Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st-Century Urban America
ELIZABETH KORVER-
GLENN
3
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For Randall, Jude, and Emma With deepest love For Rice Sociology
With deepest gratitude
Acknowledgments
One of the deep joys of pursuing an academic career has been sharing life and research with a supportive, generous, critical, and brilliant community made up of academic colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and family. While any errors in this work are my responsibility alone, Race Brokers would not exist without the web of intellectual, emotional, and practical supports my community has provided along the way.
Rice University’s Sociology Department started a new PhD program, and as part of their initial graduate student recruiting, the faculty took a chance (from my perspective) and accepted me into the program. Because I had no research background, they basically had to start from scratch when I matriculated. They expended countless hours advising and training me as well as equipping me with practical resources to progress through and excel in graduate school. Jim Elliott: Thank you. I will never forget your eagerness to join me in a day of fieldwork as I drove you around Houston and explained what I was doing. Your keen questions and insight, constructive criticism and encouragement, and general good humor motivated me and made me a stronger and better person and scholar. You made all the difference. Michael Emerson: Thank you. You believed in this project from the beginning and have cheered me on ever since. I hope you know that you and your work have long been one of my main sources of inspiration. Thank you also for providing feedback and encouragement on this book at various stages. You helped me cross the finish line. Jenifer Bratter, Sergio Chávez, Elaine Howard Ecklund, and Ruth López Turley: Thank you. You all trained and mentored me through multiple important milestones and served key roles as members of my master’s thesis, comprehensive exam, and/or doctoral dissertation committees. You also helped immensely with my professionalization into academia; I learned and continue to learn so much from each of you from afar. Other Rice Sociology faculty provided many other kinds of valuable support, including Rachel Kimbro, who helped me transition to the world of being both a graduate student and a mother.
Being a member of the Rice Sociology community also meant joining an incredible group of graduate students and post-docs, many of whom remain
close colleagues and friends. Junia Howell: I cannot believe the good fortune I have had to know, work with, and love you. Thank you for your honesty, encouragement, and support. From helping me understand contemporary theory during the first semester of graduate school to caring for my children, picking me up from airports, cooking for me, co-authoring with me, and reading and providing critical feedback on multiple iterations of this book—thank you. Sandra Alvear, Kevin Smiley, and Ellen Whitehead: I’m so grateful to each of you for the constructive and generous ways you live and work. Each of you has shaped me in profound ways. Thanks, friends.
While at Rice, I also had the amazing privilege of learning with and from brilliant and generous faculty, staff, and students in other departments. In the history department, Alex Byrd and David Ponton III deeply influenced this particular project as well as my long-term research trajectory. Dr. Byrd: Thank you for supporting this project and pushing me to read and think critically about race, racism, and cities. Your comments during my dissertation defense remain with me to this day. David: Thank you. I continue to learn from your brilliance and thank my lucky stars that you and I were in that same graduate seminar that first semester. I cherish our friendship. Thanks also for reading and providing helpful feedback on various book chapter iterations. Other faculty and staff at Rice, including Jean Aroom at the GIS/Data Center and Libby Vann and Alan Steinberg at the Center for Civic Leadership, shaped not only this project but also who I am as an academic and how I approach my work. And, undergraduate students at Rice breathed life into my tired bones. Working with you all in teaching and research roles and advising you in community-based participatory research confirmed that I did really want to pursue this academic life. I also thank the Social Sciences Research Institute at Rice, which provided grant support for professional transcription of the in-depth interviews I conducted. Speaking of in-depth interviews, I am grateful for the many dozens of people who participated in this study as interviewees and informants—I learned much because you generously shared your time and professional expertise.
