• "It has been a historical commodity ... and now it's making a comeback.  It has a great future."  This is a quote from the director of Agrorural, Peru's rural development agency.  When I took my very first university-level geography course, Professor Roger Downs began by emphasizing that geography was not what we had been led to believe by our experiences in junior high.  Seventh-grade geography was about memorizing rivers, mountains, the names of countries and their capitals, and their principal exports.  Roger famously called this the "Principal Products of Peru" approach to geography.  Geography was not guano, Downs told us.  And through the next weeks of fascinating lectures that kept me on the edge of my seat every day, Roger showed us that geography was about process, and the astonishingly beautiful interplay of continuity and change amongst places, peoples, and environments.  I was hooked.

• "The Philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next."  This is a quote from Cynthia Dunbar, a conservative Christian activist who serves on the Texas State Board of Education, and who teaches part-time at Liberty University School of Law, in Lynchburg, Virginia.  The Texas State Board has become one of the major battlegrounds for standards governing what students in public elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States learn about history and other subjects.  Conservatives have mobilized to take over the Board, and to revise curriculum standards so that students are taught about, for instance, the inherently Christian and biblical basis of the U.S. Constitution.  Your job:  first, read Russel Shorto (2010).  "How Christian Were the Founders?"  New York Times Magazine, February 14.  Second, investigate the public proceedings and journalistic reports about the Texas Board, and analyze these questions:  What changes are the Christian activists seeking to make for the curriculum standards for geography?  Are the struggles over standards for geography any less significant than the high-profile battles over history, government, and biology?

• "I am imported from place to place..."  Not long ago, Steven Flusty, professor of geography at York University, sent me a copy of a forthcoming book chapter.  Flusty has wide-ranging interests in social theory and urbanism, and recently has been focusing on the interrelations of socio-cultural change, societal understandings of the past and the present, and the simultaneous acceleration of custom-designed cultural commodities and travelers and tourists.  Yep, I'm overwhelmed, too, by the complexity of that last sentence, which is my lame attempt to summarize Flusty's work.  As a quantifier and a recovering positivist, I can estimate that the upper bound of the 95-percent confidence interval is that I understand no more than 10 percent of most of what Flusty writes.  But I enjoy 100 percent of it.  It forces me to stretch my imagination in ways that make my brain hurt, and that can only be a good thing.  I recommend this project only if you have met two prerequisites:  1) you've taken a third- or fourth-year class with Derek Gregory, and 2) you've completed, or at least you are currently enrolled in, Urban Studies 400, The City as an Entertainment Machine.  Your mission:  read some of Flusty's work and analyze how it refines, extends, and challenges any of the major themes explored in that course. 

• "It Would Have Been A Katrina."  Not long ago, Nicholas Dahmann sent me an essay in the history of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA-CAN), a coalition working to protect low-income residents from gentrification and efforts to criminize poor people in LA's Skid Row.  Dahmann's eloquent essay opens with a quote from one of the organizers and mobilizers, General Dogon:  "That's what it means. We're still here. We ain't going nowhere. If it wasn't for our work at LA CAN, it would have been a Katrina. It would have been genocide down here. If you look at it from that perspective, just starting from there and look at all the things that we have done, helped with, and stopped, all that comes into plain view…LA CAN is a support system, it's a friend, and also it's a lover because we love everybody. We're all neighbors. We're all brothers and sisters because we've developed that bond through the struggle."  (General Dogon, quoted in Nicholas Dahmann [2010].  Ten Years of Struggle for Human Rights: The housing and civil rights work of the Los Angeles Community Action Network. Los Angeles, CA:  Southern California Library / Department of Geography, University of Southern California, quote from p. 1).

