After the Oliver Twist poorhouse became luxury housing with a segregated playground, London bans segregated play-areas

The world is full of corrupt oligarchs looking to smuggle their money out of their countries and put it somewhere where the rule of law that they have helped to dismantle at home still reigns; a favourite safe asset class is luxury housing in major cities, which is viewed as easy to sell on short notice due to the large supply of other money-laundering oligarchs.

Cities don't need more luxury housing, though (not least because a sizable fraction of it is never occupied and sits empty, a safe deposit box in the sky): they want affordable housing. But since neoliberal orthodoxy has made it nearly impossible to imagine that cities might publicly fund their housing, cities are left begging commercial developers to build "below-market rent" housing (that is, housing that is intended to be lived in) rather than hyper-profitable luxury housing.

A favoured tool for accomplishing this is to offer developers exemptions to urban planning restrictions in exchange for designating a few of the units they build as "subsidised" or "low income" housing. For example, if a plot of land is designated for buildings that are no taller than 20 stories, a developer might be given permission to build to 25 or 30 stories, provided a couple of those additional floors are below-market-rent housing.

But part of the appeal of luxury housing for oligarchs is segregation from poor people. The foundational belief of right-wing thought is that some people are intrinsically superior to others and that God tells you who the best people are (by giving them white skin, or penises, or a lot of money). Read the rest