Race Brokers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Rank Order ◽  
Exchange Process ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Mortgage Lending ◽  
First Century ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Professional Tool

This book examines how housing market professionals—including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers—construct twenty-first-century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, the book shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people—or refusing to connect people—to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or equitable, people-affirming ideas. Typically, White housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. The book tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process—from the home’s construction to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, and home appraisals. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status quo, a small number of housing market professionals—almost all of color—draw on equitable, people-affirming ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, denaturalizing housing market racism. The book highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades White housing market professionals’ work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a fair housing market.

Brokering Ties and Inequality: How White Real Estate Agents Recreate Advantage and Exclusion in Urban Housing Markets

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 350-368
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
Real Estate Brokerage ◽  
Real Estate Agents ◽  
One Year ◽  
Depth Interviews

The real estate brokerage industry has long perpetuated overt discrimination against minority housing consumers, but we know little about how it may reproduce inequality through less overt means. In this article, I highlight real estate agents’ (REAs) reliance on social networks as key to how this “new inequality” happens. Specifically, I investigate the contextual factors that enable white agents to maintain predominantly white networks and how disparate-impact consequences for minority home buyers and sellers emerge when white agents deploy their networks in ordinary housing situations. My examination relies on one year of ethnographic research with 10 REAs and 49 in-depth interviews with REAs, home buyers, and home sellers in the Houston housing market. I begin my analysis by documenting agents’ racially stratified networks. I then unpack how agent pay structure and status as market gatekeepers supported the persistence of white agents’ white networks and constrained minority agents’ business opportunities. Finally, I show how white agents’ reliance on white networks came together with other widely shared practices to negatively affect minority home buyers and sellers, excluding them from for-sale homes and competitive customer service. I conclude by discussing the implications of my findings for mitigating housing market inequality.

scholarly journals Black Gold, White Power: Mapping Oil, Real Estate, and Racial Segregation in the Los Angeles Basin, 1900-1939

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel G. Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Mortgage Lending ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Oil Boom ◽  
Political Exclusion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Power Mapping

In 1923, Southern California produced over twenty percent of the world’s oil. At the epicenter of an oil boom from 1892 to the 1930s, Los Angeles grew into the nation’s fifth largest city. By the end of the rush, it had also become one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Historians have overlooked the relationship between industrialists drilling for oil and real estate developers codifying a racist housing market, namely through “redlining” maps and mortgage lending. While redlining is typically understood as a problem of horizontal territory, this paper argues that the mapping of the underground—the location and volume of subterranean oil fields, in particular—was a crucial technique in underwriting urban apartheid. Mapping technologies linked oil exploitation with restrictive property rights, constructing oil as a resource and vertically engineering a racialized housing market. By focusing on petro-industrialization interlocked with segregationist housing, this article reveals an unexamined chapter in Los Angeles’s history of resource exploitation and racial capitalism. Moreover, it contributes to a growing literature on the social production of resources, extractive technology and political exclusion, and the technoscientific practices used by states and corporations to mine the underground while constructing metropolitan inequality above ground.

Fair Housing

Race Brokers ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 143-161
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
Organizational Routines ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Fundamental Point ◽  
Market Opportunities

By regularly acting out racialized organizational routines and interpreting ostensibly neutral routines through the lens of racist ideas comprising the racist market rubric, real estate professionals separate people and neighborhoods by race. In doing so, these race and racism brokers ensure that the most housing market opportunities and resources are reserved for White individuals and neighborhoods. Their actions exclude individuals and neighborhoods of color from such opportunities. This chapter describes the author’s policy recommendations for interrupting such housing market racism. These recommendations are directed toward governmental, real estate, and fair housing agencies and organizations rather than toward individual professionals. Broadly, the chapter’s recommendations focus on how to monitor housing market professionals (particularly housing developers and appraisers), prosecute violations of fair housing law, and directly intervene in organizational routines that implicitly or explicitly enable racist interpretations of individuals and neighborhoods. These recommendations return to the fundamental point of this book: Racial segregation is not a natural or neutral feature of urban landscapes.

Introduction

Race Brokers ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Organizational Routines ◽  
Urban America ◽  
The People

The Introduction presents the book’s driving question: How does racism contribute to the persistence of racial segregation in urban America? It sets up the book’s answer to that question by highlighting a group of people the author theorizes are central to housing exchange: housing market professionals. Housing market professionals are the influential gatekeepers, or brokers, who connect—or avoid connecting—housing consumers to housing resources and opportunities. Professionals’ decisions about whether and whom to connect occur through what the author calls the racist market rubric—the set of racist ideas that links racial status with market worth—or the people-oriented market rubric—the set of equitable, people-affirming ideas that equalizes market worth. Professionals’ use of the racist market rubric in particular is supported by real estate organizational routines. The Introduction provides a brief overview of the book’s research methods and data, as well as brief chapter summaries.

The geography of climate migration

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Michał Burzyński ◽  
Frédéric Docquier ◽  
Hendrik Scheewel
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Migration ◽  
First Century ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Mobility Data ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Working Age ◽  
Internal Mobility ◽  
Almost All

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the long-term effects of climate change on the mobility of working-age people. We use a world economy model that covers almost all the countries around the world, and distinguishes between rural and urban regions as well as between flooded and unflooded areas. The model is calibrated to match international and internal mobility data by education level for the last 30 years, and is then simulated under climate change variants. We endogenize the size, dyadic, and skill structure of climate migration. When considering moderate climate scenarios, we predict mobility responses in the range of 70–108 million workers over the course of the twenty-first century. Most of these movements are local or inter-regional. South–South international migration responses are smaller, while the South–North migration response is of the “brain drain” type and induces a permanent increase in the number of foreigners in OECD countries in the range of 6–9% only. Changes in the sea level mainly translate into forced local movements. By contrast, inter-regional and international movements are sensitive to temperature-related changes in productivity. Lastly, we show that relaxing international migration restrictions may exacerbate the poverty effect of climate change at origin if policymakers are unable to select/screen individuals in extreme poverty.

scholarly journals The role and significance of planning in the determination of house prices in Australia: Recent policy debates

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2198894
Author(s):  
Peter Phibbs ◽  
Nicole Gurran
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
House Prices ◽  
Housing Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Price Inflation ◽  
Depth Analysis

On the world stage, Australian cities have been punching above their weight in global indexes of housing prices, sparking heated debates about the causes of and remedies for, sustained house price inflation. This paper examines the evidence base underpinning such debates, and the policy claims made by key commentators and stakeholders. With reference to the wider context of Australia’s housing market over a 20 year period, as well as an in depth analysis of a research paper by Australia’s central Reserve Bank, we show how economic theories commonly position land use planning as a primary driver of new supply constraints but overlook other explanations for housing market behavior. In doing so, we offer an alternative understanding of urban housing markets and land use planning interventions as a basis for more effective policy intervention in Australian and other world cities.

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