Theorizing Gentrification as a Process of Racial Capitalism

Academics largely define gentrification based on changes in the class demographics of neighborhood residents from predominately low-income to middle-class. This ignores that gentrification always occurs in spaces defined by both class and race. In this article, I use the lens of racial capitalism to theorize gentrification as a racialized, profit-accumulating process, integrating the perspective that spaces are always racialized to class-centered theories. Using the prior literature on gentrification in the United States, I demonstrate how the concepts of value, valuation, and devaluation from racial capitalism explain where and how gentrification unfolds. Exposure to gentrification varies depending on a neighborhood’s racial composition and the gentrification stakeholders involved, which contributes to racial differences in the scale and pace of change and the implications of those changes for the processes of displacement. Revising our understanding of gentrification to address the racialization of space helps resolve seemingly contradictory findings across qualitative and quantitative studies.

Residential Segregation under Jim Crow: Whites, Blacks, and Mulattoes in Southern Cities, 1880–1920

We study the residential patterns of blacks and mulattoes in 10 Southern cities in 1880 and 1920. Researchers have documented the salience of social differences among African Americans in this period, partly related to mulattoes’ higher occupational status. Did these differences result in clustering of these two groups in different neighborhoods, and were mulattoes less separated from whites? If so, did the differences diminish in these decades after Reconstruction due a Jim Crow system that did not distinguish between blacks and mulattoes? We use geocoded census microdata for 1880 and 1920 to address these questions. Segregation between whites and both blacks was already high in 1880, especially at a fine spatial scale, and it increased sharply by 1920. In this respect, whites did not distinguish between these two groups. However, blacks and mulattoes were quite segregated from one another in 1880, and even more so by 1920. This pattern did not result from mulattoes’ moderately higher-class position. Hence, as the color line between whites and all non-whites was becoming harder, blacks and mulattoes were separating further from each other. Understanding what led to this pattern remains a key question about racial identities and racialization in the early twentieth century.

Eyes on the Screen: Digital Interclass Coalitions against Crime in a Gentrifying Rural Town

According to the theories of social disorganization and collective efficacy, population heterogeneity contributes to the erosion of social ties and the increase in crime. I test that assumption through an in-person and digital ethnography in La Calera, a rural area in Colombia undergoing population change through gentrification and facing increasing burglaries, cattle theft, and other crimes. I argue that the use of social media in this socially mixed community for a common goal—safety—enables coalitions among residents that reach across social divisions. By participating in community meetings but especially through social media, residents monitor the area to look after homes and each other, highlighting feelings of “unity” and “cohesion” that strengthen social ties among them and the police despite the heterogeneity in class composition. This case examines when social organization can occur despite class polarization, even in a country with a long civil war history and high class inequality.

Development, Responsibility, and the Creation of Urban Hazard Risk

Scholarly attention has recently shifted to the creation and redevelopment of urban hazardscapes. This body of work demonstrates how housing is deployed in close proximity to hazards, and how the attendant risks have been communicated—or not—to potential residents. Utilizing the case of Calgary, Alberta, this article uses interview data collected from flood-impacted residents, and looks at their perceptions of development and risk creation. The analyses focus on how people attribute responsibility for development in flood-prone areas, and their views on future development in these areas. Results reveal that many residents argued for more government regulations preventing new development in floodplains. Moreover, they viewed developers as narrow-interested capitalists who fail to protect public safety and work to conceal risk from the public. Others wished to see large structural mitigation projects—dams, levees, or floodwalls—or insisted that homebuyers be informed of flood risk prior to purchase. The article concludes by addressing the implications for scholarly work in urban sociology, environmental sociology, and the sociology of disaster—all of which grapple with tensions between place-making and risk creation.

Chinatowns Lost? The Birth and Death of Urban Neighborhoods in an American City

This article historicizes and links the ways in which ethnically segregated neighborhoods are born and die in American cities. Based on a historical ethnography of five Chinatowns in Los Angeles from 1850 to 1950, I highlight Chinese residents’ agency in both the birth and death of their own neighborhoods through a process called neighborhood architomy. Chinese residents split off new neighborhoods from dying neighborhoods while maintaining their institutions and memories, showing how neighborhood death and birth are intimately intertwined. To understand either process fully, we must treat neighborhoods and their residents as sociological and historical agents at both the birth and death of neighborhoods.