Pub Date : 2023-10-23DOI: 10.1177/15356841231207626
Aaron Foote, Cedric de Leon
What conditions gave rise to the Flint Water Crisis? Students of contemporary urban disasters tend to advance two claims, increasingly in tandem. First, preexisting racial and class inequalities structure both the impact of disasters on urban communities and the dynamics of resettlement. Second and similarly, neoliberalism (variously theorized as neoliberal urbanism and the growth machine) prefigures urban disasters and underpins an ensuing market-oriented process of redevelopment. While long-standing patterns of inequality and neoliberalization are important contextual factors, by themselves they tend to undertheorize the timing and ecological content of urban crises. In this article, we synthesize the literature on uneven development, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism to advance an alternative hypothesis. Drawing on interviews with Flint residents and Michigan officials, the archival correspondence of government agencies, and ethnographic data, we argue that the Flint Water Crisis was the consequence of an extractivist project of White state and suburban actors to “regionalize” and thereby expropriate the assets and natural resources controlled by the predominantly Black working-class city of Detroit. Specifically, the formation of two regional water authorities required that Flint leave the Detroit Water and Sewer Department for an interim water source, the Flint River, which had been contaminated by decades of automotive toxins.
{"title":"Origins of the Flint Water Crisis: Uneven Development, Urban Political Ecology, and Racial Capitalism","authors":"Aaron Foote, Cedric de Leon","doi":"10.1177/15356841231207626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231207626","url":null,"abstract":"What conditions gave rise to the Flint Water Crisis? Students of contemporary urban disasters tend to advance two claims, increasingly in tandem. First, preexisting racial and class inequalities structure both the impact of disasters on urban communities and the dynamics of resettlement. Second and similarly, neoliberalism (variously theorized as neoliberal urbanism and the growth machine) prefigures urban disasters and underpins an ensuing market-oriented process of redevelopment. While long-standing patterns of inequality and neoliberalization are important contextual factors, by themselves they tend to undertheorize the timing and ecological content of urban crises. In this article, we synthesize the literature on uneven development, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism to advance an alternative hypothesis. Drawing on interviews with Flint residents and Michigan officials, the archival correspondence of government agencies, and ethnographic data, we argue that the Flint Water Crisis was the consequence of an extractivist project of White state and suburban actors to “regionalize” and thereby expropriate the assets and natural resources controlled by the predominantly Black working-class city of Detroit. Specifically, the formation of two regional water authorities required that Flint leave the Detroit Water and Sewer Department for an interim water source, the Flint River, which had been contaminated by decades of automotive toxins.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135413596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.1177/15356841231198458
Pham Thanh Thoi, Truc Hong Nguyen, Erik Harms
Morphological distinctions between Ho Chi Minh City’s low-rise and high-rise residential neighborhoods make it possible to compare how residents in spatially different neighborhoods responded to the city’s strict lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article combines spatial analysis of COVID-19 cases with qualitative interviews conducted in different neighborhoods over the course of the pandemic to highlight observable patterns across the social responses. In the early days of the pandemic, residents in low-rise neighborhoods developed successful resilience strategies by drawing upon pre-existing relationships and forms of trust to overcome the lockdown’s shocks. Over time, however, residents in vertical high-rise communities developed even more successful strategies for managing the prolonged lockdown measures by relying on building managers and digital tools to help pool and share resources. The results show that the role of social capital in a crisis is not only impacted by spatial considerations but that it changes over time.
