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Hundred-billion dollar writedowns and trillion-dollar stock market fluctuations have drawn worldwide attention to America's subprime mortgage sector, and its linkages with predatory exploitation in working-class and racially marginalized communities. During nearly two decades of stealth expansion, agents of subprime capital fought regulation and reform by a) using the doctrine of risk-based pricing to equate financial innovation with democratized access to capital, b) appealing to the cultural myths of the 'American Dream' of homeownership, and c) dismissing well-documented cases of racial discrimination and predatory abuse as anecdotal evidence of rare problems confined to a few lost-cause places in what is otherwise a benevolent free-market landscape. The current crisis has undermined the third claim, but mainstream policy debates are reinforcing the first two. In this paper, we challenge all three of these ideological claims. Properly adapted and updated, Harvey's (1974) theory of class-monopoly rent explains how the localized, neighborhood exploitations of class and race in urban America have been woven through Wall Street into transnational webs of structured finance and investment. We map the race and class segmentation of subprime mortgage capital across several hundred U.S. metropolitan areas in 2004 and 2006, and we also analyzed the achievements and prospects of several progressive challenges to subprime exploitation. Subprime Goes Prime TimeAmerica's long-running boom in subprime mortgages met its catastrophic end in 2007. For years, an interdisciplinary group of scholars, attorneys, and activists diagnosed the gathering dangers in the sector, which is designed to provide high-cost, high-risk credit to low-income consumers and others with poor credit histories (Carr and

Empirical research on gentrification suffers from a dichotomy between richly detailed neighborhood case studies and macro-scale, census-based analyses, perpetuating uncertainty over the extent and timing of gentrified areas in American cities. We develop a model relating tract-level census statistics to the results of a detailed field survey of 24 census tracts in Minneapolis-St. Paul. We use stepwise and canonical discriminant analysis to select nine variables distinguishing gentrified neighborhoods and to classify all central-city tracts for each decade between 1960 and 1990. Results indicate a moderate level of overall accuracy, and the model is more than 90% accurate in distinguishing areas of heavy reinvestment from stable, middle-class districts. Compared with other techniques, our approach more accurately distinguishes gentrification from other types of inner-city redevelopment, providing a useful tool for identifying the phenomenon with a measurable degree of precision.Research on gentrification in North American cities has grown rapidly in the last two decades. In urban geography, most recent work has been theoretical, representing a significant departure from the empirical case-study approach common in the 1970s. Consequently, alternative theories of the causes and implications of the phenomenon have advanced considerably, while important empirical questions remain shrouded in mystery. After nearly 20 years of research, analysts still disagree on the extent, timing, and location of gentrified neighborhoods in American cities.The uncertainty over the extent of gentrification stems not only from the complexity of the process, but also from the difficulty of observing and measuring the phenomenon. The U.S. census is the most comprehensive and comparable source of data on changes in urban neighborhoods, but the use of census variables to identify gentrification is highly problematic. These limitations prompt many geographers to eschew census data in favor of intensive field surveys or other qualitative methods to document inner-city reinvestment. There is thus a substantial dichotomy between neighborhood-based studies, which provide little comparability between different settings, and extensive census-based analyses that include little attempt to verify results. With few exceptions, scholars fail to integrate fieldwork with rigorous analysis 248

As the Nation celebrated a new era, its home ownership rate had moved to an historic high ... . Public housingöespecially the isolated, distressed clusters of high-rises scarring cities from Newark to Chicago to St. Louis to Oaklandöhad experienced a rebirth ... . And in cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., public housing tenants now lived side-by-side with neighbors who, a few years earlier, might not have considered visiting the area, much less settling down in it.'' HUD (2000, page 50)`T he spotlight of the Olympics provided the catalyst to`remove the problem' of public housing from the doorstep of the corporate and academic institutions that could not abide or accommodate the proximity of poor people ... a national landmark was sacrificed to the`downtown business agenda' and partially funded by unsuspecting U.S. taxpayers who financed a public relations program instead of providing necessary support for public welfare.'' Keating and Flores (2000, pages 305^306)`T he revanchist city is a city of occasionally vicious revenge wrought against many of the city's most dependentöunemployed and homeless people, racial and ethnic minorities, women and immigrants, gays and lesbians, the working class. It has everything to do with a defence and reconstruction of the lines of identity privilege. '' Smith (1997, page 129) These three quotes, torn out of the context of wildly divergent debates and discourses, offer a glimpse of the complex reconstruction of American urbanism in the 1990s. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD, 2000), in a lavish, glossy compendium of its accomplishments targeted at the new presidential administration, celebrates the transformation of contemporary US urban policy ö a`vision for change' emphasizing homeownership, flexible devolution, and the creative use of market forces to rebuild low-income inner-city neighborhoods

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For two generations, urbanists have analyzed how residential mortgage lending reflects and reinforces inner-city inequality. Yet the basic dichotomies of this literature have been eroded by parallel developments in community organizing, public policy, and restructuring of financial services. Securitization, institutional structure, and increasingly sophisticated market segmentation have altered the relationship between mortgage capital and the inner city, redrawing patterns of exclusionary redlining into more complicated, stratified inclusion into prime and subprime reinvestment flows.In this article, we analyze lending dynamics in neighborhoods at the nexus between gentrified reinvestment and enduring poverty in 23 large U.S. cities. A strong, sustained resurgence of capital investment is woven together with enduring racial-ethnic exclusion that cannot be blamed on borrower deficiencies. Institutional restructuring and secondary-market linkages reinforce newer class and racial-ethnic inequalities through subprime segmentation: Lenders' willingness to serve black borrowers, for instance, is becoming closely associated with subprime specialization.

The debate between the proponents of the rent gap hypothesis and Steven Bourassa concerning its internal consistency centres on the role of land use in capitalised land rent. Bourassa argues that capitalised land rent is nonsensical because it is determined in part by land use which is in conflict with land rent theory. The paper explores the determinants of capitalised land rent by reviewing the rent gap hypothesis and related research, and argues that the issue of scale is implicit in the rent gap. Land rent can be determined at a minimum of two scales resulting in at least two different land rents. This argument rectifies Bourassa's contentions, and is consistent with the theoretical foundations of the rent gap.