The race for profit in the 1970s transformed decaying urban space into what one U.S. As she forcefully argues:Īr from being a static site of dilapidation and ruin, the urban core was becoming an attractive place of unparalleled opportunity, a new frontier of economic investment and extraction for the real estate and banking industries. The historiographical focus rests on a critique of the “declensional framing” of “urban crisis” through the late 1960s and 1970s, which Taylor suggests, “belies the dynamic and innovative methods of financing generated to develop the urban housing market” (p.5). In Race for Profit Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that “unprecedented public-private partnership in the production of low-income housing tethered the HUD and the FHA to real estate brokers, mortgage bankers, and homebuilders” (p.4). In this sense, the recent book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published not long before the pandemic began in 2020 offers prescient analysis.

Any discussion of histories related to global or regional housing must be considered from this sort of lens. The conditions created by global pandemic have undoubtedly contributed further to greater poverty in many areas-from housing, to jobs, to access to food security and water resources (informed by colonial legacies in North America especially).

In the context of a COVID-19 world, housing and living standard inequities are a phenomenon that have surely been exacerbated.

Race for profit