I am also deeply grateful for the many scholars I now have the pleasure of knowing as departmental and professional colleagues and friends. Many colleagues at or previously at the University of New Mexico (UNM) have helped me with the book-writing process. Sharon Erickson Nepstad and Owen Whooley both provided valuable feedback on my book prospectus and advised me through the book contract process. Lisa Broidy, Felipe Gonzales, Sofia Locklear, Nancy López, Wayne Santoro, María Vélez, Owen
Whooley, Jon Williams, and Eli Wilson all provided valuable feedback on previous iterations of book chapters. To my students at UNM: thank you for your sharp questions and critical insights. You inspire me every day. In fact, I had you in mind as I wrote each chapter of this book. Outside of UNM, Clayton Childress, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Neda Maghbouleh, Amaka Okechukwu, Ranita Ray, and Chris Smith all helped me through the book prospectus writing, feedback-getting, and submission process in various ways. Thank you all. Thanks also to Dan Hirschman, Whitney Pirtle, Victor Ray, Jake Rugh, Louise Seamster, and Haj Yazdiha, all of whom read portions of this book in its previous iterations and provided incisive, encouraging feedback. Special thanks to Haj, who has been an extraordinary book buddy, friend, and fellow academic mama. Thanks also to Max Besbris, who provided critical, generative comments on my writing and helpful advice on the book publishing process. I also thank Cristina Mora, Mary Pattillo, and Robert Vargas, each of whom asked important questions and gave valuable comments at various stages of the analysis process. Thanks to Jeff Guhin and Tony Lin, who co-hosted an early morning Zoom writing group during the COVID-19 crisis that gave me the structure I needed to complete final book revisions. I also thank Michael Allen, Diane Houk, and Morgan Williams, all of whom generously shared their fair housing legal expertise with me. Prentiss Dantzler read through and provided detailed, extremely helpful feedback on the penultimate draft of this book—thank you, dear friend. I’m so grateful to share the journey with you! Audra Wolfe (The Outside Reader): Thank you for helping me strengthen this manuscript through critical, constructive editorial assistance. Thank you to James Cook and Emily Mackenzie at Oxford University Press and to the reviewers who helped make this book stronger. Each of you has shaped my thinking and writing in profound ways. Thank you all.
Other key organizations and people made this work possible by providing fellowship and childcare support. The Institute for Analytic Sociology at Linköping University in Sweden awarded me a Robert K. Merton Visiting Research Fellowship, which supported me as I made book revisions. Thanks especially to Peter Hedström, Karl Wennberg, Sarah Valdez, Ben Jarvis, Åsa Arnoldson, and Madelene Töpfer, who all welcomed me and facilitated a productive stay at the Institute. While in Sweden, my dear friends Alex and Nate Messarra, sister Allegra, mom Marcia, and dad Bill provided childcare, and Alex also provided feedback on book chapters. Thank you to you all. My deepest thanks also to St. Matthew’s, especially Lisa, who cared for Jude and
made me think that everything would be okay during the data collection for this project. Thanks also to Wesley Kids, especially Alex, Angelica, Christina, Lori, Jackie, Roberta, Terri, and Vanessa who cared for Jude and Emma while I completed this book. All of you have loved my children so well—thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Others have provided the intellectual, emotional, and motivational support to bring this project to fruition. Gloria Kenyon, Lenora McNamara, Cynthia Muccio, and Lesley Vanaman: We must be the only “us” in the world, right? Grateful for 20+ years with you all; thankful, too, for the general and specific comments and questions you offered about this project that helped strengthen it. Lynne Graham: You taught me how to read and write and, when I was around you, never once did I feel weird or uncool (as I did most of the time in high school). Thank you. Jennifer Aycock: Miracles happen when kindred spirits come together. Running the race with you is my soul’s deep delight. Je t’aime. Emily Zimbrick-Rogers: you have inspired me for ten years! I can’t wait until we actually meet in person one day. Karla and Rob Woodruff: Your friendship has saved me over the past few years. Thank you for sharing your lives and joy.
Finally, my family. Mom and dad, thank you for loving me unconditionally, for teaching me grace, and for cultivating a thirst for knowledge and justice. I love you. Jared and Allegra: You have shown me, in word and deed, how to be whole and at peace. I wouldn’t trade growing up and old with you for the world. Each of you write in ways that motivate me to keep growing past the limitations of my own writing: Thank you. Amy: What a joy it has been to share life with you over the past decade. Your strength, courage, and independence inspire me daily. Resa and Dell: Thank you for welcoming me as your own and always finding ways to encourage me. Jude: I was terrified of you at first, mainly because I had no idea what I was doing. But you, my firstborn, are a force of nature. You single-handedly transformed my fear into purpose and you are the joy of my life. Emma: My firecracker, my comedienne, my independent, fierce second-born. You make me a stronger woman every day; you are the light of my life. Randall: You have supported me in every possible way; with you, I flourish. Thank you for journeying with me through it all with humor, patience, hope, and steadfast love.
