Yesterday I completed and turned in a paper about the history and contemporary state of data-driven spatial racism (specifically housing) in the United States for one of my graduate school classes. The paper is called “An Unbroken Red Line: Data-Driven Housing Discrimination in the United States.” The premise of the paper is that redlining was never just a single practice embodied by a set of maps, it was, and is, a stand-in for a whole host of data-driven discriminatory practices that never really ended, just changed their clothes. The paper traces data-driven housing discrimination through redlining and “urban renewal” into the rise of neoliberalism and the contemporary policy landscape with its algorithmic sorting and valuation tools. It also examines how landlords and algorithms construct race and proxies for race, and ends with some examples of contemporary data-driven housing allocation practices that produce discriminatory outcomes. I chose the United States mostly because I only had a few weeks to work on it and Canada is less well-studied and information significantly harder to find. What I turned in was decent, I think, but at 5,000 words really only the skeleton of an idea. The topic deserves much more than the time and space I had to give it. Anyway, I thought some folks might be interested in the materials I drew on when writing the paper. The Julien Migozzi piece in Logic was actually my inspiration for writing the paper, though I never wound up citing it directly.
An Unbroken Red Line: Data-Driven Housing Discrimination in the United States – Bibliography
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2019.
Boeing, Geoff. “Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(2), 2020, pp. 449–468.
Bolger, Katrya. “Defining ‘Affordable.’” House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis, edited by Alex Bozikovic et al., Coach House Books, 2019, pp. 114–118.
Cheney-Lippold, John. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York University Press, 2017, New York.
Dreier, Peter. “Why America Needs More Social Housing: Subsidizing Market Prices to Make Housing Affordable Is a Losing Strategy. There’s a Better Way—On Display for a Century in Vienna.” The American Prospect, April 16, 2018, https://prospect.org/infrastructure/america-needs-social-housing/.
Fields, Desiree. “Automated Landlord: Digital Technologies and Post-Crisis Financial Accumulation.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54(1), 2022, pp 160–181.
Fields, Desiree. “The Politics of Digital Transformations of Housing.” In “Interface” section on “Planning, Land and Housing in the Digital Data Revolution,” edited by Libby Porter. Planning Theory & Practice, 20(4), 2019, pp. 575–603.
Greenfield, Adam. Against the Smart City. Do Projects, 2013, New York.
Greenfield, Adam. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Verso, 2017, London.
Hanson, Andrew et al. “Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: Evidence from a Correspondence Experiment.” Journal of Urban Economics, 92, 2016, pp. 48–65.
Hill, Alex B. “Before Redlining and Beyond: How Data-Drive Neighborhood Classification Masks Spatial Racism.” Metropolitics, November 2, 2021, https://metropolitics.org/Before-Redlining-and-Beyond.html.
Madden, David, and Peter Marcuse. In Defense of Housing. Verso, 2016, London.
Maalsen, Sophia. “Smart Housing: The Political and Market Responses of the Intersections Between Housing, New Sharing Economies, and Smart Cities.” Cities, vol. 84, 2019, pp. 1–7.
Migozzi, Julien. “Apartheid by Algorithm.” Logic, no. 17, Summer 2022, pp. 65–78.
Moskowitz, Peter. How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. Nation Books, New York, 2018.
Milner, Yeshimabeit and Amy Traub. Data Capitalism and Algorithmic Racism. Dēmos, May 17, 2021, https://www.demos.org/research/data-capitalism-and-algorithmic-racism.
Poster, Winifred R. “Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Surveillance Economy.” Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 133–169.
Rosen, Eva et al. “Racial Discrimination in Housing: How Landlords Use Algorithms and Home Visits to Screen Tenants.” American Sociological Review, 86(5), 2021, pp. 787–822.
Safransky, Sara. “Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(2), 2020, pp. 200–218.
Spangler, Ian. “Reporting on Redlining: An Interview with Scott Markley.” Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, January 23, 2022, https://www.leventhalmap.org/articles/scott-markley-interview/.
Stein, Samuel. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Verso, 2019, London.
Stewart, Matthew. “The Real Estate Sector Is Using Algorithms to Work Out the Best Places to Gentrify.” Failed Architecture, February 19, 2019, https://failedarchitecture.com/the-extractive-growth-of-artificially-intelligent-real-estate/.
Traub, Amy. Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out of a Job. Dēmos, February 3, 2014, https://www.demos.org/research/discredited-how-employment-credit-checks-keep-qualified-workers-out-job.
Vale, Lawrence J. “The Ideological Origins of Affordable Homeownership Efforts.” Chasing the American Dream: New Perspectives on Affordable Homeownership, edited by William M. Rohe and Harry L. Watson, Cornell University Press, 2007, pp. 41–66.
