The Moral Background of the City: How Real Estate Professionals Think About Their Responsibility to Society


Zachary Hyde, University of Toronto

In recent years, the language of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing has made its way into the urban development community in Toronto, Canada. Since the late 1990s, Toronto has seen North America’s highest levels of urban development set against the backdrop of an unprecedented housing affordability crisis. At the city’s annual real estate conference, there are now panels on topics like “addressing climate change” and “tackling the affordability question.” Meanwhile, urban development podcasts, LinkedIn articles, and Twitter threads centre on how developers can “give back” to society. This raises the question: How do real estate professionals think about their responsibility to the citizens of cities? And, how do these rationales influence what they do in their day-to-day work? My paper unpacks these questions through an analysis of 20 interviews with development industry professionals, local politicians, and city planners in Toronto, and a content analysis of 40 development industry podcasts. Using economic-cultural sociologist Gabriel Abend’s moral background theory, I show how developers navigate between several competing value frameworks. Developers draw on these frameworks to make sense of and explain their positions on contentious issues such as tenant relocation policies and inclusionary zoning. Some developers rely on a utilitarian framework, which allows them to accept social harms, such as displacing low-income tenants, on the basis that they will be countered by larger-scale social goods, like increasing housing supply. Others use a good citizen framework, which suggests that always doing the right thing, like not displacing people, may be costly in the short term but leads to better economic returns in the long run. Those with the utilitarian framework tend to be skeptical of ESG, seeing it as a perverse interference in the housing market, while those with a good citizen approach see it as central to their business strategy. I conclude by placing these findings in dialogue with recent work on temporal dimensions of profit-making in capitalist urban development.

This paper will be presented at the following session: