DissertationMy dissertation examines how property markets generate and organize inequality beyond their operation as sites of exchange. I ask three questions about the role of real property markets in place-making and identity formation, and how these processes shape urban inequality: How do property markets produce and align group identities and place identities? How do property markets generate intergroup conflict and guide collective action? How do property markets shape political belonging and the experience of citizenship? I explore these questions through two cases: urban development and community organizing in Mexico City, and Milwaukee’s Neighborhood Improvement Districts (NIDs).
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The first empirical chapter uses the case of Mexico City to challenge assumptions about how property markets produce neighborhood segregation. While segregation often emerges when property markets sort individuals according to pre-existing social categories, it may also arise when property markets generate and emplace new forms of social difference. I show how the construction and regulation of a modern property market created segregation in post-Revolutionary Mexico City by constituting new place-based collective identities in the urban periphery, and subsequently amplifying and naturalizing a sense of social difference. While segregation is commonly conceptualized as a strategy pursued by powerful groups to create or protect unequal access to resources, the segregation examined here results from residents’ efforts to combat their exclusion from the market-based distribution of resources. More broadly, this chapter brings constructivist understandings of identity to segregation research and recasts property markets as race- and identity-making institutions.
The second chapter connects residents’ experiences of property markets to contemporary organizing against urban development and displacement through the concept of moral economy. I compare the construction and invocation of moral economy across several Mexico City neighborhoods where property is central to both the productive and social reproductive activities of residents. Tensions between neighborhood-specific moral economies stem from neighborhood-level differences in residents’ pathways to ownership and in the claims used to successfully demand property rights. Residents respond to displacement threats by mobilizing to defend these neighborhood-specific and opposing moral economies, which ultimately hinders efforts to organize across neighborhoods. I challenge the conceptualization of moral economy as a vestige of vanishing pre-market “traditional” social relations by demonstrating how moral economies are continually reimagined by communities. Moral economies evolve along with changes in communities’ structural positions in society and in the value and meaning of their objects. In this case, residents reinvented the moral economy surrounding property as they reorganized their livelihoods around their new status as property owners, and as capital-driven urban development transformed the value of property.
The third empirical chapter examines how these findings extend to other contexts through a study of Milwaukee’s Neighborhood Improvement Districts (NIDs), a program that allows residents to propose the boundaries and assessment structures for neighborhood-level property tax districts. Once approved, the city collects and disburses these assessments to an elected NID board comprised of residents, which implements approved activities (e.g., home improvement grants, neighborhood beautification). I find that homeowners, working through existing community organizations, have used NIDs to harness the coercive power of the state to address long-standing neighborhood concerns. In majority renter neighborhoods of color, residents use NIDs to force reinvestment from absentee landlords and raise property values. In newer subdivisions at the urban-suburban interface, homeowners use NIDs as a state-enforced replacement for flagging homeowner associations and to force community reinvestment in collective property. While an effective tool for addressing these issues, NIDs also amplify social differences along lines of homeownership, which is racially organized within and across neighborhoods.
The second chapter connects residents’ experiences of property markets to contemporary organizing against urban development and displacement through the concept of moral economy. I compare the construction and invocation of moral economy across several Mexico City neighborhoods where property is central to both the productive and social reproductive activities of residents. Tensions between neighborhood-specific moral economies stem from neighborhood-level differences in residents’ pathways to ownership and in the claims used to successfully demand property rights. Residents respond to displacement threats by mobilizing to defend these neighborhood-specific and opposing moral economies, which ultimately hinders efforts to organize across neighborhoods. I challenge the conceptualization of moral economy as a vestige of vanishing pre-market “traditional” social relations by demonstrating how moral economies are continually reimagined by communities. Moral economies evolve along with changes in communities’ structural positions in society and in the value and meaning of their objects. In this case, residents reinvented the moral economy surrounding property as they reorganized their livelihoods around their new status as property owners, and as capital-driven urban development transformed the value of property.
The third empirical chapter examines how these findings extend to other contexts through a study of Milwaukee’s Neighborhood Improvement Districts (NIDs), a program that allows residents to propose the boundaries and assessment structures for neighborhood-level property tax districts. Once approved, the city collects and disburses these assessments to an elected NID board comprised of residents, which implements approved activities (e.g., home improvement grants, neighborhood beautification). I find that homeowners, working through existing community organizations, have used NIDs to harness the coercive power of the state to address long-standing neighborhood concerns. In majority renter neighborhoods of color, residents use NIDs to force reinvestment from absentee landlords and raise property values. In newer subdivisions at the urban-suburban interface, homeowners use NIDs as a state-enforced replacement for flagging homeowner associations and to force community reinvestment in collective property. While an effective tool for addressing these issues, NIDs also amplify social differences along lines of homeownership, which is racially organized within and across neighborhoods.
Other Projects |
Historical Mexico-U.S. Immigration Data
In a another project, my co-authors and I constructed a novel dataset of U.S.-Mexico border crossers (1919-1952) by linking data from administrative records to individual-level U.S. Census records. In a paper in preparation using this dataset, I examine how the housing markets into which immigrants arrived, as well as their entry into homeownership, contributed to their likelihood of acquiring U.S. citizenship. A second, co-authored paper leverages a unique measure of complexion—as determined by border agents—to examine the divergent labor market outcomes of immigrants according to skin color. Examining the geographical variability of this association, we find that complexion was a stronger predictor of economic outcomes in the Southwest than in other regions of the country.
In a another project, my co-authors and I constructed a novel dataset of U.S.-Mexico border crossers (1919-1952) by linking data from administrative records to individual-level U.S. Census records. In a paper in preparation using this dataset, I examine how the housing markets into which immigrants arrived, as well as their entry into homeownership, contributed to their likelihood of acquiring U.S. citizenship. A second, co-authored paper leverages a unique measure of complexion—as determined by border agents—to examine the divergent labor market outcomes of immigrants according to skin color. Examining the geographical variability of this association, we find that complexion was a stronger predictor of economic outcomes in the Southwest than in other regions of the country.