Class Monopoly Rent and The Contemporary Neoliberal City

Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.
12107
Class Monopoly Rent and the Contemporary Neoliberal City

Matthew B. Anderson*
College of Arts and Sciences, Montana State University Billings
Abstract
The objective of this essay is to rejuvenate interest in Marxian rent theory in urban political economy
by identifying and deepening discussion of an important aspect of the contemporary neoliberal city:
class monopoly rent. First introduced by David Harvey, the concept of class monopoly rent has curiously
evaded in-depth scholarly inquiry and has never been substantively elaborated or examined. But the
conditions through which class monopoly rents are extracted from property have since evolved.
Yet, we know little about the relation between this standard institutional practice and contemporary
urban landscapes, modes of governance, and processes of urban restructuring. The essay first reviews
and identifies the concept of class monopoly rent as an important aspect of the urban process and
discusses its limited scholarly engagement over the past four decades. It then discusses the implications
of class monopoly rent in the context of current urban redevelopment policies and practices in
Chicago, Illinois. It is suggested that a deeper examination of this concept could build a more robust
and intricate understanding of the contemporary neoliberal city, particularly in the context of the
post-2007 economic recession.
Introduction
The social and physical restructuring of urban landscapes is now widely chronicled, in urban
political economy in general and geography in particular, as a defining aspect of the last four
decades of global capitalism (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Leitner et al. 2007). Neoliberalism,
despite its recent portrayal as ‘dead’ amid the post-2007 global economic crisis (Smith 2008;
Stiglitz 2008, 2010; Krugman 2009), continues to drive this on-going restructuring and
political-economic functioning of cities today (Keil 2009; Brenner et al. 2010; Hendrikse and
Sidaway 2010; Peck et al. 2010, 2012, 2013; Aalbers 2013; Oosterlynck and Gonzalez
2013).1 Urban governances – across the global north and south – remain guided by this mode
of rationality, in their hybrid forms and evolving trajectories (Peck 2010; Kunkel and Mayer
2012), to refashion cities as sites of up-scale living, consumption, and hyper-competitiveness
(Wilson 2007; Hackworth 2007).
Emerging in the late 1990s (see Swyngedouw 2000), the literature on urban neoliberalization
is now voluminous and remains an important topic of study, from its historical and variegated
unfolding (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Keil 2009; Brenner et al. 2010; Peck et al. 2009,
2010), to its contingent manifestations (Keil 2002; MacLeod 2002; Wilson 2004, 2007;
Hackworth 2007; McCann 2011), and to the myriad forms of contestation it confronts (Leitner
et al. 2007; Addie 2008, 2009; Kunkel and Mayer 2012). Attention has recently shifted to its
adaptive capacities (and limitations) in response to the myriad challenges presented by the crisis
(Keil 2009; Sheppard and Leitner 2010; Peck et al. 2012, 2013) and as a lens through which
(Marxist) urban political economy and Foucauldian studies on neoliberal governmentality
can be reconciled (Kunkel and Mayer 2012).
However, there has also been a parallel loss of interest in the role of rent and property
observed in this literature over the past 10–15 years (Blomley 2005; Christophers 2010). As
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14 Class Monopoly Rent and the Contemporary Neoliberal City
a reflection of the cultural turn, research in urban studies has generally moved away from the
economic-driven topics, i.e., class and ground rent, that held more dominant positions in the
1970s and 1980s (Smith 2000). But these remain important aspects to the functioning of
urban economies today. The objective of this essay is to rejuvenate interest in Marxian rent
theory by identifying and deepening discussion of an important aspect of the contemporary
neoliberal city: class monopoly rent.
The concept of class monopoly rent, first introduced by David Harvey (1974), has
curiously evaded in-depth scholarly inquiry and has never been substantively elaborated or
examined. But the structuring of urban landscapes remains subject to the imperatives felt
by landowners (i.e., landlords, lending institutions, developers, and city governments) to
extract class monopoly rent from property. The restoration of class power under neoliberal
capitalism has been and continues to be about the resuscitation of cities as sites for capital
accumulation (Harvey 2005). Yet, the conditions through which class monopoly rents are
realized have changed since first discussed by Harvey. As such, we know little about the ways
in which this standard institutional practice impacts current processes of urban restructuring,
influences the logic of urban policy and governance, and embeds in the social and physical
landscape.
In what follows, I first review and identify the concept of class monopoly rent as an
important aspect of the urban process and discuss its limited scholarly engagement over the
past four decades. Second, I discuss the implications for class monopoly rent in relation to
the contemporary neoliberal city in the context of Chicago, Illinois. While urban growth
remains a primary objective of contemporary urban governance, it follows that restoring
conditions favorable for future growth (and rent) is of paramount importance. The essay
concludes by arguing that a deeper examination of class monopoly rent could build a more
robust and intricate understanding of the contemporary crisis-ridden neoliberal city.
Urban neoliberalization frames this review because it highlights the historical trajectories
of political-economic transformation over the past four decades. Since the power of class
monopoly rent lies in its ability to illuminate the complex relationships between landowners,
producers, and consumers within such processes of change (King 1989a), urban
neoliberalization, thus, provides an important context for examining the ways in which these
relationships have evolved. Moreover, the multi-faceted and deeply contingent process of
urban neoliberalization suggests the institutional conditions whereby landowners extract rent
from property vary across (and within) urban settings, a dimension of complexity that re-
mains relatively unexplored.
Lastly, as the ascendency of neoliberalism represents a return to market-oriented practices
mobilized by the very neoclassical economic principles sharply critiqued by Harvey (1974),
the theory of class monopoly rent is acutely relevant to the critical project of fracturing the
resilience of neoliberal hegemony. As the neoliberalization process continues to evolve in
response to the crisis of its own making, “the critical intellectual project of deciphering the
problematic of neoliberal urbanism must [also] continue to evolve” (Peck et al. 2013, p. 1091).
This review responds to this dilemma by arguing that a rejuvenated Marxian rent theory might
play an important role within this ongoing critical project.
Class Monopoly Rent

