>CB: Thanks for the help on how to even frame the problem. The real property
>, yes.
>
>I have this fantasy about a web of finance capital sort of sitting on top of
>the city like a giant net in the form of debtor-creditor relationships. (If
>a web is not the right metaphor, what might be ?) Municipal bonds in the
>first place, but , with an army of Marxist accountants, I'm thinking it
>might be possible to map the whole range of financial relations,including
>mortgages ( want to include predatory loans), insurance (redlining
>especially). Others ? It would be a shifting , everchanging set of
>relations, making it much harder to track.
>
>Of course, "Wall$treet" is not the geographic location in Manhattan, but a
>globe of scattered points channeled especially through lower Manhattan ( I
>think ).
That would be a great project, more interesting in some ways than who owns Manhattan. We could understand why the big bourgeoisie would want a piece of NYC. But impoverished, depopulated Detroit - who's making money off that?
No doubt the mortgages are held by banks and institutional investors, but all they care about is the flow of debt service. It'd be great to know who owns the housing and the stores and the land. And the rate of turnover. I've heard of studies of small cities (somone did a presentation at an URPE summer camp once on Providence) showing a tremendous turnover rate in property ownership. Wonder if that applies to Detroit. There's also probably a massive set of tax breaks involved - who got 'em, for what, and did they deliver?
Maybe you could convince a bunch of UMich students to do their dissertations on this!
Doug