(HOU1) Cultural Sociologies of Housing

As a material necessity, housing lies at the heart of social life and is a key vector for the re/production of inequality. While existing social scientific approaches to housing tend to foreground policy and political economy, housing is not only a material necessity. Whether we talk about McMansions or tiny homes, gated communities or homeless encampments, housing endures as one of the most meaningful signifiers in contemporary society. Put simply, housing is deeply symbolic and holds multiple meanings. Treating meaning as central to social life, over the last thirty-plus years, cultural sociologists have substantially advanced our understanding of the role of culture in (re)producing inequality and exclusion (Lamont et al 2016; Cottom 2019; Alexander 2007). This work foregrounds symbolic dimensions of material inequality. Surprisingly though, there is little conversation between housing studies scholars and cultural sociologists. While currently marginal in housing studies, what happens when we bring cultural sociology to the study of housing? This session brings housing studies and cultural sociology into productive dialogue, probing possible intersections theoretically, conceptually, methodologically, and/or empirically. By exploring intersections between housing as both a material reality and a deeply meaningful symbol, we can develop new insights on inequality, and create opportunities to think anew about addressing the current housing crisis. Tags: Culture, Home And Housing, Policy

Organizer: Mervyn Horgan, University of Guelph; Chair: Mervyn Horgan, University of Guelph

Presentations

Jakira Silas, Rice University

"Crime-ridden" to "Cool neighborhood": Changing Representations of Neighborhood Reputations Over Time in Houston, Texas

This study examines how neighborhood reputation and stigma are represented in local media and how these representations may change over time. Specifically, I am interested in knowing how these representations change as neighborhoods undergo gentrification and how these representations connect with the racial composition of the neighborhoods. Exploring two Houston neighborhoods at different stages of gentrification with varying demographics, this study unpacks how media discourse shapes neighborhood reputations. This study builds on previous literature on symbolic boundaries, territorial stigmatization, segregation, gentrification, and media discourse to understand how these symbolic understandings of place accompany material aspects of place. I compare the reports of the third ward and EADO (East downtown) neighborhoods in the Houston chronicle, Houston’s largest newspaper, spanning from 1985 to 2024. Both neighborhoods were majority minority neighborhoods that have gentrified over time. Third ward is a case of a neighborhood that is still in the process of gentrifying. In parts of third ward, there are intentional, community efforts to resist gentrification as it unfolds. The neighborhood still largely maintains its identity, but it’s still clear that gentrification is happening. In 1990, third ward was 77% black, 12% white, and 8% Hispanic with 72.5% of the residents living below the poverty line. In 2020, third ward was 66% black, 15% white, and 11% Hispanic, with 52.7% of its residents living below the poverty line. This suggests that there has been some change to the racial and economic composition of the neighborhood, but the neighborhood is still majority minority and majority below the poverty line. EADO, however, is arguably in its final stages of gentrification (if such a thing exists) as the neighborhood’s identity has changed greatly. EADO is a new way to refer to this area, as it used to be referred to as part of the east end of Houston. In 1990, the same area was 27% black, 4% white, and 65% Hispanic, with 73.2% of its residents living below the poverty line. In 2020, this area was 28.6% black, 35% white, and 27% Hispanic, with 32% of the residents living below the poverty line. The racial and economic composition of the neighborhood has changed a great deal in the past 30 years. Combining nelson’s (2020) computational grounded theory and lee’s (2019) computation critical discourse analysis, I conduct a computational text analysis of the data from the Houston chronicle using structural topic modeling. I use a large corpus of newspaper articles, 6,000 EADO reportings and 4,000 third ward reportings, in my analysis. Importantly, these methods allow space for a qualitative analysis of the power and social dimensions of the articles, specifically in neighborhood discourse, while still using computational methods for the large corpus. The models examine change over time in the Houston chronicle reportings, which I connect with the findings on demographic changes in these neighborhoods. As a neighborhood gentrifies, it is important to consider how the neighborhood is changing, both physically and symbolically. I argue that we are able to see the stigma changes over time through media analysis. Put simply, we can see the gradual shift from “crime” to “craft breweries” as a neighborhood undergoes gentrification. As gentrification crystallizes in these neighborhoods we see the neighborhood’s identity and reputation change, going from a “unsafe” place to a “desirable” and “cool” neighborhood with fun activities. Findings will demonstrate how neighborhood reputations change over time, and how we can see this change happen gradually through media discourse. Furthermore, the methods used in the article explore new ways of understanding media discourse surrounding neighborhoods, through qualitatively analyzed computational models.