Harvey (1974) first presented the theory of class monopoly rent in a provocative article that
examined the inner-city housing markets of Baltimore, MD. Building off Marx’s critique of
Ricardo, presented in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2 (1968) and Capital, Vol. 3 (1981), the
concept of class monopoly rent rests on the notion that landowners can be treated as a class of
© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

Class Monopoly Rent and the Contemporary Neoliberal City 15
actors. While these actors – developers, landlords, homeowners, and financial institutions –
may act individually, they are compelled, in aggregate, by the same competitive profit
maximizing imperatives under capitalism. It is this “coordinating” behavior that allows these
agents to be treated as a class based on their collective position as individual landowners.
While not necessarily acting in collusion, the profit imperative renders collusion not neces-
sary as similar outcomes are achieved: it is simultaneously individualized and generalized in
advanced capitalist societies. To Harvey, this imperative operates as a standard institutional
practice that invariably leads to certain outcomes in the urban spatial structure and, as King
(1989a) notes, has impacts that reach across spatial scales.
Harvey is particularly concerned with this class of actors as they are implicated in the
production of “artificial scarcity” within the urban housing market: the active manipulation
of supply/demand conditions by landowners. This manipulation is executed through their
existence as a “class of owners” who legally possess the monopoly power to collectively (but
competitively) exert their “class interest” over the use of their property, i.e., maximizing
returns on their investments. This assertion was posited in contrast to the neoclassical
economic notion that urban housing markets represented conditions of “natural scarcity”
which, to Harvey, elided the monopoly and class dimensions to housing market dynamics.
As Harvey (1974, p. 242) stresses, “the key concept here is class power.” And the proportion
of rent that can be attributed to imperatives felt by individual property owners collectively as a class
can be called class monopoly rent. To Wyly et al. (2009, p. 336):
Class matters because, in all capitalist societies, the rights and privileges of ownership are central to
power relations, political conflict and social inequality. Monopoly matters not primarily because, as
Marx suggests, the supply of land is limited, nor because landowners can become price-makers, but
rather because of the inherent monopoly associated with the legal status of ownership…Finally, rent
is the simple yet crucial economic measure enabling owners’ claims on the use of any capitalizable
asset with return…
It is worth noting that the same competitive behavior, ironically, also has the potential to
harm the collective by virtue of the individual basis of this behavior. For example, this can
lead to speculative bubbles, oversupply of units and lowered rents, and invariably crisis, the
effective regulator of the market absent active or conscious coordination, as spectacularly
observed in the post-2007 housing collapse. In other words, housing producers are typically
unaware of oversupplied market conditions until crisis erupts.
Harvey’s focus on 1970 inner-city Baltimore isolates the role of landlords in removing
rental units from circulation to maintain acceptable rates of return. Class monopoly rents,
thus, are underpinned by supply/demand conditions that are manipulated via this monopoly
control by landlords to maximize returns. But the story does not end there. While many of
these landlords held mortgages with local savings/loan institutions, class monopoly rents
ultimately “percolated upwards” to the financial industry. Landlords, here, are merely one
conduit within this upward percolation where class monopoly rents are ultimately realized
as financial profits.
Speculators were also implicated through “blockbusting,” a discriminatory practice that
fueled mass suburbanization by nurturing fear of expanding Black populations: speculators
bought cheaply from Whites and sold high to Blacks desperate for adequate housing. Rents,
thus, were maximized by speculators while Black families were left with inflated mortgages
or subject to rent-maximizing slumlords. Harvey also posits the reality that many of these
speculators and landlords also resided in the suburbs as homeowners. Here, a proportion of
their returns are transferred to suburban developers via, again, the financial industry as the

owner of the landlord’s mortgage. For Harvey, the financial industry is the ultimate coordi-
nating and realizing agent of class monopoly rent.
These insights are further strengthened when viewed in tandem with another article by
Harvey (1975). Harvey, here, argues that urban landscapes, under capitalism, have become
increasingly differentiated along minute class variations. And the potential realization of class
monopoly rent is increased insofar as housing sub-markets are perpetually created and (re)pro-
duced that effectively (and spatially) trap particular population segments who have no other
(at least perceived) option for housing. Thus, as long as housing markets can be chopped-up
into sub-markets or “island-like” structures (Harvey 1974), artificial scarcity is established and
can be controlled within each “island.” Since higher income groups cannot be trapped as
easily as lower-income groups, it is here that the cultivation of housing exclusivity via new
consumptive tastes and identities becomes particularly important. Supply and demand, in this
context, is only relevant within such (socially and spatially) differentiated sub-markets, as
competition for housing among consumers is, typically, kept within narrow social-class
divisions.
In these ways, Harvey concludes that class monopoly rent represents a fundamental
dimension to the functioning of capitalist housing markets and the (re)production of the
socio-spatially differentiated character of residential landscapes. In short, this landscape is both
an outcome and necessary pre-condition for realizing class monopoly rent, the spatial expres-
sion of this restless pursuit by housing producers to maximize profits.
MARXIAN RENT THEORY AND URBAN HOUSING MARKETS
Relatively little research has systematically or empirically followed up on the propositions