Introduction
Racial segregation is so prevalent in American cities that it can seem normal, even natural. Many Americans, including government officials and everyday housing consumers, view segregation in this way.1 Housing market professionals, or those who professionally assist consumers with home buying or selling, are no exception. For example, in April 2015, Jay, a White middle-aged real estate agent, invited me to his real estate brokerage in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood. He wanted to show me a contract he had drawn up for a house he had listed for sale in Near Northside, a Latinx2 neighborhood just north of downtown. After inviting me into the conference room near the front of the brokerage office space, Jay explained the terms of the contract. As he did so, he described who the buyers and sellers were and also provided running commentary on Near Northside and its surrounding areas, including several White neighborhoods west of Near Northside. “In the last six months,” he said, “I’ve had lots of young hipsters calling. People are being pushed out of the Heights, Norhill, and Brooke Smith. That’s the natural progression, to come to Near Northside. The tide of hipsters is coming.” Jay did not think that Near Northside would stay a Latinx neighborhood for long.
Two months after I observed Jay at his brokerage, I met and interviewed Diego, a Mexican American appraiser, at a diner in southeast Houston. Diego explained that he tries not to allow “ethnicity” to come into his appraising. But he went on to say that he thinks racial segregation exists because Black, Latinx, and White individuals want to live near “someone who is your equal.” For this reason, he explained, Black individuals wanted to live in the Black Third Ward neighborhood “amongst their peers—not my natural peers—but young Black urban professionals that are buying in that area.” From Diego’s perspective, it seemed “natural” that Black professionals wanted to live near Black peers and that he and other Latinx individuals—such as his sister, who had purchased a home in a Latinx neighborhood—wanted to live near Latinx peers.
Then, in July 2015—a month after I interviewed Diego—I met Lauren, a White real estate agent, at her brokerage on the west side of Houston. She led me into a large multipurpose room that had several long tables and dozens of chairs set up in anticipation of a continuing education class. We sat together at one of these tables for our interview. Lauren told me that her White clients make housing decisions based on neighborhood racial composition:
But, you know, I definitely see in clients when I’m showing them properties in some areas that they think, “Oh, you know, we love the look of this neighborhood, we love the location. You know we love the price.” And I’ll go and show them and they’ll make comments like, “Nobody here looks like me.” And, you know, I think that’s natural. I don’t think that’s necessarily a racist thing.
Less than a month after I interviewed Lauren, I interviewed Howie, a White mortgage banker. Like Jay, Howie referred to the Heights and Brooke Smith neighborhoods when he discussed differences in home values across neighborhoods. Inhabited by White residents as the neighborhoods were developed from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, these areas became predominantly Latinx after several decades of White flight that began in the 1960s. More recently, White residents have returned to these areas. By the time I conducted my research, these areas were once again predominantly White, and property values were higher than before. Echoing Jay’s comments, Howie explained that he thought these changes in both neighborhood race and home values were a “natural progression.”
These housing market professionals recognized that Houston and other American cities are racially segregated. In fact, Jay, Diego, Lauren, Howie, and many other housing market professionals I studied viewed racial segregation as so ever-present as to seem “natural.” These professionals were correct in their assessment that racial segregation is the way things are in the United States. Most White Americans live in White neighborhoods and most Asian, Black, and Latinx Americans live in neighborhoods of color. In fact, although segregation appears to be slowly fading in some cities, it is remaining stagnant or intensifying in other cities. This is especially true in cities with large populations of residents of color, such as Atlanta, Houston, and Miami (Frey 2010a, 2010b; Krysan and Crowder 2017).
Even as real estate professionals describe this situation as “natural,” it is anything but, particularly given recent legal and social trends. Beginning in
1968, the U.S. Congress began to pass a series of laws that prohibited explicit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of a home. Defendants of color won numerous lawsuits against real estate agents, mortgage lenders, appraisers, and other housing market professionals who had discriminated against them. At approximately the same time these legal changes occurred, America’s social landscape began to shift dramatically. The proportion of Americans who identified as White declined as White families began to have fewer children. During the same period, millions of African, Asian, and Latin American individuals—most of whom moved directly to American cities rather than rural areas—immigrated to the United States, dramatically increasing urban ethnoracial diversity. White Americans began to report more favorable and less explicitly racist attitudes toward groups of color on surveys. Individuals of color were increasingly able to purchase homes, and they more frequently expressed a desire to live in racially diverse neighborhoods than their White counterparts.
