NOTE: The following is a revised copy of a letter sent to Samuel Stein after reading his book Capital Cities (Verso, 2019). For whatever reason, my letter went unanswered and so is reproduced here.

Dear Mr. Stein,

I recently finished reading Capital Cities and was reviewing the notes I had taken when it occurred to me to write and ask for your thoughts on a few topics. Before going into that, however, I did want to say that I found your book insightful and inspiring as well as every bit as relevant in 2026 under the second Trumpian regime as it was in 2019 the first time around. While the situations you describe are perhaps not quite as obvious in part of the world as they are in New York City or many other large American cities, they are not completely unknown to me — we have seen our share of apartment complexes pop up in our area and our own house has magically more than doubled in appraised value over the past 15 years in spite of the fact we’ve done absolutely nothing to it.

We live in an HOA community, which segues into my first observation and question. While our HOA is fairly inexpensive and only sometimes overbearing, the fact remains that it exists as an involuntary association that wields extraordinary power. You allude to such organizations late in Capital Cities, but never address their role in the financialization of housing. I imagine this is in part because your focus is on much more urban areas and HOAs, at least in my experience, are more the suburban cousins of the building associations often found in high-rise apartment buildings. Still, I can see how both act as exclusionary forces and as agents of the real estate state. One of the HOA’s key functions, as I understand it, is to enforce certain aesthetic standards in an effort to maintain or raise property values by ensuring properties are kept in order and community amenities (e.g. pools and playgrounds) are maintained. While this sounds like a noble goal, it struck me some time ago how odd it is that a homeowner would want their property value to increase indefinitely as that would presumably mean a higher tax burden. While reading your book, it occurred to me that it makes perfect sense if we look at it through the lens of real estate speculation: HOAs aren’t necessarily there for the long-term residents planning on living in their house for decades — they are in the service of home buyers who aren’t tied to any particular location and are happy to sell once the market gets hot enough. How do you view HOAs and what part, if any, do you see them playing in the real estate state? Are they just groups of nosy busybodies drunk with the power to scold neighbors for unmowed yards, or are they devoted foot-soldiers for real estate investors trying to maximize returns?

The second matter relates to remarks you make in the final pages of your book that I found particularly thought provoking in light of the administration’s strangulation of Cuba. You observe that large swaths of Havana have historically been considered public property, recovered, repurposed and formally privately owned. That was in 2019. One of Trump’s main conditions for relaxing the siege is the opening of the island’s real estate market to foreign investment/development. I can only assume that he intends to participate (whether directly or indirectly) from such an opening and profit by it. This injection of foreign money would, it seems, be beneficial judging from the many news stories that show Cuba as a land teetering on the edge of collapse. My questions then are:

1. Do you see the current desperate situation in Cuba chiefly A) as the result of some inherent flaw within Castroism, B) the organic development of corruption and authoritarianism (i.e. the revolution losing its roots and focusing more on control) or C) the planned result of decades of American pressure to punish and eradicate what might have been a thriving alternative to American capitalism?
2. What changes, if any, have taken place over the past few years in the country’s housing situation? Has there been efforts at ‘reform’ (i.e. privatize) property? Has the government been able/willing to maintain public ownership? Has there been any desire among Cubans living on the island to move to a more private real estate regime?

The final thing I will bring up will certainly be considered controversial if not plain ignorant, but I hope you can help me clarify one way or the other. I do not recall when this thought came to me while reading your book, but at some point I began to wonder: is homelessness, as experienced today, a relatively recent phenomenon? In other words, was it less common in previous times, to find people out in society with literally nowhere to go? I feel the images of homeless encampments in parks and tents set up along highways and sidewalks are not images we would historically see outside, perhaps, of the Great Depression. Maybe I am overestimating the prevalence and capacity of the Dickensian workhouses (to quote Ebeneezer Scrooge: “[t]he Union workhouses…[a]re they still in operation?”), but it seems like there were more (although not necessarily better) options for the impoverished and destitute. It might be more a matter of trading predatory speculators and private equity landlords with predatory slumlords and company town bosses, but I feel the perception at least is that out and out homelessness was less common than it is now. Your book traces the origins of the real estate state back to the New Deal era (although it only started in earnest with the industrial decline and rise of financialization in the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent fetishization of neoliberal policy), but what about earlier, say during the late 1800s and early 1900s? Was homelessness or the threat of homelessness a daily fear during the peak of the Gilded Age as it is in the post-industrial present?

I thank you for taking a moment to read this letter — I’m trying to connect with authors when I have questions about their work, so I hope that you can find time to address some of the points I’ve mentioned. Thank you very much for writing Capital Cities as I feel it helps unmask a lot of the players in this extraordinarily imbalanced game and gives much needed transparency to a maliciously opaque system that has taken so much control over our public spaces.