that are made by Harvey (1974, 1975; also, see Harvey 1973, Harvey and Chatterjee
1974). But these insights did stimulate a broader theoretical debate on Marx’s analysis of rent
in the 1970s and 1980s. Although already discussed in the French literature (see Scott 1976),
this debate marked the entry of Marxian rent theory into Anglo academic circles (Ball 1977;
Murray 1977, 1978; Amin 1977; Tribe 1977; Harvey 1982; Fine 1982; King 1987, 1989a)
and revolved around its applicability to urban housing markets (Walker 1974, 1975; Edel
1976, 1982; Markusen 1978; Scott 1980; Ball 1983, 1985a; Lauria 1984; Ball et al. 1985).2
This topic became contentious due to the tendency to ascribe rent a “messianic role” in
explaining urban spatial structures (Ball 1985a; also, see Duncan and Ley 1982). As rent
represents a seizure of the wages of workers, the debate also, as Ball (1985a) noted, tended
to focus on its distributional mechanisms at the expense of illuminating the complex and
specific economic relationships that form between landowners, producers, and consumers,
and the constitutive role of these relationships in processes of urban and social change (also,
see King 1989a).3
But class monopoly rent, in particular, largely evaded empirical inquiry in this broader
debate, representing little more than a “heuristic device” used to discredit the “smooth
optimizing” approach inherent to neoclassical economic theory by directing attention to the
“multitude of conflicts and contradictions that arise over urban space” (Ball 1985b, p. 74).
King’s (1987, 1989b,1989c) exploration of class monopoly rent in the context of Melbourne,
Australia, did, however, illustrate its constitutive role in the creation of new middle-class to up-
per-class spaces of exclusivity and, in the process, negotiating and remaking patterns of residen-
tial differentiation. It also highlighted the economic mechanisms of rent within crisis-induced
processes of social change (in contrast to Harvey’s temporally static glimpse of Baltimore).
However, King’s analysis also illustrated the difficulties of empirically examining this concept
(also, see Ball et al. 1985). King used a mixed-method approach consisting of quantitative

analyses of demographic, financial, and housing data as well as content analyses of newspaper
articles and advertisements of housing developments. Yet, King’s conclusions ultimately rest
more on persuasiveness than concreteness; the problem stemming from the inherent difficulty
of identifying and measuring the spatial impacts of landowner actions compelled by collec-
tively-felt profit imperatives. This methodological challenge has and continues to limit the
analytic development of class monopoly rent beyond a heuristic device.
Smith’s (1979, 1996) “rent-gap” thesis did generate more attention and debate during the
1980s and 1990s in relation to gentrification, an emergent and growing phenomenon at the
time. But this marked the peak of scholarly engagement with Marxian rent theory as interest
in rent and property subsequently waned as a reflection of the cultural turn in urban studies
during the 1990s. Much gentrification research, for instance, has since focused on its myriad
contingencies; how its economic underpinnings are mediated by local political climates,
cultural factors, and historical legacies (see Lees et al. 2008). While undeniably deepening
our understanding of the city and its complexities, class monopoly rent, as a consequence
of this shift, has received minimal scholarly attention post-1990.
THE EVOLVING CONDITIONS OF CLASS MONOPOLY RENT
Harvey (2001) has since only briefly re-engaged with class monopoly rent, and only a select
few have kept it alive in recent years, notably Wyly et al. (2006, 2009, 2012). Through spatial
analyses of mortgage data, this research impressively captures the persistence of discriminatory
lending practices by financial institutions through the sub-prime mortgage market, with
Wyly et al. (2012), perhaps, representing the most extensive theoretical elaboration of class
monopoly rent to date (also, see Aalbers 2007).
In these studies, Wyly and colleagues argue that the conditions for realizing class monopoly
rent in the urban landscape have evolved since 1970s Baltimore. The demands of global
finance capital, for instance, now trump the local banks and slumlords that figured promi-
nently in 1970s Baltimore. Rents were then realized by a “loosely organized network of
landlords” via informal mechanisms that served the collective by preventing extraction of
“usurious rents beyond what the captive low-income tenants could bare” and, thus, sustain-
ing “local circuits of accumulation and exploitation” (Wyly et al. 2012, p. 257, 258).
These actors have been replaced by global financial firms, investors, and local brokers and
lenders acting on their behalf, reflecting a de-localization of individual actors via the consol-
idation of the global financial industry over the past generation (Aalbers 2012). In this con-
text, the sub-prime mortgage penetration into contemporary low-income and racialized
housing markets through the 1990s and 2000s can be interpreted as an “institutional-fix”
for channeling accumulated financial capital to new outlets for investment.
As a result, following Wyly et al. (2012), class monopoly rent now goes less to the landlord
than to global finance capital as fewer low-income minorities are confronted by slumlords
and panic peddlers than with sub-prime mortgages. And with rents, over this time frame,
constituted more by up-front fees and premiums, “the immediate material constraints of
borrowers to meet their monthly payments” became irrelevant until mounting (and related)
foreclosures culminated in the sub-prime mortgage crisis (Wyly et al. 2012, p. 256). Even if
these actors are not necessarily aware of the discriminatory impacts of their actions (to them,
they are giving opportunities to a previously excluded population), the institutional practice
of realizing class monopoly rent produces results not too dissimilar than that if there is con-
scious malicious intent.
Wyly and company’s analysis, however, is situated at the macro-urban scale and focused
on the upward percolation of class monopoly rent through the national and global financial