Sanaz Labaff, Memorial University

Examining the role of meso-level storytelling agents in stigmatized neighborhoods

All communities are discursively imagined, and as a corollary, all communities can be discursively reimagined. Local storytelling is essential in the collective redefinition of local traditions and norms that can lead to structural image and reputation change. The image of a neighborhood is shaped through 1) residents as micro-level storytellers who share local news, information, stories, or even gossip with one another. 2) macro-level storytelling agents who often spark interpersonal discussions and enable community imagination and opinion formation on a large scale. 3) Meso-level storytelling agents, including local media and community organizations that given their organizational focus on a particular place have the greatest interest and potential in sharing local information and stories based on recent studies. The power of stories to bring communities together for a common purpose, to facilitate a shared understanding of their history, and to form their future is widely discussed in both urban development and communication literature. But this discursive power should be considered a dynamic phenomenon that takes “different forms in different community contexts, or from different perspectives, or on different issues.” In neighborhoods grappling with territorial stigmatization, storytelling can be a double-edged sword. It can play a crucial role either in initiating destigmatization discourses or in provoking bottom-up territorial stigmatization discourses which are likely to be directed and manipulated by meso and macro-level agents of storytelling like local news and social media. Place-based narratives in labeled areas, therefore, can be redirected to be served to revalue the place and reinsert it into the real-estate market or even to justify the state-driven gentrification projects. Although nowadays, all over the St. Johns downtown area can be considered a stigmatized region due to the dominance of the discourse of danger in the area and the growing number of homeless people, through initial interviews with residents of the area and scholars, I realized the significance of studying a particular part of this area called Livingstone Street and longs hill as a highly notorious neighborhood grappling with drug abuse, sex work, and violence. After an archival study on the social media groups and press news about this area as well as interviews with local journalists who have worked on this area, I realized the importance and power of place-based narratives on this site. The number of articles about these particular places in St John’s and how it is pictured as a dangerous abandoned area did not match my firsthand experience in the area. In this study, through an ethnographic study and working on bodies of literature on place-based narratives and territorial stigmatization, I aim to answer 1) How do Meso-level narratives of place contribute to image-making and reputation management in stigmatized neighborhoods? And 2) Is there any meaningful connection between place narratives told by local news and media and urban development plans? 3) Is there any other meso-level story based on history and literature that can shape an alternative narrative about this neighborhood?

Zachary Hyde, University of Toronto

The Moral Background of the City: How Real Estate Professionals Think About Their Responsibility to Society

In recent years, the language of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing has made its way into the urban development community in Toronto, Canada. Since the late 1990s, Toronto has seen North America’s highest levels of urban development set against the backdrop of an unprecedented housing affordability crisis. At the city’s annual real estate conference, there are now panels on topics like “addressing climate change” and “tackling the affordability question.” Meanwhile, urban development podcasts, LinkedIn articles, and Twitter threads centre on how developers can “give back” to society. This raises the question: How do real estate professionals think about their responsibility to the citizens of cities? And, how do these rationales influence what they do in their day-to-day work? My paper unpacks these questions through an analysis of 20 interviews with development industry professionals, local politicians, and city planners in Toronto, and a content analysis of 40 development industry podcasts. Using economic-cultural sociologist Gabriel Abend’s moral background theory, I show how developers navigate between several competing value frameworks. Developers draw on these frameworks to make sense of and explain their positions on contentious issues such as tenant relocation policies and inclusionary zoning. Some developers rely on a utilitarian framework, which allows them to accept social harms, such as displacing low-income tenants, on the basis that they will be countered by larger-scale social goods, like increasing housing supply. Others use a good citizen framework, which suggests that always doing the right thing, like not displacing people, may be costly in the short term but leads to better economic returns in the long run. Those with the utilitarian framework tend to be skeptical of ESG, seeing it as a perverse interference in the housing market, while those with a good citizen approach see it as central to their business strategy. I conclude by placing these findings in dialogue with recent work on temporal dimensions of profit-making in capitalist urban development.

