Lending Capital

This chapter describes how White mortgage bankers relied on segregated interindustry networking with real estate agents to shore up their lending portfolios. In doing so, they helped sustain racially segregated buyer–agent–banker networks and loan opportunities. The chapter also demonstrates how White real estate agents undertook such networking and, in some cases, used the racist market rubric to interpret mortgage bankers of color, whom they excluded from their professional circles. In addition, the chapter describes how mortgage bankers depended on the routine of racialized discretion when they interpreted mortgage borrower and property risk. They gave White borrowers and homes in White neighborhoods the benefit of the doubt, assuming they were the least risky and most valuable. By contrast, they cast shadows of doubt on borrowers of color and homes in neighborhoods of color, interpreting these individuals and areas through the racist market rubric. Racialized discretion has consequences for whether and under what conditions mortgage loans are approved.

Conclusion

The Conclusion returns to the book’s overarching question of how racism among housing market professionals contributes to persistent racial segregation. In addition to summarizing the findings from previous chapters, the Conclusion foregrounds housing consumers’ perspectives and experiences, showing that housing market professionals exert significant influence in shaping consumers’ options, decisions, and outcomes. The Conclusion also discusses the book’s contributions to existing racial segregation theory, namely the “big three” mechanisms of racial discrimination, racial residential preferences, and economic inequality. It concludes by highlighting the imperative to intervene in housing market racism and create equal housing opportunities for housing consumers and neighborhoods.

H-Town

This chapter describes the Houston, Texas, context, providing a historical overview of the city’s rapid urbanization and diversification; its persistent and, in some cases, growing racial segregation; and its housing market. The chapter also introduces six Houston neighborhoods—Denver Harbor, Fifth Ward, Golden Acres, Heights, Lindale Park, and Riverside Terrace—to anchor the city to local areas that served as the reference points for the housing market professionals researched by the author. The chapter shows that although Houston is unique, it is also an exemplary case for understanding how an ostensibly free market approach to housing and development obscures the very active role market professionals play in shaping unequal urban landscapes.

Fair Housing

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.

Appraising Value

This chapter analyzes how appraisers assess home value. It demonstrates that despite surface changes to appraisal requirements, the logic and methods guiding contemporary appraisers’ work reflected the explicitly racist appraisal logic and methods instituted by the U.S. federal government and the appraisal industry in the early and mid-twentieth century. When using such logic, appraisers assumed that racially uniform, White neighborhoods were the most valuable. They also assumed that White home buyers were the reference point for neighborhood desirability and value. This logic guided their methods, such that they typically chose “comps” from within singular neighborhoods. This chapter also uses quantitative data to show that homes in White Houston neighborhoods were systematically appraised higher than homes in otherwise similar Black and Latinx Houston neighborhoods in 2015. Such inequality is not merely an artifact of explicitly racist historical appraisals; rather, it is actively produced by contemporary appraisers.

Introduction

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.

Building Homes

This chapter discusses how housing developers used the racist or people-oriented market rubric to interpret their mental maps of Houston and made choices about where to develop land for residential use. Developers first thought about development at the local neighborhood level, reading neighborhoods through one of these two rubrics to make choices about where to build and where not to build. When they considered specific plots of land to purchase, they engaged in reverse blockbusting. Several housing developers targeted homeowners of color and others they perceived as gullible or more likely to sell for cheap. They did so in order to purchase land at bargain prices and then make a higher profit when selling the new homes they constructed on this land.

Brokering Sales

This chapter examines how real estate brokerage routines pressured agents to use the racist market rubric in their work and how brokerages’ silence about unofficial yet potentially discriminatory routines served as a form of approval for agents adopting these routines. When agents interpreted established brokerage routines through the racist market rubric, they cultivated relationships with White individuals and excluded Asian, Black, and Latinx individuals. At times, brokerage routines—such as the automated use of the local real estate board’s market area map—required agents to advertise homes according to a racial–spatial hierarchy. In addition, brokerages remained silent when White agents pursued alternate routines outside the bounds of brokerage organizations, such as when they took on pocket listings—that is, homes not advertised on the Multiple Listing Service. Given the racial patterns of real estate networking in Houston, White home buyers had disproportionate access to pocket listings, yet White agents faced no verbal, professional, or legal sanctions for adopting this behavior.