In other words, multiple conditions that could have contributed to more rapid or steep declines in racial segregation did not do so and at times actually coincided with increases in racial segregation. This is because these social and legal changes occurred even as racism, or the ideas and practices that justify and maintain racial inequality and White dominance (BonillaSilva 2006; Fields and Fields 2014; Lewis and Diamond 2015), has persisted in every major sphere of contemporary American life (Seamster and Ray 2018), including the housing market (Howell and Korver-Glenn 2018; Korver-Glenn 2018a, 2018b).3 Indeed, racism, like racial segregation, has become naturalized—so pervasive that it seems natural (Jung 2015). Thus, when considering the housing market and the role real estate professionals play in shaping housing opportunities and urban residential landscapes, the key question is not whether racial segregation is an inevitable, or natural, outcome of market exchanges or whether racism contributes to racial segregation (see also Taylor 2019). Rather, it is how racism in real estate contributes to racial segregation in twenty-first-century urban America.
The question is pressing. Racial segregation poses serious problems for American society more broadly. Among many other problems, it is tied to ongoing wealth, educational, and health inequalities; intensified and more violent policing of Black and Latinx people; social isolation and lack of interracial contact; and sociopolitical conflict. In other words, racial segregation is one of the key mechanisms at the core of systemic American racial inequality (Reskin 2012).
This book examines how racism enables racial segregation to persist in order to denaturalize and chip away at this inequality. To do so, it examines real estate professionals, a group of individuals at the heart of the housing market. Many of these professionals, including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage bankers, and appraisers, often portray their work and its relationship to racial segregation as a passive—and not necessarily color-blind—response to market dynamics or the purportedly “natural” way people prefer to live. But as I studied these individuals and learned about their work from their perspectives, I came to the opposite conclusion. Racial segregation is not a natural feature of the American urban landscape, a surface contour that market professionals trace as they find it. Instead, housing market professionals—especially those who are White—actively create racially unequal housing markets and urban landscapes. They do so by using racist ideas to inform how they implement professional norms and policies and how they distribute their professional resources, including authority, knowledge, and capital. These housing market professionals are race and racism brokers: They make a hierarchy of racial categories socially and materially real by ensuring that people who fall into what they perceive as different categories receive unequal housing opportunities. Despite their insistence otherwise, housing market professionals are the visible hands of the housing market, and they often use racism to re-create and exacerbate racial segregation in their everyday work.
Among the housing market professionals I studied, one small group— almost all individuals of color—were a sharp foil for how their White counterparts and, at times, counterparts of color actively contribute to the process of segregation. They drew on equitable, people-affirming ideas4 that emphasized the worth and deservingness of people of color and used their experiences and observations of racial discrimination to generate alternate professional strategies that better served communities of color. Importantly, at the same time they subverted real estate business as usual, these professionals built economically profitable businesses. These professionals also brokered race. But they did so through reference to racial equity, thus undermining racism and mitigating, rather than exacerbating, racial inequality in the housing exchange process.
Real estate professionals are the gatekeepers of the housing market. As such, the choices they make influence who has access to homes, under what conditions that access is granted, and where such access is granted. In the next section, I discuss the relationship between housing market professionals,
racism, and racial segregation by drawing attention to their interactions with housing consumers and other professionals as well as their professional and organizational routines. Housing market professionals interpret their interactions and routines through the lens of racist or equitable, peopleaffirming ideas and make decisions about allocating housing resources based on their interpretations. In doing so, these race brokers recycle or challenge housing market racism.
