The City as an Anti-Growth Machine (Törnberg, 2026)

Summary

"The City as an Anti-Growth Machine," by Petter Törnberg (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam), appeared in Antipode, March 2026, as a genuinely open-access (CC-BY) article. Focusing on the United States, the paper inverts a foundational framework in urban political economy — Logan and Molotch's "growth machine" thesis, which described city governments and business coalitions as organized around promoting local development to raise land values. Törnberg argues that under today's financialized housing market, the logic has flipped.

The Anti-Growth Machine

The paper's core mechanism, in its own words: "the mere holding of property — rather than its improvement — [is] the more profitable course of action. Housing units are warehoused, removed from rental markets, or reconfigured as financial instruments such as REITs or mortgage-backed securities... In many contexts, the returns to politically restricting supply now exceed the returns to building new housing." Where the classical growth machine describes coalitions that push development forward, the anti-growth machine — homeowners, landlords, and neighborhood groups — blocks it, often under cover of environmental or neighborhood-character concerns that Törnberg treats as a rationalization rather than the true motive. He draws on Fischel's "homevoter hypothesis" and empirical work (Fang et al. 2023) finding Toronto city councilors more likely to oppose new housing specifically in high-homeownership areas, and cites Hsieh & Moretti's (2019) estimate that US housing-supply constraints reduced aggregate productivity growth by roughly 36% over the late 20th century. The paper's summary line: "Scarcity is no longer a constraint on value creation — it is its precondition."

Notably, Törnberg distinguishes his argument explicitly from "degrowth" politics: anti-growth machine outcomes are not egalitarian or ecological, even when they borrow that language — they are rent-extractive. He also frames the contemporary "abundance" (Klein & Thompson) and "anti-monopoly" policy debates as two different diagnoses of the same underlying rentier-capitalism condition his framework describes.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This gives the wiki's existing NIMBYism, homevoter, and planning-restrictions coverage a named, citable theoretical framework it previously lacked — a direct academic articulation of the claim that manufactured land scarcity is not an accidental side-effect of local politics but the mechanism by which land value is extracted as rent. It complements financialization-of-land and land monopoly by supplying the specific political-economy account of why homeowners and landlords, in a financialized system, are individually rational to organize around restricting supply rather than allowing it.

Nuances and Limits

• Explicitly US-focused. The paper's argument and evidence are framed around the United States specifically; it should not be read as a general claim about all housing markets.
• A theoretical synthesis, not new primary data. The paper's contribution is the framework and argument, built on cited empirical work (Fang et al., Hsieh & Moretti) rather than original data collection.
• Full text read directly (A-claim). The complete article was read via the genuinely open-access (CC-BY) full text, independently confirmed via Crossref, Semantic Scholar, and Unpaywall.

Bears On

• Concept: NIMBYism — supplies the named theoretical framework ("anti-growth machine," inverting Logan & Molotch) for the phenomenon this page documents.
• Objection: Homevoters Will Block LVT — the same homeowner political-economy logic this objection describes, here given a fuller theoretical account of why restricting supply is individually rational under financialization.
• Concept: Financialization of Land — the underlying condition (land as speculative asset rather than productive input) this paper's mechanism depends on.

See Also

• NIMBYism
• Objection: Homevoters Will Block LVT
• Objection: Planning Restrictions Cause High Prices
• Financialization of Land
• Land Monopoly

Sources

1. Petter Törnberg (2026), "The City as an Anti-Growth Machine," Antipode 58(2), published online 1 March 2026, CC-BY 4.0. doi.org — full text read directly 2026-08-29 (open access confirmed via Crossref, Semantic Scholar, and Unpaywall) — used for the core growth-machine-inversion argument, the warehousing/REIT mechanism quotation, the homevoter-hypothesis and Fang et al. (2023) Toronto evidence, the Hsieh & Moretti (2019) productivity-loss estimate, and the degrowth/abundance/anti-monopoly framing distinctions (A-claim; full text).