From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago

An unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail--and how that affects cities.

In From Boom to Bubble, Rachel Weber debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so. Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Weber documents the case of Chicago’s ＂Millennial Boom,＂ showing that the Loop’s expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. From Boom to Bubble is an innovative look at how property markets change and fail--and how that affects cities.

Rachel Weber is 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 Swords into Dow Shares: Governing the Decline of the Military Industrial Complex and coeditor of the Oxford Handbook for Urban Planning. She was appointed to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.