system. For sure, the financial industry still sits at the top of Harvey’s “institutional hierar-
chy,” but the spatio-temporal contingency of local actors complicates this broader-scale pic-
ture (as Wyly et al. 2012 acknowledge). For Harvey, the inner-city housing market was the
focus of analysis. But while this market of consumers has since been cast to the institutional
violence of spatially diffused predatory lending, many of the same inner-city spaces, across
urban America, have also transformed through up-scale redevelopment agendas (Brenner
and Theodore 2002; Hackworth 2007). With “scarcely a vestige of institutional or govern-
ment involvement” in 1970s Baltimore (Harvey 1974, p. 245), local governments, private
developers, and global financial institutions are now centrally involved in setting the terms
for realizing class monopoly rent through gentrification, identified by Smith (2002) as new
global urban policy.
In this context, class monopoly rent is now extracted from more affluent consumers by a
notably different assemblage of actors, institutional mechanisms, and policy arrangements. As
Harvey (1974, p. 240) stressed, “any examination of how rent originates and is realized cannot
proceed without evaluating the performance of these supportive institutions.” The next section
explores this evolved institutional landscape in the context of Chicago’s Bronzeville District.
The Contemporary Neoliberal City

The imperative to maximize the extraction of value from the land continues to compel the
ensemble of actors and institutions that drive capitalist urban economies today, particularly in
a neoliberal climate where market-oriented rationalities reign supreme. Urban neoliberalization
and its impacts in Chicago are well chronicled (Wilson 2007). But the ways in which the
evolving conditions and relations of class monopoly rent are implicated in the policies and prac-
tices driving neoliberal governance remain unclear, such as public housing demolition, historical
preservation, and tax-increment financing (TIF). While these practices can be mobilized toward
a variety of ends, in Chicago, they have unequivocally unfolded in the service of clearing
disinvested structures (and their low-income inhabitants) and stimulating private market invest-
ment and rising land values in spaces targeted for gentrification (Wilson 2007).
LAND-BANKING IN CHICAGO
In Chicago’s Bronzeville District, now undergoing significant redevelopment (Boyd 2008), a

substantial chunk of land remains vacant due to the HOPE VI demolition of the area’s once
voluminous stock of public housing (Hackworth 2007; Hyra 2008). Much of this land is now
owned by the City due to an aggressive “land-banking” campaign. Despite the neighbor-
hood’s mixed-income replacement sites and broader gentrification, its current and roughly
2,000 City-owned vacant lots mark a substantial increase from the 756 reported in 1994
(Quintanilla 1994). This has effectively reduced the supply of high demand affordable housing
for the neighborhood’s evaporating low-income Black population. As local activists charge,
it has also contributed to a notable rise in property values since the 1990s (Boyd 2008). While
this particular practice (stockpiling vacant land) is not new to the neoliberal era, it has unfolded
within the broader HOPE VI program of shifting responsibility of public housing production
to the private market and stimulating gentrification in the spaces cleared by demolition.
Now an increasingly important landowner in this neighborhood, the City auctions off this
land to developers for as little as $300 (Russell 2009), while newly constructed and renovated
homes have sold for $300,000–$400,000 (before the crisis, see Anderson 2012). In this
context, the City has acted as a conduit for transferring land from bankrupt landlords and

displaced low-income renters to profit-maximizing developers. For the City, enhancing

