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Austerity budgeting in the public sector, selectively targeting the social state, is a long-established trait of neoliberal governance, but it has been enforced with renewed systemic intensity in the period since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The paper develops the argument that these conditions are defining a new operational matrix for urban politics. Examining some of the leading and bleeding edges of austerity's ‘extreme economy’ in the USA, the paper seeks to locate these developments in the context of mutating processes of neoliberal urbanism, commenting on some of its social and spatial consequences.