Under Construction: Race and Housing Markets in 21st-Century Urban America

Racial segregation continues to haunt U.S. cities. But, a full picture of why and how racial segregation persists at such high levels in contemporary urban America is less clear—in part because little is known about the contemporary, everyday operation of the housing market. To enrich understanding of the processes associated with the reproduction of segregation and other housing-related forms of racial inequality, I first conceptualize the housing market as an institution, or the intersection of several overlapping sets of stakeholders, the industries in which they work, and the federal forms and rules that affect their work. Then, I rely on a wide-and-deep methodological approach to collect data, conducting one year of ethnographic research and interviewing 102 housing market professionals and consumers across multiple housing market industries. I also conducted spatial analyses to triangulate across participant observation and respondent narratives. The findings that emerged from this dissertation data collection are organized in three chapters. In each chapter, I describe different aspects of how the contemporary Houston housing market operates and how operations reproduce racial meaning and various forms of racial inequality. Overall, my dissertation demonstrates that the cumulative effects of apparently ‘non-racial’ housing market operations, such as (racially-distinct) social networks, the lax regulatory context of housing development, and the loose arrangement of housing market industries, intersect with several institutional practices to reproduce racial meaning and inequality in everyday housing transactions. I conclude by highlighting the theoretical, methodological, and policy contributions of my work and by offering suggestions for future areas of research

Racial Justice in Housing Finance: A Series on New Directions

The enclosed essays speak from a range of diverse viewpoints to explore how housing finance can be harnessed towards the ends of residential integration, equitable investment, and housing security, rather than purely for profit. Our authors offer ideas across a spectrum of proposed reforms. They describe how aspects of our current housing finance system derive from, or fail to correct for, our deep history of structural racism; they propose concrete steps toward re-engineering our current regulatory structure and housing programs to better advance equity, including addressing the particular harms of racial segregation; and they argue for expanded social housing and other visionary reforms

Color-Blind Racism among Non-poor Latinos in a Redeveloping Houston Barrio

Accounts of urban inequality, which often focus on the urban poor, have also highlighted the centrality of non-poor minority actors in shaping poor inner-city neighborhood outcomes. This research suggests that non-poor minority actors may be particularly influential in the process of poor neighborhood redevelopment given their greater access to social, cultural, and political capital. Redevelopment in poor neighborhoods reproduces existing inequalities, at least in part through the legitimating power of color-blind racial ideology. Color-blind ideology privatizes inequality by silencing structural explanations for disparities. Additionally, color-blind ideology has also been shown to influence how minorities themselves explain inequality. Yet to date, no research has examined how non-poor minorities, redevelopment, and color-blind ideology may be linked in a single context. Relying on a year of ethnographic research and 38 in-depth interviews with non-poor Latinos, I ask whether and how these actors frame neighborhood inequality using color-blind ideology in a poor, redeveloping Houston barrio. I find widespread use of the cultural racism frame. I also ask what the implications of this finding may be, and theorize that widespread cultural racism among non-poor Latinos supports the conditions under which redevelopment stakeholders can pursue their projects without obstruction. I conclude by exploring what these findings may mean for issues such as socioeconomic integration, and offer suggestions for future research

Perceptions of Science Education Among African American and White Evangelicals: A Texas Case Study

Evangelicals have been highlighted at the intersections of religion, science, and education, yet little is known about how evangelicals perceive public science education and how these perceptions compare across racial lines. Here we analyze how African American and white evangelicals view science education through 40 in-depth interviews collected from two evangelical congregations in Texas. Without raising the topic of evolution, we find that African American leaders, white leaders, and white laity engaged in faith-based, evolution-contesting discourse, but African American laity rarely framed science education in faith-based ways. For them, science education was often linked to educational resources or was distant from their lived experiences. Our findings clarify disjuncture and overlap among African American and white evangelicals by exploring perceptions that challenge and affirm the public institution of science education in different ways. Our conclusion stresses the need to examine perceptions of science and education among religious subgroups differentiated along social and historical lines