• Topographies of Torch Tensions.  In the Spring of 2008, the old familiar tradition of the Olympic torch relay catalyzed a veritable moveable feast of protest and mobilization in the months leading up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing.  While protestors advocating autonomy for Tibet may have constituted a plurality, the high-profile and transnationally mobile spectacle of the torch relay offered an irresistible target for a wide variety of concerned groups.  "The Chinese Olympic relay - from Athens to Istanbul, St. Petersburg, London and Paris so far - has created a bond among protesters, some of whom had little in common.  In Paris, at the Trocadéro plaza across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, the human rights organization Amnesty International and the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders protested side by side with representatives from a banned underground Chinese democracy party, Taiwan nationalists and proponents of independence for Uighurs, a Muslim minority in western China."  Katrin Benhold and Elisabeth Rosenthal (2008).  "Olympic Torch Relay Through Paris Turns into Melee."  New York Times, April 7.  The ever-intensifying competition over the transnational spectacle of the Olympics had backfired, creating precisely the kinds of images that the International Olympic Committee, and prospective host nations, regions, and cities have struggled to contain.  Can they succeed?  Or is protest the inescapable, dialectical Other -- itself defined and nourished by the itinerant geography of an enterprise that has come to be defined by market competition, corporate branding, and a global media audience of unparalleled magnitude?  The tentative answer from the IOC itself seems to be a murmured "yes."  In 2009, the Committee responded to the anti-China torch protests with a new policy:  beginning in 2012, the torch would only pass through the host country of the Games.  No more international headlines following an international protest caravan, perhaps?  "Their goal was to keep crowds friendly after widespread protests accompanied the torch relay, and embarrassed China and Olympic officials, before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Canada signed on early to the new rules but then bent them ... albeit barely," to take the torch a few hundred footsteps into the U.S. at the Peace Arch crossing.  William Yardley (2010).  "Rules are Bent a Little, and Olympic Torch Visits the U.S."  New York Times, February 9.

• Tea Party Tempest.  The election of U.S. President Barack Obama enraged a vast section of the American electorate.  Many American conservatives have remained convinced -- even during times when Republicans had undisputed power and used it effectively -- that they are under siege by cadres of evil liberal elites working to transform the United States into a Bolshevik collective farm.  In the last thirty years, American politics has unquestionably veered to the right, but thanks to Frank Luntz, Fox News, and others in the conservative communications machine, most conservatives in the United States have felt disenfranchised by a vast left-wing conspiracy.  Obama's election catalyzed this fear into a powerful, indignant rage.  Not long after Obama took office, the cable-news commentator Rick Santelli offered a short but angry attack on the idea that the Obama Administration was considering expenditures that would help to ease the financial burden for millions of U.S. homeowners who owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth -- thanks to a housing collapse caused by the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.  Santelli urged viewers to rise up against the idea that the government might bail out their irresponsible neighbors who borrowed too much for their homes, and suggested that it might be time for another Boston Tea Party.  The Obama homeowner rescue plans, it turned out, were extremely limited:  it was much easier to convince conservative legislators to bail out multinational banks in the name of "stabilization," rather than help homeowners, many of whom had been swindled by predatory lenders.  But the "Tea Party" comment tapped into the gathering right-wing anger at Obama and all that he represented.  The approach of the federal tax deadline on April 15, 2009, brought the appearance of scores of "Tea Party" protests against taxes and big government.  The protests spread further and became ever more angry and threatening through the summer.  It has become clear that this is a social and political movement with considerable force.  But what is the geography of this movement?  Does it follow the broad regional divisions that separate Republican and Democratic loyalties in America -- a division that separates the generally Democratic cities and inner-ring suburbs from the prevailing Republican exurbs and rural areas, and that separates the Democratic North and Northeast from the mostly Republican South?  How common are the disruptive exceptions?  In a special election in January, 2010, a Republican candidate, Scott Brown, achieved a dramatic upset victory for the Senate seat held for almost a half century by Ted Kennedy before his death.  Brown achieved his victory in part by tapping into the anger of the Tea Party movement, and by downplaying the use of the word "Republican" to appeal to self-described independent voters.  What matters here is that he achieved the upset victory in territory once considered reliably Democratic -- sending pangs of fear among all elected Democrats in Washington, DC.

• Geographies of the Public Household.  A number of years ago, I drew on the work of Susan Hanson, Gerry Pratt, and Dolores Hayden to develop a theory of the "public household."  My concern was the interlocking relations between gender roles, private household social dynamics, and the intensified marketization of every corner of human life.  I undertook an analysis of the geography of the public household in different neighborhoods of Minneapolis-St. Paul between 1970 and 1990.  I haven't found the time to do the logical follow-up on this project.  We need to update the analysis for the Twin Cities in 2000 (with decennial census data), to extend the approach with the continuous-measurement model of the American Community Survey, and to evaluate contextual contrasts with other U.S. cities.  We also need to adapt the framework for an empirical investigation of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and many other cities.  We also need to coordinate the analysis with labor organizers, to map the geographical contours for campaigns such as the recent effort in Albany to win the right to organize for private household workers in New York State.  (My original analysis of Minneapolis-St. Paul appears in Elvin K. Wyly [1999].  "Continuity and Change in the Restless Urban Landscape."  Economic Geography 75(4), 309-338.).
  
