Introduction to the Special Issue on Class Dynamics from Socialism to Post-Socialism

According to this article, “Estate agents are reporting a surge in sales of vast country estates and former castle properties, which until COVID-19 struck had become increasingly hard to shift as the richest of the rich instead opted to live in luxurious skyscraper penthouses, on tropical islands or superyachts.” According to authors such as Atkinson (2015), whichever theoretical approach to class one takes, there is always the “tricky issue of how it relates to other forms of inequality and difference” (p. 81). First put forward by feminists of color, intersectionality encompasses “the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (Collins, 2015, p. 2). According to the authors, a possible explanation for this is that, unlike gender, ethnicity, disability, age, religion/belief, and sexual orientation, social class is not “a justiciable inequality” (p. 232).

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xiv + 349 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 978-1-469-65366-2

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership chronicles an often overlooked period in the affordable housing literature to show how the shift from racially exclusive housing policies in the 1940s and 1950s (where it was nearly impossible for Blacks to buy high-appreciating homes using low-cost and low-risk federally insured mortgages) to a regime of more inclusive policies in the late 1960s and 1970s laid the foundation for Blacks to lose massive housing wealth decades later during the 2007–2009 Great Recession. [...]instead of finding ways to increase the supply of public housing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) adopted federal housing policies, which continue to this day, that depend on public-private ventures (like Housing Choice vouchers) to house the poor. [...]the book's greatest contribution to the affordable-housing literature is Taylor's blistering account of Nixon administration decisions that forever ceded control of federal housing policies to private mortgage bankers, real estate agents, home builders, speculators, and appraisers (a cabal I label the real estate industrial complex, or REIC).