Restructuring, Race, and Real Estate: Changing Home Values and the New California Metropolis, 1989-2010

Abstract

The wake of the foreclosure crisis warrants renewed attention to geographies of race and real estate. This case study of the San Francisco Bay Area shows that outlying exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe, which saw major in-migrations of communities of color over the past three decades, were hard hit by the real estate crash, after having seen substantial housing price increases during the tail end of the boom. The potential impact on wealth and asset accumulation for these communities is significant. Rather than traditional forms of segregation, this new geography of crisis suggests a form of peripheralization, where minority communities in particular were lured out to the far suburbs under structural conditions of neoliberalism, far different from the federally supported suburbanization of two generations ago. This new reality is reminiscent of the urban roots of the foreclosure crisis, and of the need to view the crisis at a metropolitan scale.