{"title":"Spaces of Social Capital across Pandemic Time: COVID-19 Responses in Ho Chi Minh City’s High-rise and Low-rise Neighborhoods","authors":"Pham Thanh Thoi, Truc Hong Nguyen, Erik Harms","doi":"10.1177/15356841231198458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231198458","url":null,"abstract":"Morphological distinctions between Ho Chi Minh City’s low-rise and high-rise residential neighborhoods make it possible to compare how residents in spatially different neighborhoods responded to the city’s strict lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article combines spatial analysis of COVID-19 cases with qualitative interviews conducted in different neighborhoods over the course of the pandemic to highlight observable patterns across the social responses. In the early days of the pandemic, residents in low-rise neighborhoods developed successful resilience strategies by drawing upon pre-existing relationships and forms of trust to overcome the lockdown’s shocks. Over time, however, residents in vertical high-rise communities developed even more successful strategies for managing the prolonged lockdown measures by relying on building managers and digital tools to help pool and share resources. The results show that the role of social capital in a crisis is not only impacted by spatial considerations but that it changes over time.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135095538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-23DOI: 10.1177/15356841231190029
Yimeng Yang
Using the Enninglu redevelopment project as a case, this article examines how local governments in China pacify urban protests, consolidate the political legitimacy of urban agendas, and re-regulate state-society relations through cultural policy-making. The Enninglu urban renewal project has experienced three waves of social resistance since 2006. Accordingly, the government has made three rounds of urban policy changes, successively incorporating heritage preservation policies, creative economy policies, and public participation policies in response to different social demands. The case of Enninglu illustrates that cultural city-making in China is not merely “state-led,” but is assembled in a process of conflict between the state and society at the local level. This article argues for bringing the perspective of “state-society relations” to the study of Asian cultural/creative cities and further proposes a “legitimacy framework” to conceptualize the mechanisms of urban cultural policy-making in the context of social resistance.
{"title":"Cultural Policy Formation and State-Society Relations: Culture-led Urban Redevelopment of Enninglu in Guangzhou","authors":"Yimeng Yang","doi":"10.1177/15356841231190029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231190029","url":null,"abstract":"Using the Enninglu redevelopment project as a case, this article examines how local governments in China pacify urban protests, consolidate the political legitimacy of urban agendas, and re-regulate state-society relations through cultural policy-making. The Enninglu urban renewal project has experienced three waves of social resistance since 2006. Accordingly, the government has made three rounds of urban policy changes, successively incorporating heritage preservation policies, creative economy policies, and public participation policies in response to different social demands. The case of Enninglu illustrates that cultural city-making in China is not merely “state-led,” but is assembled in a process of conflict between the state and society at the local level. This article argues for bringing the perspective of “state-society relations” to the study of Asian cultural/creative cities and further proposes a “legitimacy framework” to conceptualize the mechanisms of urban cultural policy-making in the context of social resistance.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135966339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-09DOI: 10.1177/15356841231195616
Kendra Bischoff, Emily Sandusky
Income-segregated contexts may limit residents’ exposure to income inequality, suppressing concerns about economic disparity and support for economic integration. In this article, we assess the relationship between residential income segregation and attitudes about the importance of income integration in schools to understand the link between local economic conditions and individuals’ attitudes about social equity. We test this relationship by measuring residential income segregation at two geographic scales—meso-level institutional segregation between school districts and micro-level neighborhood segregation between census tracts. We find a negative relationship between school district income segregation in individuals’ residential counties and beliefs about the importance of income integration in schools, but no relationship between more fine-grained neighborhood income segregation and these same beliefs. The results suggest that the degree to which residents problematize income-segregated school contexts is associated with the relative income homogeneity of the school districts where they live, which represent the salient political boundary for the administration of educational services. These findings contribute to broader knowledge about the varied pathways and spatial scales through which segregated environments may shape beliefs about social and economic inequality.
