A few images of the endless city of sunbelt suburbia.
*Flyover sample of Phoenix, the "endless city" of sunbelt suburbia*
At the moment, I'm reading a draft manuscript by Jacob Rugh on the racial and ethnic disparities of America's ongoing housing and foreclosure disaster. Part of his story contextualizes the suburban migration of African American and Latina/o homeowners that preceded the wave of aggressive Wall Street financialized exploitation in the first decade of this century. "Amidst the backdrop of rising homeownership and increasing immigration, many of the migrating blacks and Latinos were living in increasingly diverse places (Wagmiller 2012). Epicenters of the first, still ongoing, inner city foreclosure crisis like Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago's South Side, Detroit, Memphis, and Oakland represent areas of net out-migration of blacks (Frey 2011). Foreclosure rates in these epicenters were eclipsed in 2007 by those of the new epicenters of a national foreclosure crisis -- California's Central Valley and Inland Empire, Las Vegas, the Orlando-Tampa corridor, Phoenix, and South Florida. These areas have been significant net recipients of black and Latino migration (e.g., Pfeiffer 2012). And while the prior epicenters share an enduring black/white color line in common, the new epicenters represent a multiracial nation where new color lines are still emerging (Lee and Bean 2007; Lichter 2012). As Newman and Schafran (2013: 2) argue, the shift of the housing crisis from struggling and segregated cities to rising Sun Belt cities and suburbs is predicated on the diverse character of a "New America."
Rugh's meticulous and innovative research documents the severe inequalities in high-cost lending and foreclosure that define this New America. The massive suburban and exurban expansion of housing was also a spatial reconfiguration of exploitation, risk, and catastrophe.
These images go from the Northwest corridor southeast to the airport, and thus, unfortunately, do not cover the precise areas that are the subject of Rugh's analysis. Maybe next time I fly through Phoenix...!
Rugh, Jacob (2013). "Double Disparities: The Housing Crisis and the New Demography of the Sunbelt." Unpublished draft manuscript. Provo, UT: Department of Sociology, Brigham Young University.