Racism, Racial Segregation, and Housing Market Professionals
Through the early and mid-twentieth century, the U.S. federal government, state and municipal governments, professional real estate organizations, and individual White real estate professionals actively implemented policies and practices that explicitly aimed to segregate American neighborhoods (Connolly 2014; Gotham 2014; Jackson 1985; Rothstein 2017). Such practices included cities’ use of racial zoning ordinances, which forbade Americans of color—especially Black Americans—from purchasing homes in White neighborhoods and vice versa (Rothstein 2017);5 the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ harsh penalization of real estate agents who violated its explicit goal of maintaining racial segregation (Taylor 2019); and White real estate agents’ refusal to show or sell homes in White neighborhoods to Asian, Black, Indigenous, or Latinx home buyers (e.g., Helper 1969). These practices effectively cemented racially segregated urban landscapes. By the 1960s, many American cities were extremely segregated by race and class (Massey and Denton 1993). Since then, in terms of overall national patterns, segregation between Black and White Americans has declined slightly, slowly, and unevenly. Segregation between Asian and White Americans and Latinx and White Americans has remained virtually unchanged. But, in many urban areas with large or growing populations of residents of color, racial segregation between White residents and residents of color appears to be on the rise (Frey 2010a, 2010b; Krysan and Crowder 2017).
The system of racial segregation continues to influence how everyday Americans experience their lives, with dire consequences for communities of color. Alongside other forms of inequality, racial segregation is at the heart of unequal educational opportunities, wealth accumulation, and criminal justice system encounters. For example, relative to their peers in otherwise
equal Black and Latinx neighborhoods, children in White neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to access higher quality educational opportunities and achieve higher educational attainment. This is in part because local public schools are funded by property taxes based on local home values, and home values are systematically higher in White neighborhoods net of home and other neighborhood characteristics (Howell and Korver-Glenn 2018; Lareau and Goyette 2014). These differences in home values across White neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color also mean that homeowners in White neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to gain more wealth from the sale of their homes than their counterparts in neighborhoods of color (Flippen 2004; Howell and Korver-Glenn 2018, forthcoming; Thomas et al. 2018). Moreover, residents in neighborhoods of color are far more likely to encounter police and experience violence at the hands of police than residents in White neighborhoods (Bell 2020a; Terrill and Reisig 2003).
Policing in neighborhoods of color, especially poor neighborhoods of color, “exacerbates disadvantage by cycling people through unending rounds of arrest, misdemeanor prosecution, and various modalities of supervision” (Bell 2020a:690). And, when people of color enter or exist in White areas, they are likely to “seem particularly out of place, and thus police are more likely to intervene” (Bell 2020a:697; see also Anderson 2015).
However, racial segregation in and of itself does not cause these and other inequalities. Rather, people, including politicians, educators, police officers, residential appraisers, business owners, health care providers, and many others, use racial segregation as a tool for making decisions about where and how to allocate resources. As sociologist and legal scholar Monica Bell (2020a) argues, segregation first means separation and confinement, or cutting off people and those who represent them from each other. In a system of segregation, White people are rarely exposed to individuals or neighborhoods of color and individuals of color, regardless of their class status, are less likely to be exposed to White neighborhoods than poor White individuals (Wang et al. 2018). Segregation then becomes a means for White people—who control a disproportionate share of American resources—to subordinate and dominate communities of color (Bell 2020a). They do so by keeping their resources in White areas and excluding individuals of color from entering these neighborhoods or policing them if they do.
Likewise, it is people who maintain contemporary racial segregation at above-expected levels given decades of legal and social transformation. American housing consumers and housing market professionals play key
roles in these processes. American home buyers, for example, purchase millions of homes each year. These home buyers frequently have existing knowledge about local communities and preferences about where to live. Moreover, White home buyers and home buyers of color have very different knowledge and preferences. Home buyers of color tend to know more about neighborhoods of color and prefer to live in more racially diverse areas (Howell and Emerson 2018; Krysan and Crowder 2017). By contrast, White home buyers know the most about White communities and have the strongest preferences to live near other White neighbors and avoid neighbors of color. To the extent that they act on their community knowledge and residential preferences, White home buyers help sustain racially segregated neighborhoods.
Housing market professionals also shape the process of racial segregation by influencing home buyers’ and sellers’ knowledge, preferences, prejudices, and opportunities. Especially when purchasing or selling a home, housing consumers rely extensively on housing market professionals to facilitate the process by providing access to information, social connections, and other resources (Besbris 2016, 2020; Shi and Tapia 2016). Although professionals’ behaviors appear to be less racially discriminatory now than they were fifty years ago (Turner et al. 2013), real estate agents and mortgage lenders (among others) still treat buyers and sellers of different races in systematically different ways. For example, a 2012 national audit study of real estate agents revealed that agents told prospective White home buyers about 17 percent more homes and showed them 17.7 percent more homes than equally qualified prospective Black home buyers. Similarly, agents told prospective White home buyers about 15.5 percent more homes and showed them 18.8 percent more homes than equally qualified prospective Asian buyers (Turner et al. 2013). Moreover, mortgage lenders targeted Black and Latinx mortgage borrowers with predatory lending schemes in the lead-up to the housing crash. Such predatory lending meant that Black and Latinx mortgage borrowers were disproportionately likely to experience foreclosure and wealth loss during and after the housing crash (Rugh et al. 2015).
