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120 Mary Ann Wood Drive
Whiteness, Anti-Blackness, and the Financialization of Market-Rate Rental Housing in Kansas City, Missouri
Recent rent increases in Kansas City, Missouri have accompanied a wave of new construction in market-rate rental housing. The city has drawn interest from out-of-state and even international developers. This expanding influx of finance capital is ushering in rapid development and demographic shifts in a time when the city reels from a deep shortage in affordable housing, an ongoing eviction crisis, and persistent racial segregation. How does the financing of new, market-rate rental housing normalize racial difference and spatialized hierarchies? How is the exclusionary development of market-rate multifamily properties legitimated and naturalized? My project examines these questions through ethnographic fieldwork on the everyday practices of real estate development. Ethnographic data and interviews are supplemented with textual analysis and census data mapping. By examining the calculative devices and anticipatory strategies deployed in the financing and designing of rental housing, my research shows how the constitution of market-rate housing into a legible, predictable, and tradable financial asset is premised on encoding racial difference vis-à-vis area median income and other proxies for race. By exploring how the new, financialized landscapes of rental housing map onto racialized geographies, my work interrogates how ostensibly neutral financial knowledge and practices of asset bundling and risk management are in fact rooted in a history of colonial-racial capitalism.
Daniel (DJ) Ferman-Leon is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Afro-Indigenous ethnographer whose research is broadly concerned with racialized accumulation, financialization, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy. His work interrogates how these social processes and projects are mutually constituted under various formations of colonial-racial capitalism. His current book project, The Financialization of Racialized Geographies: Rental Housing, Exclusion, and Displacement in Kansas City, Missouri examines how financial accumulation from property ownership and speculation is both premised on and extends racial segregation, spatialized exclusion, carceral immobility, and dispossession. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University.
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