Geography 450:  Project Introductions

This page offers introductions to some of the project options for our work in this course, which we'll talk about in our second meeting.  Before that time, you should glance through the options quickly, and then take a closer look at one of the options that seems best to capture your interests.  Don't worry if you don't understand all the details in these descriptions or in the articles!  Just look through and try to get a sense of the key questions and approaches.




Global Mapping the Megacity:  Growing Patterns of Socio-Economic Polarization in the Ten Cities of Suburbia

Recently, urban scholars have drawn attention to a number of changes in the vast, sprawling cities that we call home. Primarily, Canadian cities are becoming more divided: neighbourhoods become either wealthy or poor places, as the middle class slips closer to oblivion. Cities such as Toronto are increasingly defined by a tale of two cities. City 1 is comprised of neighbourhoods of increasing wealth, while City 3 is made up of communities with a declining average income. In the midst of this geography of urban polarization is City 2, neighbourhoods that have retained stable income levels (Hulchanski, 2010). This "city" is quickly being swallowed up by a city landscape that has been made unequal by a changing global economy and urban policies that advance a neoliberal governance agenda.  This research agenda involves a spatial analysis and interpretation of the distinct kinds of suburbanism created by the neoliberal-transnational transformation of Toronto.

City Labor:  Race, Gender, Ethnicity, Immigration and the Transformation of Urban Labor Markets

Mainstream theory, public policy, and popular discussion portray labor markets as dynamic economic processes:  people do their best to get the best job they can, based on their educational qualifications and other forms of "human capital," and employers do everything they can to get the most productive workers they can.  On balance, all other things being equal, in the long run each worker will earn wages that reflect their efficiency and their "value added" to the enterprise. 

But of course labor markets don't really work this way, do they?  Mainstream theory may view labor markets in purely economic terms, but there is now a vast and influential body of work in the social sciences that offers a compelling challenge and alternative.  This alternative emphasizes that labor markets are not solely economic, but also fundamentally social and institutional.  This does not mean that we should ignore things like productivity or wages.  But it means that social divisions in labor markets matter, and are not simply temporary quirks that will disappear over time.  Some jobs are gendered as male or female.  Some jobs seem to be niches for recent immigrants.  Other jobs come to be associated with workers of particular racial and ethnic identities.  All of these divisions are important, because some kinds of entry-level jobs offer real "ports of entry," the first step on a career ladder that can bring upward mobility, increases in pay, job security, and other benefits.  But other entry-level jobs are "dead-end" prospects with little chance of significant improvement over time.

This project focuses on labor-market divisions in cities.  Some of the questions we might explore include:  How do racial, gender, ethnic, and immigrant divisions vary among and/or within metropolitan regions?  As economic restructuring changes the mixture of industries and occupations that enjoy job growth, how do the impacts shape existing patterns of inequality among workers?

Virginia Parks, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, will start us off, by discussing her wonderful, fascinating article on the transformation of gender, race, and immigrant niches in Chicago's job market.  Virginia's analysis of occupational niches illustrates one set of methods and data that will be very useful to us.  The data provide extremely detailed information for workers and occupational categories.  Here's how Virginia describes her general approach:  "I often fall back on my days as a community organizer:  we always need to establish inequality in clear and straightforward ways--women earn less than men, African Americans get crappier mortgage deals than whites, union workers earn more than non-union workers--because the naysayers will simply assert that such inequality doesn't exist.  That's one reason I deal with numbers--they can effectively show that inequality affects large groups of people rather than random individuals."  At the same time, Virginia is concerned that the social categories we have to use to document these broad and pervasive inequalities can be too simplistic.  As a result, "one guiding principle" of her current research "is to look for sites of intersection as much as segregation, especially among multiply 'disadvantaged' groups." 