  
• Large-Cap Shotgun and Camelback Houses.  Some time ago, I adapted a simple technique to measure the fine-grained neighborhood patterns of housing speculation -- using a benchmark that is similar to a price-earnings ratio for stock market analysis.  When we apply this indicator to debt-financed housing purchases, we can map the geography of highly-leveraged, debt-enabled speculation.  I ran the numbers for New York City.  I think it's a fascinating map.  I'd love to see how the patterns appear in other cities.  I'm especially curious about Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Detroit.  And New Orleans, too.  On shotguns and camelbacks all built in the sinking backswamps behind the natural levees, see Pierce Lewis, 2003.  New Orleans:  The Making of an Urban Landscape.  Santa Fe, NM:  Center for American Places.
  
  
• Rent Gap Gaps.  Neil Smith's rent gap framework has shaped thirty years of gentrification research, but has also proven extremely difficult to measure.  But certain data offer the potential for new insights on the rent gap and its role in neighborhood transformation.  In particular, surprisingly few gentrification researchers have used the individual, loan-level records, each of them tied to census tract codes, from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data.  I would love to see these data used, along with other relevant databases, to distinguish house value, capitalized ground rent, and potential ground rent.  If these concepts could be operationalized (and I am not suggesting that it would be easy), then we could evaluate how the rent gap changes when it is produced not just by increases in potential rent amidst decreases in capitalized rent -- but also when potential and capitalized rent are both declining or increasing (but at markedly different rates).  Why does this matter?  Pro-gentrification advocates, most prominently Andres Duany in his "Three Cheers for Gentrification" in the right-wing American Enterprise, argue that places like Detroit and Cleveland need all the gentrification they can get.  A strategic positivist evaluation of rent gap dynamics in declining vs. expanding cities would help to illuminate the role of disinvestment in creating profitable, gentrifiable spaces in different kinds of inner-city contexts.
  
  
• Instruments of Racialized Places.  A few years ago, I refined a common technique to map the contextual variation of racism against African American and Latino/Latina homebuyers and homeowners.  The approach built on an analysis done by Sam Myers and his colleagues in the early 1990s, subsequently refined by my good friend Steve Holloway.  I applied the approach to a narrow category of inner-city neighborhoods in about two dozen cities, in order to reveal the contextuality of racism -- the regional and local variation in bigotry that we must always recognize as we continue the Civil Rights Movement.  We need to apply this technique to other cities, and to evaluate changes over time.  (See Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel [2004]."Gentrification, Segregation, and Discrimination in the American Urban System."  Environment and Planning A 36, 1215-1241).
  
  
• Subprime Slime.  Not long ago, I had the disarmingly simple, naive, and (some might argue) silly idea to undertake a classiification of the different landscapes produced by subprime mortgage lending.  For twenty years there has been a growing academic and policy literature on the subject, of course, but until recently it's been specialized, obscure, and ignored by most folks.  In the Spring and Summer of 2007, however, investors began to understand the full severity and prevalence of abuses and exploitations committed against millions of homeowners and homebuyers -- who eventually wound up defaulting in ever larger numbers as it became impossible to keep up with the mounting payments of sophisticated (and dangerous) loan products.  Alan Greenspan's respect for the innovations of the market notwithstanding, there are some "exotic" instruments -- such as the much-discussed NINJA loan (No Income, No Job, No Assets, but we're happy to give you a loan!) -- that never should have been invented.
  
  
  But indeed these sorts of products were invented, because they were profitable. 
  
