Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, Second Edition

The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2010

Kevin Fox Gotham

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438449449
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Traditional explanations of metropolitan development and urban racial segregation have emphasized the role of consumer demand and market dynamics. In the first edition of Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development Kevin Fox Gotham reexamined the assumptions behind these explanations and offered a provocative new thesis. Using the Kansas City metropolitan area as a case study, Gotham provided both quantitative and qualitative documentation of the role of the real estate industry and the Federal Housing Administration, demonstrating how these institutions have promulgated racial residential segregation and uneven development. Gotham challenged contemporary explanations while providing fresh insights into the racialization of metropolitan space, the interlocking dimensions of class and race in metropolitan development, and the importance of analyzing housing as a system of social stratification. In this second edition, he includes new material that explains the racially unequal impact of the subprime real estate crisis that began in late 2007, and explains why racial disparities in housing and lending remain despite the passage of fair housing laws and antidiscrimination statutes.

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Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development

An Introduction

This book is about the role of the real estate industry and federal housing policy in the development of racial residential segregation and uneven development, focusing on a case study of metropolitan Kansas City from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Beyond any doubt, the mass suburbanization of whites and the ghettoization of blacks has been one of the most profound population shifts in the twentieth century. Indeed, what distinguishes the United States from European nations is the massive spatial dispersal of people and industry and their organization into metropolitan regions sprawling hundreds of miles and in all areas of the country. Uneven development refers to unequal patterns of metropolitan growth that reproduce racial and class inequalities and segregation, inner city disinvestment, and suburban sprawl.

As reflected in the diverse scholarship of Mark Gottdiener, John Logan, Harvey Molotch, Gregory Squires, Neil Smith, David Harvey, and others, uneven development is a multifaceted process of socio-spatial transformation involving a relentless effort by private and public actors, organizations, and agencies to transform particular regions and places into spaces of profitmaking and economic growth. As a spatial manifestation of profit-oriented growth, uneven development is a basic geographical medium through which inter-city competition, environmental degradation, and class struggle unfold. In addition, uneven development draws our attention to the harmful consequences of inequitable growth patterns, racial and class disparities, and segregated settlement spaces that constitute and organize metropolitan areas in the United States. As the antithesis of sustainable development, uneven development is destructive and unsustainable because it threatens the basic social systems and resources that are needed for human life and growth.

A major task of this book to understand the process of uneven development as a racialized process, and to illustrate the interconnectedness of the real estate sector and federal housing programs in concentrating poor minorities in the inner city and encouraging white flight to outlying areas. Few scholars had devoted much theoretical and empirical attention to these issues and concerns until the 1987 publication of William Julius Wilson’s book, The Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson catalyzed a new interest in urban poverty and segregation by drawing attention to the linkages between deindustrialization, growing urban poverty, and declines in overt and legal discrimination. Wilson (1996; 1987) noted that by the 1980s, the world of the “new urban poor” was a world of spatial isolation and chronic joblessness in urban neighborhoods that once featured a sizable portion of working families. While not denying the importance of “historic discrimination,” Wilson argued that spatial and educational “mismatches” had undercut employment opportunities for poor minorities while an out-migration of working- and middle-class families from inner city neighborhoods had removed an important “social buffer” that once deflected the full impact of prolonged high levels of joblessness stemming from periodic recessions. These demographic changes, as well as the continuing deindustrialization, had forced up rates of minority joblessness (unemployment and nonparticipation in the labor market) and caused an increase in the concentration of poverty.

Over the last several decades, a new form of concentrated minority poverty largely restricted to deteriorating center cities has replaced the episodic and spatially diffuse poverty of earlier periods of U.S. history. Prior to World War II, poverty was largely transitory, geographically scattered, and marked by periods of migration and movement. By the 1980s, however, minority poverty had become geographically concentrated, chronic, and extreme—a situation “without precedent in America’s cities”—as historian Michael Katz argued (1993, 449). Subsequent work by Loic Wacquant (2007) found that inner city neighborhoods had become spatially split from the working- and middle-class suburbs surrounding them, and were now confronted with accelerating physical deterioration, economic exclusion, and increasing social misery. Thus, social marginalization and exclusion increasingly confronted the poorest members of American society at a time when political institutions were publicly declaring their commitment to ending racial discrimination and addressing the causes of inequality.