Two articles illustrate the kinds of work we'll explore in this project.  Virginia's article, focused on Chicago, invites us to consider some exciting possibilities.  "Students could dive into one industry or occupation:  Who's there?  Where are sites of overlap," by gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and perhaps other social divisions?  "Does this differ by geographic scale?"  Do these labor market divisions vary systematically amongst different kinds of cities?  How do contrasts in racial-ethnic relations and immigration policy shape divisions of labor in large Canadian cities?  As we approach these questions, we need to maintain a balance -- between the community organizer's spirit of clear, straightforward simplicity, versus the theoretical understanding that things are indeed complex.  Thus you should also look through at least the first four pages of Leslie McCall's delightful article -- which draws careful distinctions between three important kinds of inquiry in current feminist work:  anticategorical complexity, intercategorical complexity, and intracategorical complexity.  You should also look at the table on page 1790 of McCall's article.

Virginia Parks (2010).  "Gendering Job Competition:  Immigration and African American Employment in Chicago, 1990-2000."  Urban Geography 31(1), 59-89.

Leslie McCall (2005).  "The Complexity of Intersectionality."  Signs:  Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3), 1771-1800.

Sustaining Cities, Sustaining Households:  Commuting Choices and Constraints

When urban geography, urban sociology, urban economics, and urban planning were flowering as areas of study in the 1960s, one of the most important themes was the link between home and work.  Models of transportation and land use portrayed households trading off time, distance, and residential space to optimize their quality of life.  Workers who wished to be close to the city center with all of its job opportunities had to pay higher costs per unit of area, and thus often had to live in densely-packed residential environments.  Those willing to commute from distant suburbs, however, could get large homes on spacious lots, since the more distant land was, per unit area, quite inexpensive.  As more families acquired automobiles and as road and highway networks expanded, commuting expanded the range of choices available to urban households.  The optimism of these years was captured in such concepts as the "elastic mile" (the greater distances permitted by transportation system efficiency), the "non-place urban realm," (the broad and overlapping areas of social interaction seemingly liberated from place-based restrictions by the automobile), and "community without propinquity" (the ability of people to form social groups and communities across the entire metropolis).  Highways and suburbs spread farther and farther outward from the historic cores of North American cities.

In recent years, however, urbanists have diagnosed the serious problems caused by this idealistic, modernist legacy of urban decentralization.  Individuals and households seem trapped by the tradeoffs -- those without a lot of money seem to face an untenable choice of paying too much for crowded quarters near the city center, or enduring long hours of commuting to and from distant suburbs.  Affordable homes in the suburbs come at the enormous environmental costs of perpetual reliance on roads, automobiles, and gasoline.  Many suburbs, with their cul-de-sac designs and endless corridors of "garage-dominant" housing, seem to be built to disorient outsiders.  Other suburbs are becoming major employment centers.  And yet the expansion of suburban employment now means that many people living in the central city wind up commuting out to the suburbs, an apparent contradiction of the classical models of urban structure.  Meanwhile, the tensions of yesterday's cities and today's families becomes ever more apparent:  traditional city planning was based on the notion that each household had a single worker -- usually the husband -- who preferred to commute from the suburb to the downtown job, while the wife stayed at home in the suburban house.  The contemporary diversity of households and families means that some choices of where to live and work are made by single mothers trying to juggle home, work, child-care, and all their other responsibilities; some choices are made by dual-earner households, where husbands and wives try to choose where to live based on the locations of two different job locations; other choices are made by single people living alone, or extended families, and other household types.  And the old notion of a single work-place is increasingly antiquated.  Some people work two or three jobs.  Others (like couriers and delivery people) work at locations that are always in motion.  Thanks to computer and communications technologies, some workers are able to work from home, or from their favorite coffee shop.

Our current paradox, then, is this:  in an age when every urban planner understands that we need to remake cities and neighborhoods so that people can live in places that are accessible to workplaces, shopping, and other opportunities, it is becoming ever more complicated and difficult trying to generalize about commuting patterns and residential choices.  Models that seemed to work pretty well in the age of modernist urban planning now can't cope with all the complexity. 

Markus Moos, Doctoral Candidate in Geography at UBC, is studying many of these intricate processes.  He's reworking many of the old models to find ways that urban planning might be able to encourage practices that are more environmentally sustainable as well as socially sustainable.  Because of the enormous complexity in all the processes involved, Markus is focusing on a single type of household, so we can look at the trade-offs that people make when they are sharing the same home and coordinating their long-term career plans and financial decisions.  Specifically, Markus is analyzing the commuting choices and constraints of working husbands and wives in married-couple households.  To get a sense of the questions explored in this project, you should read the abstracts for the articles below.  Then choose one article and read it more closely.  (If you read the Plaut article, don't be intimidated by the tables of coefficient estimates; there's no need to understand all the details of this method, certainly not at this early stage).

