The Artist Loft: Affordable Housing (for White People)

Somebody Blew up Oakland: Dispossession as a Praxis of Racial Ordering

Author(s): Jones, Stephanie Delise | Advisor(s): Hironaka, Ann; Sojoyner, Damien | Abstract: In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship between underdevelopment and Black geographies. I then explore the consequences of this relationship on the city of Oakland. From 2019 to 2021, I conducted 68 in-depth field interviews of Black Oakland residents who detailed the processes and mechanisms by which California housing policy contributed to the displacement of Black subjects. Building on the work of scholars of Black geographies, I have interrogated the myth of development and the relationship to the dispossession of Black geographies. I theorize how racial capitalism produces vulnerable populations through housing in urban areas. The empirical contribution of my research is to provide a framework for Black geographies as people are being displaced. The theoretical contribution is to provide a conceptualization for Black geographies existing through abjections and placelessness as understood through residents of Oakland.I argue that the relationship between dispossession and refusal creates a distinct politic. In chapter two, I theorize the work of Moms for Housing to further understand Black knowledges of resistance to dispossession. Moms for Housing is used as a case study to highlight the many theoretical implications of dispossession occurring in Oakland. In chapter 3, I use two interviews from developers to demonstrate the contradictions in what I call the mythology of development. In chapter 4, I walk through the geographic stories of 2nd and 3rd generation Oakland residents and demonstrate each of the ways they feel locked out of the city as a result of the urban changes. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how communities resist dispossession and disposability. The city of Oakland lacks proactive implementation of equitable housing policy. The lack of action by the city of Oakland puts the onus on everyday residents to organize against their landlords, employers and the state.

Credit Access in the United States

We measure differences in US households’ access to credit and explore the mechanisms driving such differences using newly constructed population-level linked credit bureau and Census data. We find large differences in credit scores by race, class, and hometown that emerge in one’s 20s and persist throughout the life cycle. These gaps are primarily driven by differences in delinquencies that emerge in young adulthood. By age 30, 73% of Black individuals, 62% of those from low-income families, and 51% of those from Appalachia and the South have a 90+ day delinquency on their credit report, in contrast to 36% for White individuals, 20% for high-income families, and 31% for those from the upper Midwest. These delinquencies are correlated with income and wealth, but observed income profiles and wealth account for at most 10–35% of the gaps in delinquencies across groups. In contrast, movers-based estimates of hometown effects imply that childhood exposure accounts for around 50% of the differences in delinquencies across hometowns. Counties that promote repayment also promote upward income mobility, but adult income mediates only a small fraction of this relationship: growing up in a place where others are likely to repay improves credit outcomes even for those who do not have higher income in adulthood. We provide suggestive evidence on the mechanisms driving these patterns. JEL Codes: G5, H0.

Is 'Walk Score' Really Just a 'White Score'? — Streetsblog USA

A new paper argues that the popular real estate tools is driving investment to predominantly white urban neighborhoods, without expanding walkability for anyone else.

The Folk Economics of Housing

Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing.

Planning for isolation? The role of urban form and function in shaping mobility in Brasilia

Brasília offers a rare test of how urban form shapes experienced segregation. Built almost at once around modernist neighbourhood units, then expanded through planned satellites and informal peripheries, it lets us ask whether urban form turns mobility into mixing or into a more efficient engine of separation. We combine data on human mobility with urban morphometrics, amenities, road networks, along with enclosures and tessellations that capture segregation at the scales where access is structured: districts, neighbourhoods, blocks, and street-and-building cells. We find that segregation intensifies as resolution sharpens, from 0.282 at the district scale to 0.545 at the block scale, indicating that Brasília looks most integrated at coarse units and most segregated where everyday encounters are actually organised. Mobility softens home segregation for most users, but not symmetrically: poorer groups travel farther, while affluent groups remain the most selectively exposed. civic cores and mid-rise, mixed-use areas are the least segregated morphotypes, yet they occupy only a sliver of the metropolis. Elsewhere, rich lakefront suburbs and dense poor settlements reach similarly high segregation through opposite spatial logics. Amenities predict lower segregation, while barriers and enclosed residential interiors predict higher segregation. Built form explains more of this pattern than visit volume alone in the segregation models: integration is less a property of residential design than of shared destinations and porous connections. Planned capitals can build order without building isolation if they distribute mixing space rather than sequestering it.

Experienced Segregation

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we measure experienced isolation by race. We find that the isolation individuals experience is substantially lower than standard residential isolation measures would suggest, but that experienced and residential isolation are highly correlated across cities. Experienced isolation is lower relative to residential isolation in denser, wealthier, more educated cities with high levels of public transit use, and is also negatively correlated with income mobility.

Community Wealth Building — Urban Affairs Review

Scholars of urban politics have long debated the issue of what cities can and should do to promote the economic well-being of their residents. As the of election Zohran Mamdani illustrates, urban residents are increasingly demanding that city governments do more to address the increasingly exorbitant costs of housing, childcare, and transportation. One obvious solution is to raise taxes on the private holders of wealth. By the same token, his election has prompted handwringing on the right about the “inevitable” flight of capital out of New York City. Scholarship that runs the gamut from the public choice school associated with the “city limits” perspective (Peterson 1981) through to Marxian accounts (Logan and Molotch 1987) all recognize that the private ownership of wealth and the mobility of capital puts cities in a bind, especially in a context of highly circumscribed levels of federal urban spending. Though several scholars (Logan and Swanstrom 1990; Kantor and Savitch 1993; Schragger 2016) have demonstrated that cities have greater latitude to promote egalitarian public policies than these perspective allow, few would argue that the deep structural problems of economic and social inequality can be fully resolved by tax-and-spend liberalism (Imbroscio 2010).

The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress Magazine

Western housing shortages drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.

Housing ladder spillovers

Rich newcomers can raise low-end rents, and adding high-end homes can lower them

The Housing Shortage Is a Major Driver of Poverty

Housing costs are usually the largest item in a household’s budget and can determine a family’s financial stability.

I'll go on a little rant about this paper in @QJEHarvard if only for its treatment of the literature. As it's clearly not the first paper to analyze Black economic progress after slavery, we'll focus on the value-added over previous research. An important reference here is Sacerdote (ReStat 2005) "Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital". by @AndreasShrugged(Andreas Backhaus) | Twitter Thread Reader

I'll go on a little rant about this paper in @QJEHarvard if only for its treatment of the literature. As it's clearly not the first paper to analyze Black economic progress after slavery, we'll focus on the value-added over previous research. An important reference here is Sacerdote (ReStat 2005) "Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital".

Gentrification Is a Myth

It started in Soho, then moved to Chelsea and the East Village. Riots in Tompkins Square in 1988 earned it some headlines but didn’t stop its creeping...

A Low-Cost Ownership Oasis in a Desert of Apartment Unaffordability

When this California housing cooperative began more than 30 years ago, it wasn’t the most affordable place to live. But now, it is.

The American Black Bourgeoisie, a story

*The American Black Bourgeoisie is affirmed on this date in 1619. They are America’s Black upper class based on financial income. The Black Bourgeoisie comprises engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, politicians, business executives, venture capitalists, CEOs, celebrities, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and heirs with annual incomes of $200,000 or more.  This social class sometimes referred to as the […]

NAACP Unveils Blueprint for Building Black Wealth

The NAACP's new roadmap aims to help Black families build assets, close the racial wealth gap and create generational wealth.