Today is the official publication day for CRACKED FOUNDATIONS!! 🏠🥳🎉
For the next month, Penn is offering a discount of 40% off using the code UHA25. Which brings the price down to $20.97. A screaming deal!
www.pennpress.org/978151282822...

Glad to see this new piece on quantification, counter-data, "evidence," and what we call "authoritarian counting" out now in @dialoguesdigsoc.bsky.social with @itspangler.bsky.social, @emtl.bsky.social, and @marxist.af!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

More on the 608 program here: academic.oup.com/jah/article/...

Fantastic new historical mapping resource on the FHA's Section 608 multifamily rental housing program from @brentcebul.bsky.social, Mike Glass, and their team. Complete with downloadable data! Incredible work

buildinginequality.us

Mike Glass and I argue for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social that we’ve tried the #abundance incentive-based approach to housing crises before. But lack of oversight + incentives produced fraud, profiteering, and inflated rents -- and the Trump family fortune.
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/add...

this one

An update on the future of the Allmaps project:

Sadly, on April 17, 2025, we learned that the federal government terminated many NEH grants, including ours. The notification stated that our grant’s termination was “necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government.”

Why are all these people named Brian Johnson

Voters: can you pay 50 cents more in taxes to pay for vegetables for children and agree not to defraud the elderly on their electrical bills

Wall Street Guy: OH LIKE THE KILLING FIELDS?!?! LIKE THE KHMER ROUGE?!?!

crying, screaming, throwing up

he's right and he's right to say it

As always, I am happy to share the pdf if you do not have access.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We hope this intervention will help spark future deep dives into HOLC’s Area Descriptions, which really do provide a unique window into the development of what Charles Abrams called the "racist theory of value."

Moreover, we find that these Area Descriptions are rife with contradictory notions of what makes a place valuable. E.g., in Atlanta, HOLC's appraisers grade affluent Black neighborhoods low but nonetheless recommend investment.

Curiously, while the value narratives in these cities positioned Black residential presence as sign and source of obsolescence, respectively, they did not seem to anticipate Black population growth or mobility at all.

Temporal Narratives—prevalent in Milwaukee—situated neighborhoods in time, placing them along a past and projected value trajectory. Proximity Narratives—prevalent in Atlanta—situated neighborhoods in space, projecting value based on distance to certain dis/amenities, including racial composition.

Focusing on Milwaukee and Atlanta, we identify two cartographic narrative types present in the Area Descriptions: Temporal Narratives and Proximity Narratives.

In that way, this mapping program was less about directly steering property investment decisions and more about internal data gathering and assessment. We thus consider this mapping program as an early example of spatial data science in practice.

These detailed field notes provide an in-depth look into how real estate capital and the state were constructing a dynamic notion of neighborhood value that relied on estimated racial and class trajectories (though not always in consistent ways across places).

While HOLC’s colorful “redlining” maps from the 1930s have gotten a lot of attention in the last decade, we shift the focus to a much less explored component of the City Survey program: the Area Descriptions.

📣 The last article from my dissertation is out!

In this piece, coauthor Anne Bonds and I dive deep into the contents of HOLC’s Area Description sheets.

🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The complete eradication of Rafah - a city with a quarter of a million residents - should and will be remembered as a crime against humanity, amongst the worst modern urbicides

rubber bullets fly by my face. tear gas fills my lungs. a line of federal troops is marching toward me. i fire off an email to my focus group asking what i should do as a baton lands cleanly on my skull.