Because housing market professionals often interact with each other and make decisions in background, or behind-the-scenes, settings, home buyers and sellers may not be aware that professionals are treating them differently or that they have different housing opportunities than their counterparts. Among other professionals, real estate agents often interact with one another when home buyers and sellers are not present. Such contact takes
place at real estate brokerage offices, broker open houses, continuing education classes, and other professional events. Housing market professionals’ interactions with one another can shape how they perceive buyers and sellers as well as the opportunities they extend to these consumers. For example, in their mixed-methods study of real estate agents in New York, Besbris and Faber (2017:866) found that a real estate broker influenced a relatively junior real estate agent’s business strategy:
REA [real estate agent]: My boss talks about race all the time but never actually says it. But I know what he’s referring to. He’ll say [of clients], “Are they good people?” Are they good people? And for the first few months my response to that is, “What do you mean?” I would get angry about that. But then he just kept asking and other people I worked with kind of clued me in about what that means. I have unfortunately had to let that cloud my judgments a little bit.
Interviewer: In what way?
REA: Disclosure, fair housing, honestly these things don’t help me right now . . . race definitely plays a part in how we show homes.
Although it took some time and the assistance of coworkers, this real estate agent eventually understood that his boss’s “backstage,” or behind-thescenes, reference to “good” clients meant “White” clients (see also Picca and Feagin 2007). The agent then altered his business strategies based on his boss’s continual questions and even began to view disclosure and fair housing as an unwelcome interference in his work.
Such behind-the-scenes interactions between professionals can influence consumers’ opportunities and, ultimately, can contribute in subtle and notso-subtle ways to racial segregation. For instance, in addition to networking with current or prospective clients, housing market professionals regularly network with one another. This networking happens in racially determined ways. Such networking occurs when they meet at industry luncheons, attend open houses to make introductions, or invite each other to lunch. Yet consumers may not be aware that professionals’ networking strategies can affect the range of opportunities consumers perceive as available or desirable. In asking a real estate agent for recommendations regarding a mortgage banker or home inspector (among other professionals), a home buyer may assume that whomever the agent recommends is the “best” option because of the agent’s expert status. But agents’ recommendations may not be based
on these professionals’ demonstrated capabilities or experience. Instead, it is entirely possible that agents’ recommendations are rooted in their racialized networking strategies, or whom they happen to meet along the way who fits their racial criteria. Such segregated interindustry networking has the capacity to funnel consumers to distinct sets of resources and opportunities, and consumers may have no knowledge of them. In addition, such strategies function to segregate real estate professionals’ opportunities, which is particularly harmful for professionals of color (Korver-Glenn 2018a).
Housing market professionals also affect how racial segregation persists by acting out professional and organizational routines, or status quo ways of perceiving and behaving in real estate (for a discussion of racialized organizational routines, see Ray 2019). Routines can be informal and optional. For example, it was not Wells Fargo’s official policy to target mortgage borrowers of color with predatory mortgage loans, but it also did not immediately sanction employees who did so. As increasingly more Wells Fargo employees throughout the nation chose to stereotype Black and Latinx borrowers and target them with high-risk loan products without immediate consequence, such behavior became routine (Massey et al. 2016; Steil et al. 2018). Ultimately, Black and Latinx borrowers paid millions of dollars in excess costs for highrisk loans and lost millions of dollars during the resultant foreclosures because of this racist routine.6 Routines can also be formally stated and required. In mortgage lending, for example, lenders whose loans are purchased or guaranteed by the U.S. federal government (e.g., Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac) must comply with these institutions’ underwriting guidelines (Stuart 2003). Among other ramifications, this means that, in practice, most lenders require single-family home mortgage borrowers to complete the standardized Fannie Mae Uniform Residential Loan Application (Form 1003). This form directs mortgage loan officers or originators to fill in borrower race, ethnicity, and sex if the borrower completed the form in person and did not do so themselves. These checkboxes nominally exist for statistical purposes but have the effect of priming lending professionals to interpret mortgage applicant race or ethnicity (Korver-Glenn 2018b).
