Post-entrepreneurial cities? Runaway housing costs and the humanitarian turn in urban governance

For a generation, post-industrial US cities acted as entrepreneurs, deploying a suite of economic development policy tools to lure jobs, investment, visitors and residents. Taking New York’s rejection of Amazon HQ2 as a point of departure, I argue that exponential housing cost growth has undermined the political and economic foundations of the entrepreneurial model, leading cities to simultaneously inflate housing costs and manage the ensuing crisis of social reproduction. Updating Harvey’s four areas of entrepreneurial statecraft (production, social reproduction, collective consumption and intergovernmental transfers), I identify a humanitarian turn in the governance of urban development, focused on short-term aid, crisis management and political stability. Driven by structural conflict in the entrepreneurial model, the humanitarian turn both expands the limits of politically viable economic intervention and falls far short of resolving the underlying crisis of runaway housing costs and precarious work.