private investment leads to increased property values and, thus, revenue streams, which can
be considered a proportion of class monopoly rent to the extent they are attributable to such
supply-reducing strategies and the value-enhancing “uses” erected by developers; the City
and developers acting together for mutual interest as a class of landowners. The local state,
once entrenched in the philosophy of the welfare-state, now assumes the status of a private
business, its raison d’etre to enhance the flow of value from the land by converting properties
to their most profitable uses (Brenner and Theodore 2002).
DISCURSIVE USE-VALUE AUGMENTATION AND HISTORICAL PRESERVATION
The practice of promoting positive images of spaces targeted for gentrification is widely
chronicled and can be interpreted as a means of cultivating the upper-income “social wants
and needs” alluded to by Harvey. This production of exclusivity is deemed necessary for
matching particular residential landscapes with corresponding (and produced) sources of con-
sumer demand along specific social-class divisions. As all commodities must possess use-values
in order to possess exchange-values (Marx 1976; Logan and Molotch 1987), discursive
portrayals of such landscapes can be viewed as the augmentation of use-value (as a means
of maximizing exchange-value) by strategically appealing to emotional sentiments tailored
for a particular population segment. Real-estate magnate Donald Trump (in Merrifield
2002, p. 25) explains the process from the capitalist perspective:
First of all you don’t necessarily need the best location. What you need is the best deal. Just as you
can create leverage, you can enhance a location, through promotion and through psychology…
Location also has to do with fashion. You can take a mediocre location and turn it into something
better just by attracting the right people.
Bronzeville’s redevelopment, consisting of a growing African-American gentrifying pop-

ulation (Pattillo 2007; Hyra 2008), has been marked by a nostalgic portrayal of the neighbor-
hood – articulated by community organizers, developers, city officials, and new homeowners
– as undergoing a revival of the “vibrant” mixed-income community that flourished during
the early twentieth-century (Boyd 2008). This narrative can be interpreted as a racially
sensitive discursive product that functions to augment the use-value of the neighborhood’s
residential spaces specifically among this growing population segment.
Bronzeville’s redevelopment has also been marked by historical preservation as a means of
renovating the neighborhood’s historic structures and homes (Hoffman 2003). These
“improved” spaces, thus, become “charged” with the emotive content of this narrative (also,
see Anderson and Sternberg 2013). Here, the employment of historical preservation as part of
the narrative’s spatial expression functions to produce demand within this particular racialized
affluent consumer base. As demand increases for these “improved” spaces, so does their
exchange-value, serving the landowning interests of the narrative’s promoters.
But it should be stressed that this value enhancement is not only due to structural improve-
ments, as supply is also limited (in addition to land-banking) by the sense of exclusivity that
results: while there are many high-valued condos and renovated townhomes in Chicago,
there is only one Bronzeville, rendering renovated homes with this particular sub-market a
(artificially) scarce commodity. It is in this context that discursive and related material strate-
gies (i.e., historical preservation) enter into the workings of class monopoly rent as supply-
limiting semiotic resources by highlighting positive attributes, cultures, and histories of
particular spaces. The wants and needs of targeted population segments are then

