Transnational tense: Immigration and inequality in American housing markets

Spatial assimilation theory, the traditional framework for analysing urban immigration and housing, was deeply shaped by the historical-geographic contingencies of American urbanism in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the most recent and forceful challenge to assimilationist research-transnational urbanism-is also influenced by distinctive contemporary circumstances and epistemological priorities, creating a tense and unproductive dichotomy. We contend that such apparently fundamental theoretical disputes are at least partially resolved through methodological pluralism. Understanding continuity and change in immigrant settlement and housing patterns requires that we draw on the distinct, complementary merits of transnational urbanist and spatial assimilation models-while also recognising the features of American urban development and race relations that create powerful incentives shaping the spatial trajectories of immigrant upward mobility. We evaluate these considerations through empirical case studies of the recent rise of home-ownership among Hmong immigrants in St Paul, Minnesota, and the interrelations between immigration and the intensified mortgage capitalisation of US housing markets

More Continuity than Change? Re-evaluating the Contemporary Socio-economic and Housing Characteristics of Suburbs

Suburbs that developed in metropolitan Canada post-World War II have historically been depicted as homogeneous landscapes of gendered domesticity, detached housing, White middle-class nuclear families, and heavy automobile use. We find that key features of this historical popular image do in fact persist across the nation’s contemporary metropolitan landscape, particularly at the expanding fringes and in mid-sized cities near the largest metropolitan areas. Th e findings reflect suburbanization into new areas, point to enduring social exclusion, and recall the negative environmental consequences arising from suburban ways of living such as widespread automobile use and continuing sprawl. However, the analysis also points to the internal diversity that marks suburbanization today and to the growing presence of suburban ways of living in central areas. Our results suggest that planning policies promoting intensification and targeting social equity objectives are likely to remain ineff ective if society fails to challenge directly the political, economic and socio-cultural drivers behind the kind of suburban ways of living that fit popular imaginings of post-World War II suburbs in central areas. Our results suggest that planning policies promoting intensification and targeting social equity objectives are likely to remain ineffective if society fails to challenge directly the political, economic and socio-cultural drivers behind the kind of suburban ways of living that fit popular imaginings of post-World War II suburbs

Geographies of Housing Finance: The Mortgage Market in Milan, Italy

The geography of financial exclusion has mainly focused on exclusion from retail banking. Alternatively, and following the work of David Harvey, this paper presents a geography of access to and exclusion from home mortgage finance. The case of Milan shows that capital switching to the built environment is partly a sign of economic crisis and partly a sign of the intrinsic opportunities that the built environment provides. A major factor in both is the deregulation of the mortgage market that has enabled the loosening of historically stringent lending criteria, leading to a tremendous growth of the mortgage market, while leaving the co-evolution of family and home ownership intact. In addition, capital switches within sectors of the economy and between places. In Milan, once "unattractive" but currently gentrified nineteenth-century districts underwent cycles of devalorisation and revalorisation. Even though access to mortgages has increased throughout Milan, geographical disparities in mortgage lending persist: at present, yellowlining (differential access, based on less favourable terms) is common in parts of the Milanese periphery. The creation of boundaries makes the realisation of class-monopoly rent possible; while the subsequent redrawing of these boundaries creates new submarkets in which surplus value can be extracted. Based on the Milan case, one cannot explain the timing and geography of formation and reformation of submarkets in other cities, but it helps us to see how Harvey's abstract ideas of class-monopoly rent, submarket creation, and capital switching take place in the real world. Copyright 2007 Blackwell Publishing.