{"title":"Local Economic Segregation and Opinions about Income Integration in Schools","authors":"Kendra Bischoff, Emily Sandusky","doi":"10.1177/15356841231195616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231195616","url":null,"abstract":"Income-segregated contexts may limit residents’ exposure to income inequality, suppressing concerns about economic disparity and support for economic integration. In this article, we assess the relationship between residential income segregation and attitudes about the importance of income integration in schools to understand the link between local economic conditions and individuals’ attitudes about social equity. We test this relationship by measuring residential income segregation at two geographic scales—meso-level institutional segregation between school districts and micro-level neighborhood segregation between census tracts. We find a negative relationship between school district income segregation in individuals’ residential counties and beliefs about the importance of income integration in schools, but no relationship between more fine-grained neighborhood income segregation and these same beliefs. The results suggest that the degree to which residents problematize income-segregated school contexts is associated with the relative income homogeneity of the school districts where they live, which represent the salient political boundary for the administration of educational services. These findings contribute to broader knowledge about the varied pathways and spatial scales through which segregated environments may shape beliefs about social and economic inequality.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136191869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1177/15356841231187696
S. Tissot
neighborhood-specific “quality-of-life plans,” which the NCP’s programming was meant to advance. As Gonzales convincingly shows, however, residents ultimately had little influence over the NCP’s neighborhood implementation. The NCP’s central leadership socialized its local partners to become trusting and loyal partners, which required avoiding contentious programs as well as anything that might trigger conflict with city hall and downtown elites. The third and fourth chapters focus on grassroots organizations in Englewood and Little Village. These organizations launched initiatives that flowed more directly from resident demand and variably included such things as improving access to public transit and nutritious food, increasing park space, enhancing safety, and demanding political accountability from city hall representatives. Gonzales describes how these community organizations “educated residents about politics, urban policy, and processes related to land use” (p. 87), thus increasing residents’ ability to assert their own needs when confronting powerful individuals, agencies, and corporations. Deploying their collective skepticism, furthermore, community organizations strategically activated ties to experts, universities, environmental groups, and sometimes even NCP-affiliated organizations while ensuring that their vision would not be coopted. As a reader interested in local activism and mobilization, I was especially captivated by the chapters dealing with grassroots activism, which provide a wealth of fascinating cases and political dynamics. In relation to the study of the NCP itself, I would have appreciated an even deeper engagement in two ways. First, Gonzales criticizes the NCP at length for its focus on social service provision rather than a more radical agenda of mobilizing and durably empowering residents. Her diagnosis of the NCP as fundamentally nonradical and even elite-friendly is certainly persuasive, but it will not entirely surprise readers familiar with the history of urban antipoverty and development initiatives. I would have liked more discussion of how the NCP case extends this literature. Second, the book does not describe the NCP’s local social services or the experience of using them in any detail. As Gonzales notes, some residents criticized the NCP for “poverty pimping,” but the perspective of those who relied on the program’s services remains largely unexamined. How did clients feel about the NCP’s programs? Did they see them as belittling patronage or did they feel more favorably, possibly even empowered? Including their experiences would have enabled the reader to come to an even more complete assessment of the NCP. Building a Better Chicago represents a valuable addition to the literatures on neighborhood development, community organizations, and urban activism. The book is closely attuned to the recent trend of analyzing neighborhoods as political fields that are shaped by both local and nonlocal actors, inclu
{"title":"Book Reviews: Clément Rivière, Leurs enfants dans la ville. Enquête auprès de parents à Paris et à Milan","authors":"S. Tissot","doi":"10.1177/15356841231187696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231187696","url":null,"abstract":"neighborhood-specific “quality-of-life plans,” which the NCP’s programming was meant to advance. As Gonzales convincingly shows, however, residents ultimately had little influence over the NCP’s neighborhood implementation. The NCP’s central leadership socialized its local partners to become trusting and loyal partners, which required avoiding contentious programs as well as anything that might trigger conflict with city hall and downtown elites. The third and fourth chapters focus on grassroots organizations in Englewood and Little Village. These organizations launched initiatives that flowed more directly from resident demand and variably included such things as improving access to public transit and nutritious food, increasing park space, enhancing safety, and demanding political accountability from city hall representatives. Gonzales describes how these community organizations “educated residents about politics, urban policy, and processes related to land use” (p. 