Description: How does a building boom happen? Who inflates a real-estate bubble and why? What causes companies to move from seemingly usable office space into new quarters only blocks away? Rachel Weber digs into these questions and more in her detailed analysis of Chicago's downtown development during the "Millennial Boom" (1998-2008). Weber shows what happens when the real estate industry, financial markets, and public planning all operate at warp speed to build new structures and destroy older ones. She draws on years of interviews with real estate actors across the country, participant observation in a secretive sector, analyses of financial and development data, as well as the history of the appraisal, brokerage, and real estate finance professions. As a result, Weber's book is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how markets and urban change actually happen.
Brief description: Rachel Weber is professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Department and a faculty fellow in the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Swords into Dow Shares: Governing the Decline of the Military Industrial Complex and coeditor of the Oxford Handbook for Urban Planning. She was appointed to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Review Quotes: "Weber gives us a compelling book that cements her reputation as one of the top urban planners in the field of urban political economy. Her sophisticated and nuanced understanding of complex systems like global finance and real estate markets is conveyed easily and accessibly to those both inside and outside of academia. From Boom to Bubble is a major contribution, one that will most certainly be widely read and discussed for years to come."-- "Joel Rast, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee"