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real estate



  • When the Public University is a Corporate Landlord

    by Charmaine Chua, Desiree Fields and David Stein

    During negotiations with graduate student workers, UCLA administrators claimed that increasing stipends would effectively subsidize local landlords through higher rents and squeeze the poor in the Los Angeles housing market. The reality is that the university is an investor in a huge real estate trust that is hiking rents itself. 



  • Southwest Florida's Overdevelopment Made Ian Worse

    by Zeke Baker

    Massive hydrological projects undertaken to make Southwest Florida's wetlands into developable agricultural land and then high-priced real estate removed the key buffers for coastal floods. Storms like Ian are a rebuke to the idea that humanity and commerce can bend nature to their will. 



  • How "Sales Comps" Built Racism Into the Housing Market

    by Elizabeth Korver-Glenn

    The recent ordeal of a Johns Hopkins historian whose house was appraised for more money when he removed pictures of himself and his Black family points to a key finding: the use of sales comparisons to appraise homes enshrines racism in the market. 



  • Your House Makes More Money than You Do

    Rising real estate values are bringing more wealth to Americans than wages and salaries are. This is a big problem for economic equality.



  • The Invention of America's Most Dangerous Idea

    by Gene Slater

    How did a right-wing conception of "freedom" rooted in the individual's absolute property rights supersede an idea of freedom based in social equality? Blame the real estate industry. 



  • How to Ensure a New Redlining Initiative Succeeds

    by Robert Henderson and Rebecca Marchiel

    Ensuring equity in mortgage lending requires understanding why the Community Reinvestment Act failed to achieve the same goal decades ago, through a better awareness of the ongoing problems in mortgage lending. 



  • How Academia Laid the Groundwork for Redlining

    by Todd Michney and LaDale Winling

    Richard T. Ely and his student Ernest McKinley Fisher pushed the National Association of Real Estate Boards to adopt "the unsupported hypothesis that Black people's very presence inexorably lowered property values," tying the private real estate industry to racial segregation. 



  • When the Real Estate Industry Led the Fight to Defend Segregation

    California's battle over fair housing legislation in the 1960s shows a key development of modern conservatism: raising property rights to an absolute and brooking no infringement on it, particularly for the sake of racial equality, argues Gene Slater, author of a new book on fair housing. 



  • Los Angeles Pioneered American Racial Segregation

    by Gene Slater

    The real estate industry acted as a cartel to limit the free market in housing to preserve racial homogeneity, claiming it was necessary to protect property values. This form of housing segregation was tested in the booming market of 1920s California and spread nationwide. 



  • The Housing Market is Booming but Remains Deeply Unequal

    by LaDale Winling

    The standards and practices of real estate appraisal were developed in the context of white supremacy in the 1920s and since then have worked to make home ownership a path toward building wealth that has favored white Americans. 



  • Your Home’s Value Is Based on Racism

    by Dorothy A. Brown

    The real estate market isn't "free" – it is shaped by the preferences of white buyers who prefer much less racial integration than black buyers do. Consequently, the market is a machine for expanding racial inequality through home equity. 



  • A Mansion Sale Built on the Myth of a Notorious Cow

    The Chicago Fire of 1871 has been the wellspring of plenty of myths. A real estate listing for a southside mansion is just the latest. Historians Carl Smith and Ann Durkin Keating comment.