87), thus increasing residents’ ability to assert their own needs when confronting powerful individuals, agencies, and corporations. Deploying their collective skepticism, furthermore, community organizations strategically activated ties to experts, universities, environmental groups, and sometimes even NCP-affiliated organizations while ensuring that their vision would not be coopted. As a reader interested in local activism and mobilization, I was especially captivated by the chapters dealing with grassroots activism, which provide a wealth of fascinating cases and political dynamics. In relation to the study of the NCP itself, I would have appreciated an even deeper engagement in two ways. First, Gonzales criticizes the NCP at length for its focus on social service provision rather than a more radical agenda of mobilizing and durably empowering residents. Her diagnosis of the NCP as fundamentally nonradical and even elite-friendly is certainly persuasive, but it will not entirely surprise readers familiar with the history of urban antipoverty and development initiatives. I would have liked more discussion of how the NCP case extends this literature. Second, the book does not describe the NCP’s local social services or the experience of using them in any detail. As Gonzales notes, some residents criticized the NCP for “poverty pimping,” but the perspective of those who relied on the program’s services remains largely unexamined. How did clients feel about the NCP’s programs? Did they see them as belittling patronage or did they feel more favorably, possibly even empowered? Including their experiences would have enabled the reader to come to an even more complete assessment of the NCP. Building a Better Chicago represents a valuable addition to the literatures on neighborhood development, community organizations, and urban activism. The book is closely attuned to the recent trend of analyzing neighborhoods as political fields that are shaped by both local and nonlocal actors, inclu","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46003627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-21DOI: 10.1177/15356841231187703
J. Doering
Fighting poverty in urban communities has not been a policy priority in the United States for almost half a century. Nevertheless, the state and foundations occasionally launch time-limited programs that seek to encourage development and provide economic opportunities in low-income neighborhoods. How do these programs engage their target communities? Do they empower residents, or do they simply provide temporary relief? And how do these programs relate to grassroots initiatives that residents themselves may launch to improve their neighborhoods? Teresa Irene Gonzales asks and answers these questions in her book Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment. Building a Better Chicago presents findings from Gonzales’s qualitative study of community organizations in two Chicago neighborhoods—Greater Englewood and Little Village—whose populations are, respectively, majority Black and majority Latinx. At the time of Gonzales’s research, some community organizations within these neighborhoods received funding through the MacArthur Foundation’s New Communities Program (NCP), which sought to transform “distressed or vulnerable neighborhoods into areas that have jobs that provide a living wage, have successful business corridors, and are safe environments, with low levels of crime” (p. 31). The book examines the NCP and its local implementation, including its selective inclusion of resident input, and compares the NCP’s agenda and approach to local initiatives fielded by grassroots organizations that did not receive NCP funding. In this way, the book provides a comparative view of the NCP’s “development from above” and grassroots’ “development from below” approaches. The book’s first chapter familiarizes readers with Englewood and Little Village and the NCP and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing development initiatives in relation to issues of trust and social capital. While many developmental initiatives expressly seek to cultivate trust and relationships as part of their efforts of addressing local problems, Gonzales argues that residents and activists in low-income neighborhoods have good reasons to distrust politicians and other powerbrokers, including those that claim to have residents’ best interests in mind. Instead, activists are better off cultivating what Gonzales calls “collective skepticism,” an arm’s length way of relating to the powerful that allows for temporary collaboration while highlighting power differentials and competing interests. Chapter two describes the NCP and its organizational structure in more detail. Centrally administered by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (better known as LISC), the NCP selected neighborhood-based lead agencies that provided social services and further distributed funds to local service providers. To choose and design these services, the NCP did solicit resident input by holding community visioning meetings that created 1187703 CTYXXX10.1177/153568412