simultaneously nurtured and exploited in that they are catered to yet forced into highly
priced and controlled housing sub-markets.
TAX-INCREMENT FINANCING
The TIF has served as a key value-enhancing tool in Chicago and is interpreted as mobilizing
a form of income redistribution, facilitated by the City, from local residents and businesses to
the producers of the built-environment (Weber 2002). In Chicago, the TIF emerged in the
early 1980s as a tool for the City to target specific urban spaces perceived to be potential sites
for profitable redevelopment (Ranney 2003). Once designated,
The City borrows against the potential stream of future revenues in order to absorb the present cost
of land development, infrastructure improvements, property assembly, and demolition so that
developers do not have to do so. (Weber 2002, p. 188)
As initial capital investment is made and tax revenues begin to rise, the surplus revenues are
channeled back into redevelopment projects to spurn higher revenues through resulting
waves of private investment.
In Bronzeville, twelve separate TIFs are now instituted (Wilson and Sternberg 2012). In
2007 alone, $28 million of taxpayer money was siphoned away by these TIFs from other
public services and into privileged private hands (Anderson 2012). In this context, the
TIF converts tax revenues to real-estate capital as a means of augmenting that very revenue
stream by enhancing the volume of realizable class monopoly rent so long as willing
consumers are present. The result is that remaining low-income residents end up
financing their own displacement: an estimated 40,000 have been displaced from
Bronzeville since the 1990s when TIF designation and public housing demolition began
(Wilson and Sternberg 2012).
While the urban poor were once the source of class monopoly rent for now obsolete
individual landlords, their displacement now ensures its realization with local government,
developers, builders, and global financial institutions now seizing a slice of the enlarged
pie. In this way, TIFs, while not directly a supply-controlling strategy as land-banking and
historical preservation, can be interpreted as enhancing the volume of real-estate investment
that does produce artificial scarcity (and, thus, class monopoly rent) within this particular sub-
market.
Land values, of course, can also be driven by speculation which can lead to both
oversupply and rising prices, as observed in places like Florida and Spain pre-crisis. And with
deflated values now marking many urban housing markets, new housing programs have
emerged across urban America to convert vacant owner-occupied units to rental in order
to absorb growing pools of foreclosed homeowners. In Chicago, the Property Rental
Assistance Program is designed to transform empty market-rate units that currently plague
many of the HOPE VI mixed-income developments (a sub-market itself) into high-demand
rental units. Here, the post-crisis opportunities for extracting class monopoly rent are shifted
back to the rental market, while the glut of owner-occupied units is simultaneously brought
under control.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The realization of class monopoly rent remains a standard institutional practice structuring
urban landscapes today. But the modalities through which this practice operates are

constantly evolving and deeply (re)productive of socio-spatially differentiated urban land-

scapes, a phenomenon manifest in tremendously varied ways across urban contexts, in North
America and beyond. In this context, how is the pursuit of class monopoly rent differentially
institutionalized across this variegated and evolving geography of urban neoliberalization?
And what are the cultural, political, and historical mediating factors?