Addison Kornel, University of Guelph

Striving for Homeownership in Windsor During COVID: Foundations for Investigating Homeownership Ideology

From 2019 to 2022 housing prices in Canada surged. This MA Thesis research investigated the social consequences of rising prices by considering the exceptional example of Windsor, Ontario. Unlike in most Canadian cities, the “Canadian dream” social narrative of timely and reliable homeownership on the back of local labour wages had survived in Windsor until recently. The latest run-up marked a turning point. Qualitative interviews conducted in early 2022 with both successful and unsuccessful homebuyers in Windsor reveal the centrality of homeownership to the life course and social fabric. Participants articulated long-standing economic and sociological concerns that home value spikes drive wealth inequality and cleave society based on housing tenure. But they also point to an underresearched ideological dimension of this social process. The data provide evidence of the harm that arises when a previously efficient ideology (the “Canadian Dream”) is suddenly eclipsed by new economic realities. I find that rising prices present impediments to the autonomy and social development of participants. I also find that this harm is mediated by feelings of relative deprivation. Harm arises from an environment of asset speculation that creates financial barriers to inclusion in the normative lifestyle of timely and reliable homeownership. Individuals excluded from this lifestyle experience a relative deprivation of cultural safety to their homeowning peers, which constitutes social harm. This study offers a rare glimpse into the social consequences of homeownership as a signifier for normative life progression.

Marie-Aminata Peron, University of Toronto

Homes of the Republic: Representations of the 'Rightful Home' in French Migrant Housing Policy

For many of us, home is a relatively undisputed sanctuary to which we turn to find comfort, ease, and equanimity. However, this everyday imagery of the ‘Home Sweet Home!’ overshadows the inequalities which lay at the core of global access to, and experiences of, home. The home, far from insular, is subject to systemic dynamics of power and control. Literature in the social sciences has widely explored the concept of home and challenged the notions of universality, domesticity and familiarity which tend to be attached to it. Though scholarship has established the political nature of the home, little attention has been paid to how states, through policy development and implementation, create and promote ideals of the ‘right’ type of home. In this paper, I aim to address this gap by asking: What does housing policy discourse on French migrant workers’ foyers reveal about state spaces’ understandings of what a home should be? I argue that governments construct implicit narratives of the ideal home through institutional discourse on housing policy directed at marginalized groups. These narratives, I further argue, frame the homing experiences of marginalised populations whose homing practices fall outside this predetermined ideal of what I call the ‘rightful home’. Migrant workers’ foyers (MWFs) are a specific type of communal social housing created by the French state in the 1950s to house isolated migrant workers coming from West Africa and the Maghreb. Over the years, MWFs were constituted as a ‘problem’ which led to the introduction of a five-year plan for their transformation into social residences (SRs) in 1997. This plan, designed to align 687 MWFs with more normative social housing was reconducted in 2006 and 2013. Nearly three decades after the introduction of the first plan, state authorities are left to convert 126 MWFs into SRs. This is in part due to political mobilisation against the transformation project from foyers residents and allies who advocate residents’ right to maintain a form of communal housing which corresponds to their cultural, socio-economic, and religious habits. In this article, I conduct a discourse analysis of 560 official documents about or referring to MWFs. These include parliamentary questions, debates, auditions, and speeches, legal and policy documents, ministry communiqués, reports from various government organs, as well as official statements and guidelines from foyers’ managers. These documents were collected in the summer of 2023 by consulting French online and on-site archives and start in 1989 – with preparatory work for the transformation of the foyers – up to June 2023. Adopting discourse analysis as analytical framework allowed me to approach institutional discourses on MWFs, SRs, and social housing all together, as ‘social practices constitutive of identities, norms, and perceptions, which comprise both explicit and implicit dimensions’ (Alejandro and Zhao, 2023, p. 2). Using inductive reasoning, I analysed underlying narratives pertaining to state apprehensions of what the ‘right’ type of home should be – especially as they are brought out through comparisons between the homes of immigrant populations living in the foyers and that of normative social housing’ residents. This allowed me to unearth the various ways in which, government institutions construct the homes of migrants in opposition to a set homing ideal, exposing a hierarchical system of representation of the home in the process. I find that housing policy discourse on French MWFs revealed three broad typologies of state spaces’ understandings of what a home should be: 1) HOME AS A NATIONAL SPACE. Within this typology of the rightful home, home was made integral to a spatially rooted national project dictating and hierarchizing individuals most intimate experiences as they intersected with broader concerns for security, sovereignty, and unity. 2) HOME AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL SPACE. Within this typology, authorities discussed the rightful home as one which does not contort to serve cultural relations to space. Rather, officials in introducing SRs advocated the breaking up of foyers residents’ cultural ties and their respective spatial expressions. 3) HOME AS AN ARCHITECTURAL SPACE. Within this typology of rightful home, officials approached the home as a set architectural entity defined by overarching principles of autonomy and individualism.