Mark W. Horner (2004).  "Spatial Dimensions of Urban Commuting:  A Review of Major Issues and Their Implications for Future Geographic Research."  The Professional Geographer 56(2), 160-173.

Helen Jarvis (2001).  "Urban Sustainability as a Function of Compromises Households Make Deciding Where and How to Live:  Portland and Seattle Compared."  Local Environment 6(3), 239-256.

Pnina O. Plaut (2006).  "The Intra-Household Choices Regarding Commuting and Housing."  Transportation Research Part A 40, 561-571.


Life in the Basement: Informal Markets and Illegal Housing in Vancouver

If you live in Vancouver, then you are very likely to know somebody who rents an apartment in the basement of a house. These apartments (known locally as "basement suites," "garden suites," or "secondary suites") are for the most part illegal, given that most of them do not have a permit from the city to operate as residential spaces. The reasons why many owners of these apartments do not obtain the required license often have to do with: a) municipal ordinances that restrict the number of families that may occupy city lots in certain parts of the city, b) building codes that prescribe structural characteristics such as ceiling heights, and c) fire safety requirements such as mandatory types of smoke alarm system inside living quarters. The cost of retrofitting a basement into an apartment that meets these various regulations tends to be very high, discouraging many homeowners from meeting some or all of these requirements and, consequently, from allowing municipal authorities to inspect the premises – a necessary step in the issuing of a license. For some owners, the desire to hide the rental revenue from the tax authorities may also be a factor.

Despite their illegality, basement suites are believed to constitute a considerable proportion of the city’s rental housing stock -- perhaps as high as 20 percent. The exact figure, however, is difficult to estimate given the lack of a central registry that keeps a count of the actual number of these apartments. Without an effective licensing system, we do not have reliable data on how many basement suites are currently in operation as rental units. The last time an official effort to produce an estimate was undertaken by the authorities was in 2002, and we know that the housing market in Vancouver has experienced significant changes since then.

There are many reasons why it might be useful to produce a more recent estimate of the number of basement suites in Vancouver. For example, City officials and members of the public might want to learn how many households are willing to live in this type of housing. Are the numbers growing faster or slower than the city's overall population? And what does this tell us about the local housing market and the kinds of policy intervention that may be required? Moreover, what are the demographic characteristics of the households that rent these suites? Are certain groups more likely to consume this type of housing, and what are the implications of this? Policy makers and housing developers may also want to learn how dependent is the local homeownership market on the rental of basement apartments. Would most homeowners be able to continue to afford their mortgages if the demand for basement suites suddenly collapsed?

Fortunately, it is now possible to approximate answers to these and other questions, following the release of data from the Canadian 2006 Census. Prior to this, the housing variables in the Census datasets made it impossible to use this rich source of demographic information to generate reliable estimates of the number of basement or garden suites in the city. Starting in 2006, however, changes to the way the "structural type of dwelling" variable is reported enable researchers to learn a lot more about this particular housing sub-market. While the data still cannot produce exact figures, it is now possible to estimate a helpful minimum number of these "secondary" apartments in order to develop an initial portrait of their occupants, and to estimate a minimum dollar figure representing the size of this particular rental market.

As part of a larger research project on market informality among the North American middle class, Pablo Mendez is interested in tapping into the wealth of information that is available in the 2006 Census in order to produce such estimates. Some brief reading material might help you understand the significance of the secondary suite issue that Pablo is researching. In terms of the questions that interest policy makers at the City level, read the 2004 City of Vancouver policy report, which explains among other things why this type of housing is so prevalent in Vancouver, as well as why it is so difficult for City officials to legalize the existing stock of secondary suites. (The City did in fact adopt the recommendations proposed in this report, but nevertheless only a small number of secondary suites are currently licensed as required by the new bylaws.) You can also read the definition of the "structural type of dwelling" variable in the 2006 Census -- this is the key Census variable in this project. Finally, you can examine the brief report from the Metro Vancouver authorities on dwellings by type and structure in the metropolitan region, based on 2006 Census data (read in particular the end note at the bottom of the last page).