To address this broad inquiry, the concept of class monopoly rent must move beyond a
heuristic device with the development of new methodological and analytic approaches that
can more substantively and empirically re-engage Harvey’s thesis. I suggest that more
qualitative modes of analysis are required, particularly ethnography. To date, the analytic
purchase of this concept remains one of persuasiveness; scholarly inquiry must focus more
on the individual scale through detailed and innovative ethnographic and semiotic analyses
on the ways in which people from myriad cultural contexts learn to feel and act upon
broader landowner-based imperatives.
This inquiry implicates class monopoly rent as a mechanism of “neoliberal
governmentality” (Larner 2000), as people’s landowner interests and forms of knowledge
are seen to constitute, to some degree, the basis for their profit-maximizing (and self-
governing) behavior. It also raises questions about the varying ways in which this imperative
influences agency within and between different (and often conflicting) subclasses of
landowners. The pursuit of a “revived” and exclusive Bronzeville has been marked by an en-
semble of developers, city officials, and community organizations (constituted predominantly
by homeowners) motivated by myriad goals (i.e., power, prestige, and racial identity). Yet,
they are aligned by a common vision of this revival, suggesting that their collective landown-
ing interests are constitutive of this aligned vision. The extent to which these actors are
“aware” of their role within this class-based alignment is a matter for further inquiry. In this
context, re-engagement with class monopoly rent could contribute to further linking
governmentality studies with urban political economy (see Jessop 2007; Kunkel and Mayer
2012) as well as the broader “cultural economy” literature (Amin and Thrift 2004, 2007;
Ribera-Fumaz 2009).
In short, we can envision not one over-arching or “messianic” mechanism driving the
production of capitalist urban landscapes but a system of different “templates” for under-
standing the myriad ways in which class monopoly rent is institutionalized across the capitalist
urban system and how landowning agents are indoctrinated into its logic. As one of the
pivots around which urban neoliberalization has and continues to unfold, this standardized
imperative will likely play a central role in how urban landscapes evolve in relation to the
ongoing crisis. The new and revised strategies currently being mobilized to combat the
effects of the crisis (i.e., Chicago’s Property Rental Assistance Program) cannot be completely
understood without grasping their implications in (re)making conditions favorable for realiz-
ing class monopoly rent. The resilience of neoliberal modes of governance is contingent
upon the ways in which the neoliberal ethos is, in part, capable of (re)producing such
favorable conditions. The institutional landscape may have changed, but, as Wyly et al.
(2012, p. 256) note, “the material relations of exploitation are the same.”
In these ways, I suggest that revived interest in Marxian rent theory, in general, and class
monopoly rent, in particular, represents a potentially fruitful point of departure toward
building our knowledge of the functioning and evolving character of the contemporary neo-
liberal city. And as the pursuit of class monopoly rent – emboldened by the neoliberal ethos –
also (re)produces spaces of urban poverty and invariably drives capitalist economies into crisis,
a deeper examination of this concept could also be mobilized toward undermining neoliberal
hegemony by revealing the ways in which this ideological system necessarily exacerbates the
very problems it denigrates and seeks to resolve – at least rhetorically.

