The Bonds of Inequality

Municipal governments today hold around $4 trillion in outstanding debt. The growing costs of simply servicing their debt is cannibalizing their annual budgets.

Three books offer views of the shift from public planning to neoliberal privatization, and emphasize the need to reclaim planning in the public interest.

By following the money, a new history of urban inequality turns our attention away from federal malfeasance and toward capital markets and financial instruments.

“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”

By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.