New Racial Meanings of Housing in America

America is now half a decade into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, triggered by a deeply racialized “innovation” at the social and spatial margin—risky, high-cost mortgage lending—that went mainstream. Predatory capital perfected its operations in poor and working-class black neighborhoods of the deindustrializing inner city, before pursuing the greater volume available across a multiracial array of postindustrial Sun Belt suburbanites. In this article, we map the dangerous spatial configurations of law that reproduced these evolving exploitations. The catastrophic aftermath of predatory financialization may have destabilized the alliance between economic and cultural conservatives that structures so much of America’s racial political economy.