Cities After… has the podcast Urban Emptiness and the Pandemic.

In the first episode, Prof. Robles-Duran explores the urban shifts surrounding the dramatic rise of commercial and residential vacancies during the global pandemic.

If you let this episode open your mind, all sorts of possibilities become possible.

Right now the Federal Reserve Bank is using its money creation powers to finance the creation of empty space in our cities by buying up bonds of the real estate investors. If we could harness this power of the government entity which is the Federal Reserve Bank to benefit society instead of using this power to enrich the already wealthy, we could make better lives for millions, if not billions, of people.

All this time I have been focused my thinking about the way The Federal Reserve Bank is pumping up the stock market by helping to finance stock buybacks. I had not focused any attention on how the FED is pumping up the real estate market. The people who have to pay the rents for the inflation in the housing markets are suffering. The people who are being evicted so that the rents can stay high are also suffering.

Think about how all this investment in real estate fails to lower rents, but actually finances rent increases. This is not the way we have been told that the “free market” works. I leave it to you to listen to this podcast to ponder this question.

Democracy At Work has the episode Cities After… Post-Pandemic Urbanization: Spectacles, Speculation & Tourism – Pt 2.

In today’s podcast, Prof. Robles-Duran will continue to discuss Post-pandemic urbanization trends by taking a deep dive in the speculative global rent markets and their exacerbating social ills. For help with this, he is joined by Dr. Jaime Palomera from Barcelona’s radical research cooperative La Hidra who will help focus a conversation on a striking report that they published two months ago titled “The Social Impacts of the Rental Market”, done in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Barcelona and the Institute of Government and Public Policy at the University of Barcelona.

This episode has changed my attitude about rent control considerably. There are still foreseeable problems with rent control, but there are also considerable problems without it.

Here is the episode list for Cities After…

Part 1 helps to contextualize Part 2 above Cities After… Post-Pandemic Urbanization: Spectacles, Speculation & Tourism – Pt. 1.

This podcast will be the first of four episodes where, together with future guests, Prof. Robles-Duran will slowly adopt the city of Barcelona as a sample to think through some of the tendencies of a post-pandemic neoliberal urbanization. He will do so by looking at three trending development drivers, the production of urban spectacle, the burdens of rental housing, and the limitless expansion of mass tourism.