Book Review: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America

Abstract

For urban sociologists, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America, is a book we needed. This comprehensive and in-depth mixed methods study of housing market professionals provides an essential contribution to the literature on housing and racial segregation. While quantitative and qualitative urban researchers have documented the extent of racial segregation, its persistence over time, and its consequences for neighborhoods and individuals, a growing literature is investigating the role of the housing search process in perpetuating contemporary racial segregation. Still, we know very little about the practices of the professionals who clearly play an outsized role in shaping the housing market. Previous research has demonstrated the effects of racial discrimination from housing market professionals, but there has been limited research uncovering how discrimination happens. Recent qualitative work from Max Besbris has also focused on real estate agents but only in the particular context of very high-end real estate markets. Here, Elizabeth Korver-Glenn expands on the limited previous work in this area with one year of ethnographic data from following 13 housing market professionals, in-depth interviews with 102 housing market professionals and consumers, and quantitative analysis of housing market data. In this groundbreaking and highly accessible book, Korver-Glenn describes these housing market professionals as “race brokers,” gatekeepers who are especially influential in shaping ideas about race and the ways those ideas shape who gets access to resources through their professional role. In the case of housing market professionals in Houston, these race brokers uphold and build on (or in rarer cases intervene in) a system of racial segregation and racial inequality by acting on their own ideas about race in their professional activities. As a discipline, we are often focused on racism as social structure, which is essential for explaining the pervasiveness and persistence of this social force in our society. While Race Brokers never loses sight of the structural forces upholding racial inequality, it also reckons with how housing market professionals overtly and covertly engage in racism at a micro level. This project demonstrates how racial inequality on a large scale is produced through the racist actions of individuals. Ultimately, this analysis that accounts for both structure and agency allows for real insight into racial processes and lays the groundwork for understanding how we could intervene in those processes. Most of the housing market professionals examined in this project (developers, real estate agents, lenders, and appraisers), in particular, almost all of the White housing market professionals, used a “racist market rubric,” or a racial frame specific to understanding the housing market, to guide their professional actions. Using the racist market rubric, these race brokers applied the idea that White neighborhoods and individuals are the most desirable, valuable, and lucrative. By contrast, most professionals of color in the study used a counter frame, a “people-oriented market rubric,” that resisted the dominate racist frame by affirming the value of neighborhoods and individuals of color. 1169640 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841231169640City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2023