Rob Whitlock (2004). Policy Report, Development and Building:  Secondary Suites.  Report to Vancouver City Council, File No. 4654, January 27.  Vancouver:  City of Vancouver.

Statistics Canada (2007).  "More Information on Structural Type of Dwelling."  2006 Census Dictionary, Catalogue 92-566-XWE.  Ottawa:  Statistics Canada.

Metro Vancouver (2007).  2006 Census Bulletin No. 4, Dwellings by Type and Tenure.  Burnaby, BC:  Metro Vancouver.

"Be nice... Treat authors ... as you would want to be treated. Your goal is to stand on the shoulders of the scholars" whose work you are building on, "not to step on their faces.  In all likelihood, there is a good reason why these people did what they did.  Remember that if all goes well, you will one day be in their shoes. ... Do not be personal and be careful of the language you use to describe your work.  Remember that it doesn't matter whether you 'agree' with the author...; no one cares what you 'think'; and readers don't want to know what you 'believe.'  In your paper, you do not matter; the scientific community only cares what you can demonstrate."  Gary King (2006).  "Publication, Publication"  PS:  Political Science and Politics, 119-125, quote from p. 123.
Stop and Frisk Practices in New York City

Racial profiling, and geographic-racial profiling, have long been pervasive features of policing in American cities.  In New York City, the police department's "Stop and Frisk" policy has been at the center of major controversy, public protest, and litigation.  In this project, we'll explore a dataset that the NYPD was obligated to create in order to monitor policing activities in communities across the city.

Global Suburbanism:  Continuity and Change in Canadian Suburbia

Urban research has always portrayed suburbia as subordinate.  Yet the overwhelming mode of production of new urban places is now taking place in settings that have always been understood as suburban -- newly-developing areas on the fringe of existing, built-up sections of the urban fabric.  In a world where urbanization has become suburbanization, what does the city-suburb dichotomy mean?

Roger Keil, at the City Institute at York University, is leading an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers in studying global suburbanism.  Markus Moos and Elvin Wyly are leading one small component of this research project -- a baseline spatial analysis of the dimensions of Canadian suburbanism. 

Affordable Housing:  Contested Supply and Demand in New Orleans

Before Hurricane Katrina, there was already an affordable housing problem in New Orleans.  More than half of the housing units in New Orleans that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina were affordable housing units.  After the storm, rents rose by 44%, fuelled by strong demand for a drastically reduced number of apartments.  Increased increased insurance and operating costs further tightened the market for affordable units.

In the years after Katrina, there was great uncertainty over the extent of residential displacement, and the pace of household return to New Orleans neighborhoods.  Recently, however, new sample estimates became available for the first time from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS).  ACS data are by no means perfect -- they have a very large margin of error, since the samples are smaller than the old long-form census reports that the ACS was designed to replace.  There is no question that data from the ACS will the subject of considerable discussion, debate, and local political struggle.  Emily Rosenman is currently working on her Master's thesis in the Geography Department on this issue.

In this project, however, it is crucial to obtain a first glance at what the data suggest in terms of demographic changes in New Orleans neighborhoods since 2005.  You can examine two reports on housing needs and supply by the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.  Using these reports as guides, you can then use the newly-released ACS data to provide an updated report on the state of affordable housing in New Orleans.  The ACS website allows you to download data in a variety of aggregations, including for all of New Orleans or for individual census tracts within the city.  Possible projects could compare the new ACS data to previous data (e.g., 2008 and earlier), or could be a case study comparing housing conditions in a few census tracts with diverse demographic characteristics. 

Louisiana Housing Finance Authority (2010).  "2010 Louisiana Housing Needs Assessment."  New Orleans:  Louisiana Housing Finance Authority.

James R. Elliot et al. (2009).  "Unequal Return: The Uneven Resettlements of New Orleans' Uptown Neighborhoods."  Organization & Environment 22: 410-421.

