In the first installment of our new series, A People's Guide to Power: Real Estate Edition, we explore the political power of the real estate industry in the early part of the 20^th century as public housing began to replace tenement buildings in New York City with Richard Plunz, professor of architecture and the director of the Earth Institute's Urban Design Lab at Columbia University and the author of City Riffs: Urbanism, Ecology, Place (Lars Müller, 2016) and David Favaloro, director of Curatorial Affairs and Hebrew Technical Institute research fellow at the Tenement Museum.