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The U.S. Southeast has become a harbinger of twenty-first-century immigrant integration and race relations. Its unique characteristics of rapid demographic change, an explosion of anti-immigrant policies, cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and large African American population, have made the region a dynamic indicator of how race and race relations are changing throughout the country. For immigrant newcomers, like in generations past, how they will come to identify themselves, and are situated in the U.S. racial hierarchy, is an ongoing process of great interest to scholars and policymakers alike. Drawing from 12 months of ethnographic research, 86 interviews, and inductive analysis of three local newspapers, The Browning of the New South demonstrates how the marginalization and racialization of Latinos compels them to self-identify as racial minorities and to develop positive social and political ties with blacks. Specifically, this book shows that within a context of minimal economic competition, Latinos’ new racial identity arises from two related processes: a political backlash against Latino immigration that results in downward mobility and what I call ‘reverse incorporation,' and through on-the-ground relations with native-born community members, whose attitudes and practices shape newcomers’ ideas about race. By highlighting the role of context in shaping intergroup relationships, these findings undermine pervasive assumptions of black-brown conflict and unpacks the social processes that produce intergroup solidarity and political action.

This book presents a holistic, multi-disciplinary analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of neighborhoods in America. We make our neighborhoods and then they make us serves as the foundational proposition of this book. That is, our collective actions in metropolitan housing submarkets regarding where we live and invest financially and socially will determine what characteristics our neighborhoods will manifest and how they will evolve. In turn, these multidimensional neighborhood characteristics influence our attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, health, quality of life, financial well-being, children’s development, and families’ opportunities for social advancement. Unfortunately, private, market-oriented decision-makers now governing human and financial resource flows among neighborhoods usually arrive at an inefficient allocation due to externalities, strategic gaming, and self-fulfilling prophecies. This failure systematically produces too-little housing investment in many places and too much segregation by race and income. Moreover, lower-income, black and Hispanic households and property owners typically bear a disproportionate share of the costs associated with under-investment, segregation and neighborhood transition processes, while reaping comparatively little of their benefits. Ultimately, our current configuration of neighborhoods creates unequal opportunities. Because neighborhood context affects children, youth, and adults—yet neighborhood contexts are extremely unequal across economic and racial groups—space becomes a way of perpetuating unequal opportunities for social advancement. To remedy these substantial market failures, this book advances neighborhood-supportive public policies guided by the principle of strategic targeting.

The title of the book, The Patchwork City, refers to the fragmentation of Manila into a “patchwork” of classed spaces, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. The book is not just about urban fragmentation, however, but about its effects on class relations and politics. It argues that the proliferation of slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. Class boundaries clarify along the housing divide and the urban poor and middle class emerge as class actors—not as labor and capital but as squatters and “villagers” (in Manila residential subdivisions are called villages). The first part of the book traces the emergence of class identities defined by experiences of spatial discrimination and siege. The second part shows these identities to be politically consequential. They shape the political thinking of the urban poor and middle class and help account for dissensus over the populist president Joseph Estrada. The book does not just tell us something new about segregation, class relations, and democracy, it shows these things to be connected. It spells out how they are connected, and thus helps us make similar connections in other cases. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other Global South cities—as race is to the study of American cities. In scope and approach, The Patchwork City expands the boundaries of both urban and political sociology.

The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of the US food system. It explains how the food system transformed from feeding cities to feeding regions to feeding an entire nation, and in turn, why that process shifted the system’s underlying logic from fulfilling basic needs to satisfying profit margins. The book also explains how and why this system has failed communities. Food-access issues are the result of infrastructural disruptions stemming from how markets and cities developed, how distribution systems arose, and how organizations coordinated the movement, quantity, and quality of food. Building on archival research, 190 interviews with food industry stakeholders, and observations and tours of distribution facilities, The Problem with Feeding Cities profiles a wide variety of people connected to the food chain, including farmers, supermarket executives, logistics experts, food bank employees, and public health advocates.

This book is the first multi-level analysis of real estate agents and their effects. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and administrative data, it promises three main contributions. First, it documents how real estate agents are key actors in creating the demographic makeup and cultural identity of particular neighborhoods, as well as in translating the value and meaning of different places to prospective homebuyers. Agents upsell very wealthy buyers, which increases income segregation and contributes to place stratification by reifying some neighborhoods as elite and exclusive residential environments and others as undesirable and less valuable. The upselling analyzed in the book helps explain how and why prices rose so dramatically in places like New York City in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Second, the book argues that sociologists of markets have been too timid in tackling fundamental economic concepts like price. Indeed, the book reveals how prices are not just the outcomes of structural or cultural forces, but are also the products of interaction. It provides evidence that homebuyers’ preferences about how much to spend are highly malleable and subject to particular patterns of interaction with real estate agents. Third, by uncovering how interactions between buyers and agents matter for outcomes like neighborhood value and housing prices, the book offers a novel perspective on markets. It demonstrates that the work of intermediaries is central to sustaining any market and creating inequalities within it.

For New Yorkers, the answer to the question “Who cleans your park?” is complex: Welfare-to-work trainees, volunteers, unionized city workers (working within or outside their official job descriptions), summer youth workers, workers for private, nonprofit parks “conservancies,” staff of companies working under contract, and people sentenced to community service all perform routine maintenance in parks. With public services no longer being provided primarily by public workers, the state and the nature of public work have to be reevaluated. Based on four years of fieldwork in New York City parks and on nearly 140 interviews with workers inside and outside the Parks Department, and with others involved in the parks maintenance system, this book is an investigation of the conditions under which New York City’s parks are maintained, of changing labor relations and contracts of the parks’ cleaners, and of their relations at the workplace with each other. It argues that we cannot understand these unless we also try to understand the ways in which the city’s institutions have changed—with the Parks Department sometimes at the avant-garde. We must also, in turn, comprehend how and why even more encompassing changes in urban political economy shape these institutional changes. In taking this view of parks maintenance work, the book moves stepwise up levels of analysis, from an analysis of labor contracts and workplaces through organizations and their legitimation strategies, and up to larger public policies and to an understanding of the State that, in its diverse composition, produces them.