Racialized Geographies of Housing Financialization

The Public and Urban Policy Program is delighted to host Elora Lee Raymond for a talk on Racialized Geographies of Housing Financialization for our Public and Urban Policy Lunchtime Speaker Series.

In this talk, Elora Lee Raymond argues that theories of racial capitalism provide necessary scaffolding for understanding housing financialization, and the black radical tradition offers a path toward theorizing housing justice in relation to financialization. Everywhere we look today, we find extended circuits of financial processes, instruments, and intermediaries implicated in the reconfiguration of housing development, acquisition, ownership, and management to render immovable, local property into liquid, global capital. Despite these developments, the central insight of racial capitalism – that racism and capitalism are fundamentally intertwined  – has not been thoroughly developed in relation to financialization.  Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization materially reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring the abstraction of racism from systems of individual bias and racialized bodies into automated systems.

Note: this talk is based on a forthcoming article in Progress in Human Geography co-authored with Desiree Fields of the University of California-Berkeley.

Elora Lee Raymond is Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech. She is interested in the financialization of housing and property in land, displacement and dispossession through housing systems, housing and disasters, housing justice, race, segregation, and the transnational Pacific Islander community. She has published articles in several academic journals and her research has been featured in the Economist, New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR’s Morning Edition, ABC's Good Morning America, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Univision, and Radio New Zealand, among other news outlets.

Moderated by Alex Schwartz, Chair of the MS Public & Urban Policy Program.

Save the date: the Public and Urban Policy Lunchtime Speaker Series will continue on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 with James Parrott, Director of Economic and Fiscal Policy at the New School's Center for NYC Affairs, who will speak on COVID's current impact on the NYC economy.