{"title":"Book Reviews: Teresa Irene Gonzales, Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment","authors":"J. Doering","doi":"10.1177/15356841231187703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231187703","url":null,"abstract":"Fighting poverty in urban communities has not been a policy priority in the United States for almost half a century. Nevertheless, the state and foundations occasionally launch time-limited programs that seek to encourage development and provide economic opportunities in low-income neighborhoods. How do these programs engage their target communities? Do they empower residents, or do they simply provide temporary relief? And how do these programs relate to grassroots initiatives that residents themselves may launch to improve their neighborhoods? Teresa Irene Gonzales asks and answers these questions in her book Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment. Building a Better Chicago presents findings from Gonzales’s qualitative study of community organizations in two Chicago neighborhoods—Greater Englewood and Little Village—whose populations are, respectively, majority Black and majority Latinx. At the time of Gonzales’s research, some community organizations within these neighborhoods received funding through the MacArthur Foundation’s New Communities Program (NCP), which sought to transform “distressed or vulnerable neighborhoods into areas that have jobs that provide a living wage, have successful business corridors, and are safe environments, with low levels of crime” (p. 31). The book examines the NCP and its local implementation, including its selective inclusion of resident input, and compares the NCP’s agenda and approach to local initiatives fielded by grassroots organizations that did not receive NCP funding. In this way, the book provides a comparative view of the NCP’s “development from above” and grassroots’ “development from below” approaches. The book’s first chapter familiarizes readers with Englewood and Little Village and the NCP and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing development initiatives in relation to issues of trust and social capital. While many developmental initiatives expressly seek to cultivate trust and relationships as part of their efforts of addressing local problems, Gonzales argues that residents and activists in low-income neighborhoods have good reasons to distrust politicians and other powerbrokers, including those that claim to have residents’ best interests in mind. Instead, activists are better off cultivating what Gonzales calls “collective skepticism,” an arm’s length way of relating to the powerful that allows for temporary collaboration while highlighting power differentials and competing interests. Chapter two describes the NCP and its organizational structure in more detail. Centrally administered by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (better known as LISC), the NCP selected neighborhood-based lead agencies that provided social services and further distributed funds to local service providers. To choose and design these services, the NCP did solicit resident input by holding community visioning meetings that created 1187703 CTYXXX10.1177/153568412","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42663037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-26DOI: 10.1177/15356841231169640
Nora E. Taplin-Kaguru
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
{"title":"Book Review: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America","authors":"Nora E. Taplin-Kaguru","doi":"10.1177/15356841231169640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841231169640","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46009204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-20DOI: 10.1177/15356841231169639
Greggor Mattson
The first chapter provides an overview of some of the neighborhoods discussed in the book, how they are racialized by market professionals and the housing market dynamics that shape them. Korver-Glenn makes a convincing case for why Houston is a great case for this study. It is both highly racially diverse and highly racially segregated, while also being a relatively affordable housing market. The city therefore provides opportunities to look at racism’s direct effects on housing outcomes. The second chapter looks at the role of developers in shaping racialized space. This is a particularly innovative section of the book, as housing developers have been especially understudied in the urban sociology literature. It demonstrates how developers support racial segregation and racial inequality through their choices of where to build and who to build for. Most developers, especially White developers, consciously choose to build in White neighborhoods in an effort to appeal to White buyers. Some developers also engage in a practice Korver-Glen calls “reverse blockbusting” where they target homeowners of color when buying land, encouraging them to sell their homes quickly on terms that were favorable to the developers, a practice that likely contributes to gentrification. “Brokering Sales,” the third chapter, investigates how real estate agents rely on personal networking to build their clientele and connect to other kinds of housing professionals, and those networks were highly racialized, with White real estate agents in particular seeking White clients and excluding nonWhite professionals from their networks. They then maintain these networks by tolerating the racism of their clients and offering their own racially charged opinions about neighborhoods and schools. The fourth chapter, “Lending Capital,” demonstrates how mortgage lenders imprint their racial ideas on to the housing process. White mortgage lenders work to sustain racially segregated networks of buyers, agents, lenders, and loan opportunities. They also apply a racist market rubric when using their discretion to evaluate the risk of buyers and homes, which advantage White buyers and homes in White neighborhoods and disadvantage buyers of color and homes in neighborhoods of color. Chapter 5, “Appraising Value,” interrogates the role that appraisers play in furthering racial inequality in the housing market and demonstrates that racial inequality in appraisals is produced not just by historical legacies but through the active application of racist rubrics by contemporary appraisers. The concluding chapter presents innovative solutions for intervening in this racially structured market. By studying all four types of housing market professionals, KorverGlenn is able to offer suggestions for how federal, state, and local governments could audit and enforce fair housing practices for developers, appraisers, and lenders in addition to real estate agents. She argues for a more systemic approach
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