Search

A rapidly expanding body of research has sought to connect the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's (HOLC) so-called redlining maps to a wide array of present-day social injustices. The assertion is that these maps helped entrench emerging cogeographies of racial segregation and devaluation that have continued to reproduce racial-spatial inequities through time. We argue that such arguments likely underestimate the ongoing power of racism by narrowly focusing on the map grades rather than on racial segregation itself. To investigate this possibility, we conduct a set of statistical analyses that decouple race from redlining. These analyses produce two main findings. First, postwar Black population growth did not occur in all HOLC redlined neighborhoods evenly but was most concentrated in those areas that either had an initial Black population or that were adjacent to them. Second, whereas HOLC grade was a stronger predictor of neighborhood home values than Black population share until about 1970, the latter has become the more salient factor since. Thus, rather than obliquely highlighting the persistent geographies of racialized devaluation by way of the HOLC grades, researchers should instead focus on the racially uneven geographies of value directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's (HOLC) so-called 'redlining' maps have gone from a niche corner of urban historical scholarship to the centre of mainstream narratives about racism in the United States. In this paper, I map this journey and trace the contours of the ongoing debates that have emerged, identifying two competing camps I call 'HOLC Culpablism' and 'HOLC Scepticism'. Finding these perspectives to have run up against their self-imposed limitations, I outline a research agenda that breaks from the debate's narrow confines by envisioning HOLC's mapping materials anew. My proposed approach recasts the maps and their accompanying field notes as windows into the governing racial–spatial ideology of 20th-century US real estate capital. In doing so, it invites researchers to reimagine the map grades as dynamic categories reflecting a particular spatiotemporal conception of value that is highly contingent on an area's estimated racial trajectory. This reformulation, I argue, not only opens new possibilities for studying the HOLC mapping programme but suggests that the power of these maps has almost certainly been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November of 2016, the City of Stonecrest was carved out of Atlanta's suburban Black Mecca. The hope was that the new city's "brand" might bring development and increased wealth to an area which has borne the brunt of uneven development, racialized urban secession, and racial capitalism for many decades. The case of Stonecrest points to several interesting tensions, contradictions, and necessary reckonings around race, class, and neoliberal urban space in Atlanta. We reconsider the historical politics of the Black Mecca alongside contradictory geographies of racialized housing policy, arriving at an analysis of Stonecrest as a project of White democracy that fails to challenge the material and ideological conditions of its own subordination. We build from this analysis to argue that abolition democracy in Atlanta must work to transcend not only the particulars of its own history (and that of Atlanta more broadly) but the hegemony of neoliberal racial capitalism as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An outpouring of critical sub/urban scholarship in recent years has explored the historical and ongoing linkages between race, real estate, and space in the United States. Much of this literature has positioned residential segregation as crucial for structuring the geographies of capital accumulation, highlighting how segregation delimits places for extraction and dispossession. In this essay, I build from the foundations this literature lays by bringing together Charles Abrams’ concept of “the racist theory of value” (RTV) and David Harvey’s notion of “anti-value” to illuminate the centrality of racialized devaluation in the accumulation process in the US. Specifically, I contend that the RTV, in its role in entrenching residential segregation and collapsing race and value together in space, has helped to demarcate and contain the devaluation that capitalism requires in Black residential spaces. As a key innovation for real estate capital to manage the geographies of (anti-)value, the RTV ensures that the economic losses generated in the accumulation process are felt most acutely in Black communities. In this way, the RTV constitutes a form of planned spatial obsolescence wherein the restricted movement of Black people is converted into the controlled movement of devaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of neoliberalism has thrust cities into fierce competition for jobs, investments, and “creative” residents who many believe to be the purveyors of urban economic development. In response, city governments have devised entrepreneurial strategies aiming to establish distinct local identities through marketing their supposedly unique culture and/or history via place branding campaigns and accumulating what David Harvey calls “collective symbolic capital”. However, with disproportionate scholarly attention focusing on large urban centers, little is known about how these processes have unfolded, or what they entail, in smaller cities. Adding to a growing body of literature interested in urban processes down the urban hierarchy, this research traces the historical development of Knoxville, Tennessee’s gentrification efforts and examines the contradictions—and their implications—at work within the interactions between the associated processes of gentrification, urban entrepreneurialism, monopoly rent seeking, collective symbolic capital accumulation, place branding, and creative city policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]