  
  Years ago, of course, defaults and foreclosures were bad for everyone involved -- borrower, bank, and community.  But in the new world of "structured finance," where mortgages are sold to investors and debt obligations are chopped up into all sorts of different commodities, the situation is very different.  After making a loan, for example, lenders often sell the debt itself to investors.  They often sell the "servicing" rights -- the nitty-gritty details of processing the monthly payments and calling borrowers when the due date arrives but the payment has not.  Special servicing firms usually earn most of their revenue from things like late payments, creating a powerful incentive to 'lose' a check for a few days in order to trigger a late charge.  Meanwhile, the loan obligations themselves are packaged into carefully-designed Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs) offered to investors on Wall Street.  Investors obviously demand higher returns for loans of higher risk, so investment banking firms over the last decade found ever more sophisticated ways of providing higher returns for ever more risky loans, and lenders and brokers responded by aggressively making more and more loans that could quickly be sold into the MBS market.  As a result, the old incentives no longer apply:  we're not talking about a local banker anymore, who is concerned that a particular borrower should be able to make the monthly payments on a long-term, sustainable basis.  Instead, we're talking about brokers and lenders eager to make as many loans as they can, and then the loans are pacakged into securities, divided up into a variety of collateralized debt obligations, multiple-tranche bonds with callback provisions, interest-only strips, and so on.  Confused?  Yeah, me too.  And so is nearly every major institutional investor on the planet.  (Indeed, the 'Subprime Slime' title is not my own, but is a quote from a financial analyst explaining why investors were running away so fast even from mainstream bank stocks in August, 2007.)  The point is that for a time, as long as house values continued to rise, ever more risky practices could be profitable for those who made the loans, and for those who invested in them, even as more and more borrowers defaulted on the loans.  Especially in the refinance market -- where most of the subprime push has been concentrated -- it's possible to extract a lot of profit by using deception to make loans with high fees and terrible terms to poor people who are almost certain to default in a few months.  When they do, come back to them, offer to refinance, pack in another batch of hidden charges, and pocket another bonus.  Eventually, all the home equity is down to zero -- the borrower owes as much as, or more than, the value of the house.  But if you foreclose before that very last stage, when the borrower is in default but there's still some home equity, you can still extract one last round of profit.  In other words, irrational, unhealthy, and dangerous loan transactions became profitable.  It became profitable to make loans destined to fail.  The industry created a game of musical chairs that provided lucrative fees to everyone, with surprisingly low risks for brokers, lenders, and investors.  Unfortunately, borrowers consistently wound up on the short end of these aggressive deals.  If you're still not convinced, read some of the historical literature on when this happened to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and also take a look at the expose of West Outer Drive, Detroit, published by that notorious left-wing rag, the Wall Street Journal. 
  
  
  But back to my silly idea.  How do we come to terms with the many different ways that this new form of financial risk interacts with the many different housing markets and neighborhood settings across the American urban system?  The combinatorial possibilities are endless, but of course we do need to find some way of classifying things to make sense of them, and to formulate plans for organizing, activism, litigation, and regulation.  This applies no matter what you think of the industry that has sprang up to serve B-and-C borrowers:  whether you think it's the magic of risk-based pricing, or the exploitation of predatory lending.
  
  
  So I had this simple idea, and one day in early 2007 on the way home from work, in the spare moments when the bus wasn't going over any bumps, I jotted down this.  I eventually wound up playing around with the 2004 HMDA data -- a best-case scenario, as it turns out -- and expanding the primitive scribbled notes into the  rather verbose first draft of "Mapping and Mobilization."  When it was sent out for anonymous peer review, one of the referees raised the predictable objection:  "Not all subprime lending is predatory."  Yes, that was a cutting-edge insight about ten years ago.  In any event, the referee's comments inspired me to redesign the analysis from the ground up to address this concern, in what could be regarded as a new inference approach, in "Subprime Mortgage Segmentation in the American Urban System."
  
  
  But the original classification impulse remains, no matter how embarrassing it is to stand out there in the field and hack the pumpkin apart like a lunatic (see the original Mapping and Mobilization to understand what I mean by this).  What I need your help on is this:  what are the absolutely crucial measures of city and neighborhood conditions that we should use to define the space of today's Wall-Street subprime slime?  Precisely how do we analyze the linkages among racial-ethnic inequality, regional variations in the historical legacy of the housing stock that is (and has become, through filtering) affordable to lower-income homeowners?  How can we best measure the velocity of change between 2004 and 2006?  We also need in-depth narratives, based on deep local knowledge of particular neighborhoods shown in various clusters and taxonomies.  Also, I need you to undertake a full-fledged study of metropolitan areas in Puerto Rico, which have been almost completely ignored in the redlining, discrimination, and predatory lending literatures.  But I know there's an important analytical and strategic story to be told there, in part because the comparatively low rate of subprime penetration can be traced to the strong governmental subsidies for affordable homeownership on the island.

• Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel (2005).  "Mapping Neoliberal American Urbanism."  In Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge, eds., Gentrification in a Global Context:  The New Urban Colonialism.  New York:  Routledge, 18-38.

• Don Mitchell (1997).  "The Annihilation of Space by Law:  The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States."  Antipode 29(3), 303-335.

• Don Mitchell (2003).  The Right to the City:  Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space.  New York:  Guilford Press, Chapter 5.

• National Coalition for the Homeless (2006).  A Dream Denied:  The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities.  Washington, DC:  National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.