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.