Scott Markley

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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/...

Mortgaging Out: Fha Credit Policy, Segregated Rental Housing, and the Remaking of Metropolitan America On a hot afternoon in July 1954, Fred C. Trump sat as a witness before the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency. He had been subpoenaed for an investig

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

Adding Value | Phenomenal World Mortgage insurance has traditionally been the method the federal government has used to induce investment in owner-occupied housing. But for multifamily rentals, the history of mortgage-insurance prog...

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?!?!

"Hearing that real estate and business leaders in New York City are convening a 2 pm call to discuss The Zohran Situation"

crying, screaming, throwing up

screenshot of a Facebook post by Corey Robin, which says: "By the way, did you all notice how Zohran made affordability a central issue of his campaign without selling out trans kids or shitting on immigrants? Might be some lessons there. Just a thought."

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.

HOLC Area Description for neighborhood D5 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

HOLC map for Milwaukee, Wisconsin

HOLC map for Atlanta, Georgia

📣 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....

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

theonion.com/this-war-wil...

Rafah, 5 June 2025. Haaretz

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.

One consequence of viewing all politics through the lens of propaganda, disinformation, and the information war is that we've gotten to a place where that becomes the only rubric with which to judge anything. Politics is reduced to producing absolutely futile symbolic acts of debunking.

City of Cameras Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the United States. With 124.14 surveillance cameras per 1,000 people, we not only lead the country, we have more than twice as many cameras per capita as 2nd …

Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the United States.

But because the Atlanta Police Department claims that releasing the locations of these 60,000+ cameras will lead to terrorism, we’ve not been able to map their locations...

Until now. Read more 👇👇

Article information including DOI, title, authors, abstract and keywords.

New research study estimates the incidence of manufactured home parks #evictions across the state of #Florida from 2012 through 2022, accounting for both individual evictions and mass #displacements

buff.ly/7tdeQd4

Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future by Candace Fujikane

Enjoying the “Abundance” book everyone is talking about

Racial Capitalism and Black-White Health Inequities in the United States: The Case of the 2008 Financial Crisis - Reed T. DeAngelis, 2025

My new article will be out in the next issue of Journal of Health and Social Behavior. I'll be sure to post it here when it's out. In the meantime, here's a short thread and open-access link to a policy brief (tinyurl.com/yc7zxj98) 🧵 (1/8)

A Dumb New Way To Think About The Dismantling Of The Federal Government | Defector At some level, reading some sort of purpose over or onto the ongoing vandalism of the American state is doing a favor to the vandals. Picture a parent holding a screaming toddler on a crowded bus, loo...

This is mostly about processing some stuff I truly hate about the current political moment, and the extent to which it is unfair to Anthony Santander and Luis Severino is, I would say, both real and incidental to the bigger issue. defector.com/a-dumb-new-w...

Oh wow I didn't know about this report. Taylor Hafley's dissertation looked into this as well, and I remember the numbers he found being high