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

This paper considers the importance of age in delineating urban space, the latter operationalised as high-density living. Many cities have experienced an increase in inner city living contributing to gentrification. Today, inner cities contain more amenities, public transit and housing options than in the past but there are also growing affordability concerns owing to rising prices. Especially young adults, sometimes dubbed Millennials, are making location decisions in a context of lower employment security, higher costs and continuing high-density re-development that now extends into suburban areas in some cases. The analysis in this paper shows evidence of a youthification process that results in an increasing association of high-density living with the young adult lifecycle stage. The higher density areas remain young over time as new young adults move into neighbourhoods where there are already young people living, and they move out if their household size increases. Youthified spaces have become characterised by small housing units that are not generally occupied by households with children. Additionally, some areas are exhibiting generational bifurcation as both older and younger adults live in some higher density areas. Youthification is driven by a combination of lifestyle, demographic, macro-economic and housing market changes that require further investigation. The youthification process is not replacing, but occurring alongside, gentrification and points to young age as a delineator of high-density living becoming more important over time. However, immigration, measures of social class and household size still remain the most important explanatory variables of high-density living.

Urban planning policy in North America is increasingly dominated by the ideal of "sustainability-as-density"-the promotion of walkable neighborhoods containing high-density housing in proximity to transit and daily amenities. Although this planning approach is increasingly scrutinized due to its links to gentrification and rising regional housing costs, there are few examples of analysis of neighborhood-level effects, especially social impacts. This study extends a political ecology perspective to combine quantitative, cultural, and critical policy analysis methods to analyze neighborhood densification initiatives in the city of Vancouver, Canada. Densification was found to be entangled with socioeconomic neighborhood composition as well as cultural and lifestyle characteristics of gentrification. Increased public concern over tensions between the promotion of densification and housing affordability is also a factor, despite some limited efforts by the City of Vancouver to address social concerns. This suggests a need to rethink the roles of both densification and "the social" more generally in urban sustainability policy. [

We investigate the spatial relationships among three prominent facets of contemporary urbanism – gentrification, studentification, and youthification – in the context of Canadian post-secondary educational institutions (universities and colleges). We conduct the analysis in three major Canadian cities with substantial knowledge economy sectors using confidential Statistics Canada census files, which include information on individuals and their geographies, and the location of universities and colleges, by enrolment size. We document ‘spillover’ effects of expansions in student enrolment and the building of campuses by analysing the geographic correlations among universities and gentrification and youthification. Studentification and youthification are to some extent coincident but not entirely, whereas the connection to gentrification is more complex. Our work provides novel insight into the ways the three different facets of contemporary urbanism overlap and contribute to our understanding of how universities and colleges, as hallmarks of the knowledge economy, influence the social geography of cities.

Considering Vancouver and Montreal as case studies, this article demonstrates the increasing centralization of the young adult population since the early 1980s. Gentrification, which brings higher income earners to the inner city, is often explained as a class‐based process associated with post‐industrial, post‐Fordist, and, more recently, neo‐liberal restructuring. However, delays in child‐bearing, increasing educational attainment, and the growing amenity and housing component in inner cities have also sharpened the division of space by demographic variables such as age and household size—variables that relate to life‐cycle stage, consumption practices, and generational differences. This article contributes to the understanding of the factors delineating urban space by considering residential location patterns of two different generations of young adults in two metropolitan areas. The findings show that today's young adult residential ecology is increasingly defined by proximity to transit, high‐density housing, and walkability to urban amenities. Due to the higher‐priced housing market and land use planning policies emphasizing densification, the residential pattern is one of concentrated decentralization in Vancouver. In Montreal, centralization of young adults is mostly associated with changing household profiles. In both metropolitan areas, the inner city residential ecology is increasingly delineated by young adults.