Since the 1990s, a variety of researchers have revealed a powerful interaction between high segregation and high poverty rates in restricting opportunities for upward mobility and geographically concentrating social problems such as neighborhood disinvestment, chronic unemployment, violent crime, and poor schools. In their award winning book, American Apartheid, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) showed how high levels of racial segregation—i.e., hypersegregation—interacted with high levels of black poverty to concentrate poverty within deteriorating central cities by restricting blacks to a small set of geographically isolated, tightly clustered, racially homogenous neighborhoods.¹ Through the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s a host of scholars have pointed to the persistence of racial segregation as the focal point of a host of metropolitan problems such as urban disinvestment (redlining), employment discrimination, and the persistence of prejudiced attitudes among whites.² More recently, scholars have drawn attention to the importance of situating the subprime mortgage crisis and global real estate crisis in the context of longstanding patterns of segregation and racial discrimination in housing markets.³ Scholars recognize that racial residential segregation remains the dominant organizing principle of housing and settlement patterns and the “structural linchpin” of American race relations, urban poverty, and metropolitan development.⁴

Despite the plethora of scholarly research on racial residential segregation, much disagreement remains on the salience of contemporary and “historical” forms of racial discrimination (Wilson 1987; 1996), how race and class operate as interlocking dimensions to reinforce segregation, the historical role of government policy and programs in concentrating racial minorities in central cities, and the policy implications of the various competing accounts. In my book, I situate the origin, development, and consequences of racial residential segregation within broader processes of uneven development, the changing dynamics of real estate activities and investment, and federal housing programs and policies. I investigate the origin of racially segregated living spaces, the role of real estate industry in constructing and shaping images about white and black settlement spaces, and the critical linkages between racial discrimination and residential segregation. My goal is to document the role of private interests and government policy in the development of racial residential segregation while at the same time highlighting the connections between race, uneven development, and the real estate industry.

The argument I develop in this book differs from other interpretations of uneven development and racial residential segregation in three major ways. First, in much of the scholarly literature there is a tendency to view uneven development and residential segregation as two separate and analytically distinct processes. By “uneven development” I mean the fact that inner cities lose population, wealth, and jobs while suburban areas experience economic development and population growth. In my book, I view uneven development and residential segregation as analogous, reciprocally related, and mutually constitutive of each other. One advantage of examining uneven development and racial residential as a single process is that it offers a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the connections between race and other metropolitan problems such as urban poverty, disinvestment (redlining), school segregation, and the persistence of prejudiced attitudes among whites. Another advantage of focusing on the close relationship between uneven development and racial residential segregation is that it draws attention to the importance of analyzing the production, distribution, and consumption of housing as a system of social stratification and inequality. Indeed, in the case of housing and real estate is important to understand just how the production, distribution, and consumption of housing reinforces and exacerbates uneven metropolitan development, residential segregation, and the polarization of races and classes in the larger society.

Second, I explore the interlocking dimensions of race and class in the development of segregated metropolitan areas. In his famous book, Social Justice and the City, David Harvey (1973) discussed the issue of class and class struggle but failed to incorporate race and racial conflict in his explanation of uneven development. According to sociologists Joe Feagin (1998, 14) and Talmadge Wright (1997) race is distinguished by its absence in political economy explanations about uneven development in the United States. When scholars mention racially segregated living patterns, they typically explain them as epiphenomena, a consequence of the logic of capital accumulation or focus on individual choices and decisions as drivers of metropolitan change. There are exceptions to this tendency, especially the work of Joe Feagin and Robert Parker (1990), Gregory Squires and Charis Kubrin (2006), and others who have written in diverse ways about the racially segregative effects of real estate investment, spatial segregation as an indicator of institutional discrimination, and interplay of racism and poverty. While the insights developed by these scholars have taken us beyond the limitations of existing explanations, current research has yet to integrate race and racial discrimination into theories of uneven development.

Third, I situate meanings of race, manifestations of racial housing discrimination, and changing notions of racial ideology within the political economy of real estate and the development of federal housing policy. Several leading scholars contend that the creation, development, and persistence of racial residential segregation has been a consequence of “racism,” that is, overt and covert racially discriminatory acts committed by whites against blacks and other racial minorities over a period of many decades.⁵ While racial discrimination is a central component of racial exclusion and segregation, there is much debate about how to theorize race as a social phenomenon, the connection between discrimination and segregation, and the constructed nature of racial identities and racial experience. Moreover, while racial prejudice, discrimination, and institutional racism are central to understanding the origin and development of cities and metropolitan areas, none are the same as they were in the 1960s and before. Indeed, meanings of racial prejudice, the formation of racial identities, and actual manifestations of racial discrimination have changed dramatically throughout the twentieth century. Rather than viewing racial discrimination as the “cause” of housing segregation, I emphasize the socially “constructed” nature of race and racism, and the importance of contextualizing specific racisms, racial identities, and other racial phenomena within broader historical and political processes.

HOUSING AS A SYSTEM OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

According to a longstanding tradition in American urban theory and conservative social policy, Americans migrated to suburban areas and continue to live there because they prefer to reside in single-family, low-density housing outside the central city. This “preferences perspective” emphasizes the role of free choice, consumer demand, individual housing preferences, and market dynamics as the motors of metropolitan development and the subsequent segregation of classes, races, ethnic groups, and land-uses. A pamphlet from the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that “suburban residents who have moved out of the city clearly have decided that they are willing to endure more time spent in an automobile in exchange for a larger house with more open space” and thus “[d]evelopers who build houses and towns and shopping centers for them do so bec...