The American Housing Question: Racism, Urban Citizenship, and the Privilege of Mobility
The American Housing Question reframes the question of affordable housing through the concepts of urban citizenship and racism. As the author aptly demonstrates, solving America's housing question means addressing both the effects of racism on housing and revaluing the notion of the public.
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Randolph Hohle is associate professor of sociology at SUNY-Fredonia.
Randy Hohle explains, in clear and engaging language, why housing in the US is becoming ever more unaffordable. He presents the long history of housing exclusion that targeted Black people and the more recent effects of financialization and speculation that have severed the protections white people won through racist laws and practices and with government subsidies. If you want to understand how we reached this point and what can be done to make affordable housing accessible to all, you should read this book.
Sociologist Randy Hohle offers a critical take on our longstanding "affordable housing" crisis as always about systemic racism. Historically, white framing coded private-housing-white and public-housing-black, making the latter unacceptable and ensuring whites' right to segregation from African Americans. After 1960s desegregation, whites still accented public-as-black but sought to privatize some public housing while maintaining their "right" to racially segregate. Hohle concludes with savvy solutions for the housing crisis requiring an end to racist white-privatization logic.