Housing market professionals tend to stick to the routines they learn from their respective professional and organizational contexts, even those that are optional. But these individuals can also depart from or bend routines, including those that are formally stated and required (Feldman and Pentland 2003; Ray 2019). Scholars who study routine-based processes find the presence of individuals who depart from those routines illuminating for several
reasons, two of which I highlight here. First, it can be difficult for those embedded in a routine to describe or even acknowledge its shape or contours, but those who choose a separate option, or an alternate route, help identify and describe the routine. (A current can be difficult to identify when swimming with it but unmistakable when swimming against it.) Second, the existence of people who choose alternate options demonstrates that conforming to routines is a passive choice, or a choice of least resistance, rather than an automatic or natural outcome. In doing so, these individuals can denaturalize routines and open up new pathways for action and understanding—in this case, ways of doing real estate work.
Whether they are acting in accord with or departure from routines or are interacting with others, housing market professionals are interpreting their professional worlds. In my study, they did this interpretive work through housing market-specific racial frames, or sets of guiding ideas about race used to evaluate people and neighborhoods and make housing decisions. The dominant frame, what I call the racist market rubric, applied and adapted multiple elements from the long-established White racial frame—the White worldview that interprets others through the lens of racist ideas and induces them to treat others according to these ideas (Feagin 2013)7 to the housing market context. Housing market professionals who used the racist market rubric in their everyday work perceived White individuals and neighborhoods as the best, most desirable, most valuable, most educated, least dangerous, and most lucrative for the least amount of work (Table I.1).8 Simultaneously, they perceived individuals and neighborhoods of color as the least desirable, low income, least educated, dangerous, culturally or morally deficient, and a lot of unwanted work. Almost all White housing market professionals in my study relied on aspects of the racist market rubric9 when they interpreted people (consumers and each other); properties; and their professional norms, policies, and practices.
Rarely, professionals of color also interpreted people and professional routines using elements of the racist market rubric. Unlike their White counterparts, however, these professionals of color often expressed an awareness of ongoing discrimination or housing exclusion, thus tempering their views.
In contrast to professionals using the racist market rubric, most professionals of color in my study used elements of a housing market contextspecific counterframe, or a set of ideas that resisted White racism in housing market spaces by affirming racial equality (Clergé 2019; Feagin 2013; Lipsitz
Table I.1 The Racist Market Rubric
Asian Black Latinx
Affluent
Difficult to work with
Loyal to co-ethnics
Smart/value education
Unsafe or dangerous
Undesirable as neighbors
Working class or low income
Occupationally inferior to Whites
Financially unstable and not knowledgeable about U.S. financial system
Spanish-speaking or speaking English with an “accent” “Ethnic” names
Undocumented/ immigrant
Working class or low income
Occupationally inferior to Whites
Financially stable but not knowledgeable or trusting of U.S. financial system
Financially unstable and not knowledgeable or trusting of U.S. financial system
White
Hip lifestyle
Lacking culture
Affluent or middle class
Occupationally and educationally superior to Blacks and Latinxs
More financially savvy and knowledgeable about U.S. financial system than other groups
Note: Professionals who used the racist market rubric did not use all of the rubric’s elements at all times. Rather, they selectively chose from these racist ideas depending on the context. I have deliberately not grouped or arranged these ideas into “economic,” “cultural,” or other stereotype categories because the professionals in my study did not separate these categories. Racist-economic ideas merged with racistcultural ideas, which merged with racist-linguistic ideas, and so on. Finally, professionals in my study almost never mentioned Indigenous people, paralleling their erasure in broader American culture.
2011). When they drew on what I call the people-oriented market rubric, 10 real estate professionals perceived neighborhoods and individuals of color as valuable, deserving, historic, hardworking, family oriented, or beautiful, and they worked in ways that reinforced these perceptions (Table I.2).11 Although these professionals perceived White individuals and neighborhoods as economically advantaged, they also expressed and acted on favorable perceptions of individuals and neighborhoods of color, prioritizing them when allocating time and other resources (see Dantzler and Reynolds (2020) on redistributive housing).