Flexible or Precarious?  Labour Market Restructuring and Urban Transformation in Vancouver, Canada

Over the past two decades, it has been recognized that labour markets are becoming increasingly flexible and precarious in the current era of global capitalism. These two concepts represent two similar yet distinctive ways to understand transformations in the nature of work and employment. A flexible labour market is essentially one in which labour market actors can quickly respond to changes in business conditions. As such, while both employers and employees can utilize flexible labour markets to satisfy their labour market needs, it has been the growing use of flexibility by the former which has garnered much attention. Employers seeking to keep up with a fast-moving and fickle marketplace have utilized different forms of flexibility in the workplace in order to stay competitive. These include: numerical flexibility (the right to hire and fire without restriction), wage flexibility (the right to set the wage at a competitive level) and functional flexibility (the right to set and change work tasks as needed). While these forms of flexibility have enabled employers to be lean, agile and competitive, they have also had the effect of introducing precariousness into the labour market.

Precarious labour markets are those in which workers are, in various ways, vulnerable and insecure. A growing literature in labour studies, sociology, and other social sciences documents the rise of flexible labour markets and precariousness.  Elliott Siemiatacki, a Doctoral Candidate in Geography at UBC, is investigating two aspects of this transformation.  First, from a geographical perspective, researchers have clearly illustrated that flexibility and precariousness are established, regulated and experienced differently in different countries. In this sense, there is a recognition that geography matters. Yet, over the last two decades, economic geographers have shown that labour markets function and are differentiated not only at the national scale, but perhaps more importantly at the city-regional scale. There is, therefore, a need to bring the analysis of flexible and precarious labour markets down to the city-regional scale in order to understand the way in which different urban economies produce different profiles of flexibility and precariousness. Second, and more conceptually, the majority of research has focused on low-end service and manufacturing labour markets since these economic sectors tend to utilize flexibility the most. To be sure, examples such as retail work or foreign migrant work are likely the most readily apparent and risk-laden settings for precarious employment, but there has been a growing recognition that flexibility and precariousness are moving into professional, creative and high-tech industries as well. Thus, there is a need to supplement the existing literature on flexibility and precariousness by studying the way in which these dynamics are instituted and experienced in higher-end labour market settings.

Two articles nicely illustrate the kinds of evidence that we will need to evaluate the growth of flexibility and preciariousness in the context of Vancouver.

Marc Doussard, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore. (2009). "After Deindustrialization: Uneven Growth and Economic Inequality in "Postindustrial" Chicago. Economic Geography, 85(2), 183-207.

Sylvia Fuller and Leah Vosko. (2008). "Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada: Exploring Intersections of Gender, Race, and Migration." Social Indicators Research, 88(1), 31-50.

Altared Spaces:  Gentrification, the Post-Industrial City, and Inner-City Churches in Toronto and London

For most of human history, spirituality and religious institutions were key elements of the urban experience.  Churches, temples, mosques, and other institutions anchored urban neighborhoods, while integrating local faithful into regional, national, and global communities of belief and commitment.  Since the first diagnosis of "postindustrial" society in the West beginning about forty years ago, however, things have changed dramatically.  Most Western societies have followed a path of "secularization," with declines in the share of the population participating in formal, organized religious institutions.  This process is not linear, and there are exceptions:  secularization has been slowed in many Western European societies by the arrival of Muslim immigrants, while immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America have brought millions of new practicing Catholics to the United States.

In many circumstances, however, secularization has altered urban redevelopment processes in ways that hold significance for religious institutions, local cultural relations, and daily life in the inner city.  Nicholas Lynch, Doctoral Candidate in Geography at UBC, is studying these linkages with respect to the current trend of inner-city church conversions from spaces of sacred, religious practice to spaces of commodified consumptions.  Put simply, churches are going condo. 

