The Bonds of Inequality

"Cities require infrastructure as they grow and persist; infrastructure requires funding, typically from the bond market. But the bond market is not a neutral player. In this groundbreaking book, Destin Jenkins suggests that questions of urban infrastructure are inherently also questions of justice because infrastructure requires financial mechanisms to come into being. Moreover, these mechanisms abstract cities into investments controlled from afar, which exacerbates local inequalities of race, wealth, and power. Ultimately, Jenkins opens up far larger questions, such as why it is that American social welfare is predicated on the demands of finance capitalism in the first place"-- "Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities' dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal finance structure racial privileges, entrench spatial neglect, elide democratic input, and distribute wealth and power. Destin Jenkins shows how, beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath their quotidian infrastructure, there lurks a world of politics and finance that is rarely seen, let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, The Bonds of Inequality offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation encompassed not only local politicians but also banks, credit rating firms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to municipal finance arrangements and how these arrangements were central in determining the distribution of resources in the city. By homing in on financing and its imperatives, Jenkins rewrites the history of modern American cities, revealing the hidden strings that bind debt and power, race and inequity, democracy and capitalism."--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.