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This book examines how housing market professionals—including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers—construct twenty-first-century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, the book shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people—or refusing to connect people—to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or equitable, people-affirming ideas. Typically, White housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. The book tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process—from the home’s construction to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, and home appraisals. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status quo, a small number of housing market professionals—almost all of color—draw on equitable, people-affirming ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, denaturalizing housing market racism. The book highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades White housing market professionals’ work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a fair housing market.

The book examines a number of emerging family-relations practices engaged in contemporary China. In doing so, it draws attention to new patterns of behavior and expectations related to transformation of the family since the advent of marketization. It also shows why exploration of family-related themes is important in understanding the nature of society, the forces that underpin social relationships more broadly, and the basis and nature of social change. It fills a gap in the literature by examining such heretofore unrecognized topics as the practices related to giving a child a surname. It also examines the previously unrecognized migratory movement of rural and small-town grandparents who join adult children who have relocated to urban areas for employment, providing childcare so that both of the child’s parents can earn an income—thus becoming part of the massive “floating” population that characterizes China’s workforce today. Three other aspects of family life that are underexplored in the literature are also examined—namely, spousal intimacy, divorce, and remarriage and cohabitation in later life. In all of these cases empirical material is refracted through new insights and theoretical developments. Research for this book is based on semistructured in-depth interviews with 178 men and women. The interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2017 in Beijing, Changshu, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Hefei, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.