Nicholas is focusing on these processes in Toronto and London, and he proposes four hypotheses.  First, in response to a decline in demand for organized religions, many Christian organizations and their church managers have been forced not only to re-scale their services, but also to also integrate a corporate ethic into their practices.  Many church managers have undertaken 'rationalization' of church properties, illustrated through the private sale and re-development of church buildings.  Second, he suggests that this growing trend of releasing inner-city churches to the real-estate market is made possible by a rising demand for symbolically and functionally unique inner-city properties sought by an aesthetic and class-conscious cohort of urban developers, planners and inner-city residents.  When all the old funky industrial-era brick warehouses have been turned into trendy lots, what's next?  Churches, in this sense, can be understood as a new architectural frontier for inner-city chic.  Third, he posits that the re-development and marketing of church properties by this cohort is producing a novel inner-city aesthetic. Integral to this aesthetic is an appropriation and commodification of Christian heritage and material culture re-positioned as unique markers of lifestyle, taste and moral value.  Certain middle- and upper-class residents use these signs of heritage and history to help define and differentiate themselves through their choices of house and home.  Fourth, this kind of urban redevelopment has the effect of reshaping the inner city to serve the needs of certain kinds of home-buyers -- mobile, wealthy, with aspirations of cosmopolitan consumption -- while excluding other uses and other members of the urban community.

Two articles illustrate the themes of Nicholas' work.  Since the population censuses in Canada and the U.K. ask people about their religious affiliation, there are several possibilities.  What is the relationship between the geography of religious affiliation and the geography of recent gentrification?  What are the distinguishing housing and built-environment characteristics of neighborhoods with the strongest degrees of religious affiliation?

Nadia A. Mian (2008).  "Prophets-for-Profits:  Redevelopment and the Altering Urban Religious Landscape."  Urban Studies 45(10), 2143-2161.

David Ley and R. Bruce Martin (1993).  "Gentrification as Secularization:  The States of Religious Belief in the Post-Industrial City."  Social Compass 40(2), 217-232.

Global Capital, Local Catastrophes:  The Subprime Mortgage Boom and the Foreclosure Crisis

Through the 1980s, many financial institutions in the United States discriminated against people and places identified as racial and ethnic minorities -- especially African American communities.  Community organizing and public policies challenged this practice of "redlining" -- quite literally, drawing red lines on a map to indicate where loans would simply not be made -- and beginning in the early 1990s many lenders began to find profitable, new "underserved markets" in places that had previously been excluded.  Unfortunately, key changes in the lending industry -- and the loopholes of certain laws regulating what banks were allowed to do -- also encouraged a new breed of lenders and brokers to actively seek out low-income borrowers for financial exploitation in a syndrome known as "predatory" lending, often in the "subprime" or "B-and-C" market.  A pattern of reverse redlining began to appear in many cities:  unscrupulous lenders targeting minority neighborhoods for expensive credit with hidden or deceptive terms, and which often led to defaults and borrowers eventually losing their homes.  Subprime lending began as a small segment serving low-income borrowers with bad credit histories, but grew rapidly through the 1990s, and accelerated from 2002 until a dramatic and catastrophic collapse that unfolded in early 2007.  Much of this growth was driven by the pressures of Wall Street investment banks.  Thanks to a practice known as "securitization," most individual home loans (and many other kinds of debt obligations) are packaged together into complex pools, and the resulting "mortgage-backed securities" are traded much like mutual funds on Wall Street and other financial markets around the world.  Sophisticated risk assessment models had transformed loans to risky borrowers into financial instruments that, for many years, offered solid investment yields with very few losses for investors.

But it turned out that borrowers stuck with these loans were often in severe distress, and wound up being forced to sell and lose everything when they fell behind on their payments.  Many of the worst subprime loans were structured in such a way that default was inevitable.  As long as national home values were increasing each year, it did not matter to investors if some people lost their homes -- the home could be sold for more than the balanced owed, and everybody -- the broker, the lender, the investors -- was protected from loss.  Everybody, that is, except for the homeowner.  These distorted incentives eventually reached their limits, however, and after the long boom in housing prices began to slip in 2006, more and more people wound up slipping into foreclosure.  And since home values were falling, this time a default meant that investors who held mortgage-backed securities might lose money.  For at least a decade, community activists concerned about low-income communities and racial justice had been sounding the alarm, but powerful individuals and institutions devoted to financial deregulation fought off nearly all attempts to crack down on these abusive practices.  But in early 2007, stock analysts who read financial reports carefully to advise investors began to see the results of the abusive practices that were finally reaching their limits.  From late February, 2007, right up to now, each week has brought new twists and turns to a financial crisis that has truly gone global.  First the riskiest companies in the subprime market went belly up.  Then the mortgage-backed securities began to lose most of their value, since it was not clear how many of the borrowers would be able to keep up with their payments.  Then the banks that had big stakes in these securities began to write off these losses, while seeing their own stock values collapse.  Then it was disclosed that many institutions and investors had bought a new kind of insurance against these kinds of losses -- but the insurance, known as a "credit default swap," was totally un-regulated, and had reached a global volume of some $60 trillion -- yes, that's a "t".  Of course, insurance is not much good if the company selling it goes out of business.  That began to happen in 2008, forcing the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve to orchestrate increasingly frantic interventions in desperate attempts to restore the credit markets, support stock prices, and avoid a recession.  These efforts prevented a total collapse of the financial system.  But they did not prevent a recession, and painful wave of financial losses.  Stocks listed on the New York exchanges alone lost nearly $7 trillion of value in 2008 -- with various indices losing more than 35 percent of total corporate value -- and many measures posted their worst performance since the mid-1930s. 