As housing market professionals in my study used one of these two rubrics to interpret people and organizational routines, they became what I call race brokers. This concept does not just refer to real estate brokers, or real estate agents with additional specialized training, credentials, and professional authority. Instead, race brokers are gatekeeping individuals in any social sphere who are more influential than most other people in shaping what race means
Table I.2 The People-Oriented Market Rubric
Asian Black Latinx
Affluent
Loyal to co-ethnics
Smart/value
education
Beautiful
Strong/resilient
Family centered
Rich history
Long track record of being discriminated against and overcoming discrimination
Family centered
Hardworking and entrepreneurial
Financially stable and upwardly mobile
White
Distinct architectural preferences
Affluent or middle class
Occupational and educational achievement
Note: Professionals who used the people-oriented market rubric did not use all of the rubric’s elements at all times. Rather, they selectively chose from these ideas depending on the context.
and whether and how ideas about race are connected to resources (Blumer 1958). Race brokers are influential because of what they do and how they do it. First, race brokers express views about race (whether in explicit or coded ways) and act on their views. Because race brokers are the experts, the authority figures, the official representatives, or the elites in their respective spheres, their views about race and the ways they act on these views can also seem expert or authoritative to those around them (Blumer 1958; Flores 2018). Second, race brokers make connections or avoid making connections between individuals and institutional resources in ways that reinforce racial inequality or racial equity.12 Because they are positioned between everyday individuals (e.g., home buyers and sellers) and institutions (e.g., governments and industries), they shape how systemic racial inequalities—in this case, racial segregation—are reproduced or challenged. In my study, for example, housing developers shaped home buyers’ access to neighborhoods, land, and homes. Real estate agents influenced buyers’ and sellers’ access to other housing consumers and mortgage bankers, among other financial representatives. Mortgage bankers shaped home buyers’ access to capital and representation to the federal government. And, appraisers affected home buyers’ access to mortgage loan capital and home sellers’ access to wealth.
When the race brokers I studied recycled ideas from the racist market rubric in their everyday work, they made a hierarchy of racial differences seem natural and real. Indeed, in doing so, they upheld racist discourse and racist interpretations of routines that perpetuated racial inequality in housing opportunities and outcomes. This was most obviously the case when housing
market professionals expressed explicitly racist views, whether stated in biological or color-blind terms, taken directly from the racist market rubric playbook (see Feagin 2013; Lewis 2003). But these individuals also made racist discourse and routines seem acceptable when they enabled others to perpetuate such racist views and routines through complicit racism, 13 or expressing shock and dismay at others’ racism while hiding their own cooperation with racial prejudice, discrimination, and structural inequality. In my study, professionals cooperated with racism by expressing helplessness to change the interpersonal, organizational, or institutional status quo; using organizational or institutional norms to justify silence or inaction in the context of racial inequality; giving second, third, and fourth chances to social relations who engaged in explicit or color-blind racism; and providing insider information to help others avoid the consequences of explicit racism. Complicit racism masqueraded as racial pathos, or awareness and distaste of racial inequality, while in reality enabling color-blind or explicit racist ideas and behaviors to flourish (see also Mayorga-Gallo 2019). These professionals’ racist discourse and routines also shaped the connections they made between individuals and resources, sustaining the process of racial segregation. They were thus brokers of both race and racism.
By contrast, when the race brokers I studied adopted ideas from the people-oriented market rubric, they countered such racist discourse and routines. Instead of allowing racist ideas to flourish, they saw “other possibilities for organizing the world” (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015:240). Such race brokers circulated discourse and established routines that emphasized the worth and inherent equality of individuals and neighborhoods of color. Then, they made connections between individuals and resources through these perceptions, undermining the racist market logic of their White counterparts as well as aspects of racial segregation. They were thus brokers of race—in alternate, counter- and people-affirming forms—and breakers of racism.
Although racial segregation remains entrenched through the interlocked racist ideas, actions, and policies of multiple sets of professionals and government and private agencies (including those described previously), the racism breakers I studied in the real estate sector demonstrated that it is possible to foster a more equitable housing market and intervene in America’s racially segregated landscape. Whereas their racism brokering counterparts, especially White housing market professionals, routinely perceived and assumed the inferiority of individuals and neighborhoods of color and then acted on