Acknowledgement
I thank David Wilson for his critical comments on a previous version of this manuscript. I am
also very appreciate to Andy Wood, and the anonymous reviewers for their very constructive
comments which certainly improved the paper. The usual disclaimers apply.
Short Biography
Matthew Anderson’s research is focused on the politics and the dynamics of urban gover-
nance and redevelopment in North American cities. He has authored or co-authored articles
in Urban Affairs Review and Urban Geography on the contingency of urban redevelopment
practices and outcomes in Chicago and processes of residential ‘place-making in American
suburbs as well as book chapters on President Obama’s discourse on urban poverty and pro-
cesses of urban and economic restructuring. Current research examines the historical
unfolding and evolution of neoliberal urban governance in Chicago, contestation and emer-
gent forms of local activism, and the politics of water provision on the Yellowstone River
Basin in Montana. Anderson holds a BA in Anthropology from Pitzer College, an MA in
Geography and Environmental Studies from Northeastern Illinois University, and a PhD
in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He now teaches at
Montana State University Billings.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Matthew B. Anderson, College of Arts and Sciences, Montana State University Billings.
E-mail: matthew.anderson35@msubillings.edu
1
Neoliberalism refers to the political-economic ideology and mode of regulation that ascended to dominance in the
1970s as the purported solution to the so-called crisis of the welfare-state, i.e., deregulation, privatization, entrepreneur-
ialism, and the centrality of the free-market (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010).
2
Both Marx and Ricardo’s analyses were rooted in the agricultural context.
3
At the core of these debates were the various categories of rent, notably differential, absolute, and monopoly, and how
rigid these categories (each representing a different kind of relationship and basis for realizing rent) should be interpreted
(see Ball 1987; Clark 1987; King 1989a).
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Class Monopoly Rent and The Contemporary Neoliberal City

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Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.

Class Monopoly Rent and the Contemporary Neoliberal City

© 2014 The Author(s)

Class Monopoly Rent

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

MARXIAN RENT THEORY AND URBAN HOUSING MARKETS

Relatively little research has systematically or empirically followed up on the propositions

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

THE EVOLVING CONDITIONS OF CLASS MONOPOLY RENT

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

The Contemporary Neoliberal City

In Chicago’s Bronzeville District, now undergoing signiﬁcant redevelopment (Boyd 2008), a

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

displaced low-income renters to proﬁt-maximizing developers. For the City, enhancing

DISCURSIVE USE-VALUE AUGMENTATION AND HISTORICAL PRESERVATION

Bronzeville’s redevelopment, consisting of a growing African-American gentrifying pop-

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

constantly evolving and deeply (re)productive of socio-spatially differentiated urban land-

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

© 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 8/1 (2014): 13–24, 10.1111/gec3.12107

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