Welcome to Mipim, the world’s largest real estate fair, which returned to Cannes this month. Picture an ocean of property developers in blue suits and puffy gilets thronging the French beachfront. Inside the convention centre, instead of salespeople fronting the booths, you’ll find politicians talking up their region’s heritage, sport teams, music scenes, universities and waterfronts, with glossy prospectuses to tempt global investors.

About one-quarter of Mipim attendees are from the UK, with every British banner and brochure focused on one thing: courting investors with the promise of growth. A billboard declares Manchester “The UK’s Growth Opportunity”. Another proclaims that in the Tees Valley, “Anything is Possible”. Newcastle’s CEO and director of investment and growth tell me how the city makes development “dead easy for investment”. But the question is: growth for whom?

At a panel discussion, six senior officials from across the north of England vie to seduce an audience of investors – like Dragons’ Den for property tycoons – to choose their city to build major new property developments. After decades of Tory austerity, and with no sign of Labour restoring council funding to its full pre-2010 levels, this is what Britain’s municipalities are reduced to: grubbing for cash to build projects they cannot afford to fund themselves. It’s an unedifying spectacle to see local governments pleading at the feet of international capital.

After hearing yet another UK council leader lionise the growth opportunities for investors in their city, a consultant next to me mutters: “How do they expect to increase returns for investors without increasing inequality?” It’s a damning question – one which cuts to the heart not just of Mipim, but the whole sector of investment-led real estate development.

Private sector property investors are not altruists. Backers may be persuaded to support major developments, with councils promising to smooth the process of securing planning permission, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When investors put their money into real estate, whether they’re building housing, retail or commercial skyscrapers, they are always hoping to pump up the local land value, pushing up rents to make chunkier profits.

But when property prices grow faster than local wages, inequality shoots up too, straining poorer communities and displacing businesses. Poorer families spend more of their income on housing than rich ones, and the higher that development raises prices, the more extreme the disparity becomes. We see this when longstanding affordable cafes shut in the shadow of a shiny new tower because they can no longer afford the inflated lease, or our kids can’t afford to live where they grew up despite there being more new homes in the area than ever.

And while big developments can generate local construction jobs, not all that investment goes into the local economy. Britain runs a trade deficit of more than £14bn on building materials, for example, meaning a significant proportion of the price of a new tower block is often immediately going out of the country on importing foreign steel and timber. When the original investors are based overseas, as is the case with our big build-to-rent developers – the majority of which are owned by foreign private equity firms – their profits also leave the UK.

In 2016, London was in the grips of a post-Olympics, pre-Brexit boom, and City Hall officials could see that the unfettered growth of the preceding years had come at a cost. Finn Williams, then an officer at the Greater London Authority, told me: “Social infrastructure was becoming more and more stretched. Estate regeneration was displacing existing communities and causing environmental damage. The production and performance spaces that our cultural scene depended on were being lost to redevelopment.”

Williams and his team saw that growth was not inherently good for London, as many had previously assumed. They realised that a line needed to be drawn between developments that could achieve genuine social goals and those which were simply extracting value for shareholders by jacking up asset prices. So in 2017, shortly after he was elected mayor, Sadiq Khan unveiled his Good Growth by Design drive – an explicit acknowledgment that not all types of growth were desirable.

The big problem with Mipim is not the boozy beachfront networking – it is the underlying assumption that local authorities and planning departments should do whatever it takes to enable growth for investors over the good of their communities. It is a myopic mindset that risks flooding Britain with bad developments that are profitable for their shareholders but destructive for everyone else.

UK local authorities go to Cannes seeking private investment because under this government they have little choice, but we may soon find that the cities we are so desperate to flog are no longer worth living in. Their future will have been sold off, one glossy prospectus at a time.