Why do some urban governing regimes realize a more equal distribution of public goods than others? Local government interventions in São Paulo, Brazil, have produced surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goods — housing and sanitation — between 1989 and 2016. I use original interviews and archival research for a comparative-historical analysis of variation across time in São Paulo’s governance of housing and sanitation. I argue that sequential configurations of a) “embeddedness” of the local state in civil society and b) the “cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain why and when urban governing regimes generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods on a programmatic basis. I further illustrate how these configurations can explain variation in urban governing regimes across the world.

为什么有些城市治理体制比其他体制实现了更公平的公共物品分配？1989 年至 2016 年间，巴西圣保罗的地方政府干预对住宅公共产品（住房和卫生设施）进行了令人惊讶的有效再分配。住房和卫生。我认为 a) 地方国家在公民社会中的“嵌入性”和 b) 地方国家制度领域的“凝聚力”的连续配置，解释了城市治理体制为何以及何时产生分配公共物品的协调能力一个程序基础。我进一步说明了这些配置如何解释世界各地城市管理制度的变化。