control over land. Planners, in turn, are agents of the public, but they are beholden to developers, in practice. Democratic societies require at least a display of public input, but often only a display: “planners must proceed with enough openness and transparency to maintain public legitimacy, while ensuring that capital retains ultimate control over the processes’ parameters.” From this comes the charade of public-comment sessions, familiar to most active city dwellers, in which so-called stakeholders are invited to discuss development plans, whose basic outlines they have little chance of influencing.