Race Brokers

"Race Brokers examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers 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 anti-racist ideas. Typically, 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. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighbourhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market"--

"Race Brokers examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers 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 anti-racist ideas. Typically, 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. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighbourhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market"--

What do you want for yourself in the next five, ten years? Do your plans involve marriage, kids, a new job? These are the questions a real estate agent might ask in an attempt to unearth information they can employ to complete a sale, which as Upsold shows, often results in upselling. In this book, sociologist Max Besbris shows how agents successfully upsell, inducing buyers to spend more than their initially stated price ceilings. His research reveals how face-to-face interactions influence buyers’ ideas about which neighborhoods are desirable and which are less-worthy investments and how these preferences ultimately contribute to neighborhood inequality. ? Stratification defines cities in the contemporary United States. In an era marked by increasing income segregation, one of the main sources of this inequality is housing prices. A crucial part of wealth inequality, housing prices are also directly linked to the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial and ethnic segregation. Upsold shows how the interactions between real estate agents and buyers make or break neighborhood reputations and construct neighborhoods by price. Employing revealing ethnographic and quantitative housing data, Besbris outlines precisely how social influences come together during the sales process. In Upsold, we get a deep dive into the role that the interactions with sales agents play in buyers’ decision-making and how neighborhoods are differentiated, valorized, and deemed to be worthy of a certain price.

Reading Asian American and Latino literature, Bilingual Brokers traces the shift in attitudes toward bilingualism in postwar America from the focus on cultural assimilation to that of resource management. Interweaving the social significance of language as human capital and the literary significance of English as the language of cultural capital, Jeehyun Lim examines the dual meaning of bilingualism as liability and asset in relation to anxieties surrounding “new” immigration and globalization. Using the work of Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, Américo Paredes, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Chang-rae Lee, Julia Alvarez, and Ha Jin as examples, Lim reveals how bilingual personhood illustrates a regime of flexible inclusion where an economic calculus of one’s value crystallizes at the intersections of language and racial difference. By pointing to the nexus of race, capital, and language as the focal point of postwar negotiations of difference and inclusion, Bilingual Brokers probes the faultlines of postwar liberalism in conceptualizing and articulating who is and is not considered to be an American.

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo—a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century—uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America. There was a time when North Kenwood–Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood–Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. “A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one.”—Chicago Reader “To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows . . . turn to Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block.”—Boston Globe

The Living Inca Town presents a rich case study of tourism in Ollantaytambo, a rapidly developing destination in the southern Peruvian Andes and the starting point for many popular treks to Machu Picchu. Tourism is generally welcomed in Ollantaytambo, as it provides a steady stream of work for local businesses, particularly those run by women. However, the obvious material inequalities between locals and tourists affect many interactions and have contributed to conflict and aggression throughout the tourist zones. Based on a number of research visits over the course of fifteen years, The Living Inca Town examines the experiences and interactions of locals, visitors, and tourism brokers. The book makes room for unique perspectives and uses innovative visual methods, including photovoice images and pen and ink drawings, to represent different viewpoints of day-to-day tourist encounters. The Living Inca Town vividly illustrates how tourism can perpetuate gendered and global inequalities, while also exploring new avenues to challenge and renegotiate these roles.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.