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Allen Lane acquires ‘shocking’ survey of the global housing crisis by Minton
Allen Lane has acquired a “shocking” survey of the global housing crisis by Anna Minton.
Simon Winder, publishing director at Penguin Press, bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Super Prime: The Sterilization of the City from Nicola Barr at the Bent Agency. Minton is the author of two previous books on the modern city: Big Capital: Who is London For? and Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City (both Penguin). Allen Lane in the UK will publish Super Prime in hardback in spring 2026.
“The subprime crisis caused the financial crash and today a super prime crisis, defined by rocketing housing inflation, is consuming our cities, destroying the dream of home ownership," the synopsis says.
“Super Prime: The Sterilization of the City reveals how the promise of a property-owning democracy is being killed off by soaring house price inflation. Fuelled by a super prime crisis unleashed by the creation of new money which followed the financial crash, sterilisation is transforming cities at a speed and scale that vastly outstrips gentrification.”
It continues: “As global developers and private equity companies buy up entire neighbourhoods, doubling and tripling rents and forcing communities out, our cities are becoming unrecognisable. Combined with the growing role of super prime property to launder corrupt money and the spread of uncannily similar urban policies around the world, a new city is being created. It is a global phenomenon, but its contours are especially clear in North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand – the English-speaking economies of the world.”
Minton said: “I am delighted to be working with Penguin again on Super Prime: The Sterilization of the City. Only by understanding what is going on in our cities will we be able to change it, because there are choices we can make which affect the cities we create.”
Winder added: “Anna’s two previous books have been brilliantly researched and widely praised – she has the breadth and vision to see our great cities as vast, complex organisms which through a strange moral, legal and imaginative collapse in government and finance are now quite needlessly in a terrible state. A city is there to be lived in by people, not treated as a mere pile of assets in need of maximisation. Super Prime will be a shocking book – but it will also show how the world’s great cities can be taken back."
