Rachel Weber is a 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 From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago and Swords into Dow Shares: Governing the Decline of the Military Industrial Complex.
Real estate developers aren’t just gentrifying residential areas — in cities like Chicago, they’re also building lots and lots of office buildings, often totally unnecessary ones. Understanding why can help us work to build just cities for all.