Global real estate is now worth $217 trillion, thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world’s assets, and the vast majority of that wealth—roughly 75 percent—is in housing. There are a number of reasons why capital is converging on land and buildings: a long period of financial deregulation, low federal interest rates and “quantitative easing” in the United States; massive urbanization programs in China, the United Arab Emirates and several other countries; a proliferation of predatory equity funds scouring the globe for “undervalued” investment opportunities and finding them in housing; economic polarization around the world, with extremely wealthy and somewhat nervous individuals viewing property as the safest place to hide their money; and more. When capital gains rise while rates of profit plummet across many once-dynamic sectors of the economy, real estate becomes the latest stop on what geographer Cindi Katz calls “vagabond” capitalism’s eternal search for profitability.

The real estate state is not new, nor is it all-encompassing. Like the carceral state, the warfare state, the welfare state or the administrative state, it is an expression of government—a component, a bloc, a manifestation, a tendency—that has been around in one form or another for as long as states and private property have existed. Landowners have been determining the shape of cities for centuries, and the idea of housing as a commodity—even as a financial asset—is not exactly state of the art. What is relatively new, however, is the outsized power of real estate interests within the capitalist state. As real estate values have risen to absurd heights, so has the political force of real estate capital.