The making of an uneven shore: How coastal management and housing policies shaped racial inequality in asbury park NJ

Recent work in urban geography and political ecology has explored the roots of housing segregation in the United States within governmental polices and racial prejudice within the real estate sector. Additional research has demonstrated how coastal management practices has largely benefited wealthy, white communities. In this paper, I bring together insights from these two strands of research to demonstrate how both coastal management and governmental housing policies combined to shape racial inequalities within and around Asbury Park, New Jersey. By focusing on the period between 1945 and 1970, I show how local, state, and federal actors repeatedly prioritized improving and protecting the beachfront areas of the northern New Jersey shore while promising to eventually address the housing and economic needs of the predominately Black ‘West Side’ neighbourhood of Asbury Park. This paper demonstrates that not only did governmental spending on coastal management largely benefit white suburban homeowners but also came at the expense of promised spending within Black neighbourhoods. The case study has implications for other coastal regions in the United States in which housing segregation persists. As climate change and sea level rise unfold, the history of racial discrimination in coastal development raises important considerations for efforts to address emerging hazards and risks.

Measuring Legacies of Collective Racial Violence

The “legacy effect” of lynchings and other forms of racialized violence has shaped patterns of inequality in America. While past studies have been relatively similar in their design—relating basic counts of lynchings to various contemporary outcomes—I argue for and demonstrate a more nuanced approach. I show that if we think of racialized violence as more than just the act of lynching, and consider both the temporal and spatial proximity between historic events of racial violence and contemporary inequality, we can establish this relationship in a more fulsome way. In the case of this study, the relationship is drawn to housing segregation. I argue that expanding the conceptualization of racial violence is critical for both empirical inquiry and shaping community efforts around redress.

Racialized Discourse in Seattle Rental Ad Texts

Racial discrimination has been a central driver of residential segregation for many decades, in the Seattle area as well as in the United States as a whole. In addition to redlining and restrictive housing covenants, housing advertisements included explicit racial language until 1968. Since then, housing patterns have remained racialized, despite overt forms of racial language and discrimination becoming less prevalent. In this paper, we use Structural Topic Models (STM) and qualitative analysis to investigate how contemporary rental listings from the Seattle-Tacoma Craigslist page differ in their description based on neighborhood racial composition. Results show that listings from White neighborhoods emphasize trust and connections to neighborhood history and culture, while listings from non-White neighborhoods offer more incentives and focus on transportation and development features, sundering these units from their surroundings. Without explicitly mentioning race, these listings display racialized neighborhood discourse that might impact neighborhood decision-making in ways that contribute to the perpetuation of housing segregation.