But this is not just a story about global financial stuff.  It's an intensely local story.  Remember all those subprime loans in those fancy mortgage-backed securities?  What about the people who got those loans?  Some of these people may have tried to buy houses beyond their means, or perhaps they borrowed a bit too much on a home equity loan.  But a lot of these people were actively deceived.  And now hundreds of thousands of these people are losing their homes -- and some are losing their jobs, too, thanks to a terrible and deepening recession.  One activist has described the wave of foreclosures sweeping through city neighborhoods as "Katrina without the water."

For several years, Kathe Newman, Associate Professor in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, has been studying the neighborhood-level effects of subprime lending and foreclosures in Newark, New Jersey, and its nearby suburbs in Essex County.  She's worked with students in planning and policy to gather information on foreclosures, and to lead a task force -- the Essex-Newark Foreclosure Task Force -- of attorneys, community activists, researchers, and municipal officials.  Most of Kathe's work has involved laborious efforts at the state courthouse and county registrar to sort through legal records to get information on foreclosures in Essex County.  But her project would also benefit from contextual information on the subprime lending boom -- which gathered momentum in 2004 and then began to collapse towards the end of 2007 -- across the entire state of New Jersey.  Fortunately, there is a widely-used public dataset -- the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records -- that gives us certain information on every person who requests a loan to purchase, renovate, or refinance a single-family home (including duplexes, condos, etc.) in any urban or suburban neighborhood.  Moreover, these data also tell us a little bit about the lending institution that took the application, and what the decision was (denied, approved, and whether the loan was classified as a "high-cost" subprime note).  Some of the questions we will explore in this project will include:  how did racial and ethnic inequalities change in the turbulent period of 2004-2007 when the industry's push for more borrowers, and more profits, led to ever more risky practices?  Were there signficant changes in the kinds of neighborhoods where subprime lending was most prevalent?  What institutions were most responsible for the subprime wave in particular places?

Kathe Newman (2009).  "Postindustrial Widgets:  Capital Flows and the Production of the Urban."  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(2), 314-331.

Elvin Wyly, Markus Moos, Holly Foxcroft, and Emmanuel Kabahizi (2008).  "Subprime Mortgage Segmentation in the American Urban System."  Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 99(1), 3-23.

"...both quantitative and qualitative approaches remain important within the discipline of geography.  While taken at face value they appear to be incompatible ways of 'doing' research, it is important not to see these two approaches as binary opposites.  Subjective concerns often inform the development and use of quantitative methods.  Likewise, it is also possible to work with qualitative material in quite scientific ways. Whatever methods are adopted, some degree of philosophical reflection is required to make sense of the research process....  Equally, the two approaches are often combined in research designs in a process known as mixing methods...."  Nicholas J. Clifford and Gill Valentine (2006).  "Getting Started in Geographical Research."  In Clifford and Valentine, eds. Key Methods in Geography.  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage Publications, 1-16, quote from p. 4.
Hong Kong, January 2010 (Elvin Wyly)
Citywide Housing Coalition, Olympic Village Protest, May 2010 (Elvin Wyly)
Cleveland, Ohio, July 2010 (Elvin Wyly)
CopyLeft 2012 Elvin K. Wyly
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