Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter explains the book's core arguments. The first core argument is that the profound changes in the race and class geography of the San Francisco Bay Area is fundamentally about segregation. The second core argument is that this new form and map of segregation, and the foreclosure crisis it helped to enable, was produced by the highly specific way in which the politics of space and place during the more recent era reacted to the ghosts of postwar urbanism. What has occurred is not simply some path-dependent aftermath of the postwar era, the result of a postwar model destined to fail. Nor is it simply the result of neoliberalism or bad decisions in the 1980s and beyond. Rather, it is the end result of a “neoliberal era,” that period from the mid-1970s until the foreclosure crisis of 2008, built on the ghosts of the postwar era.