Category: Papers

The Ground Rent Machine

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The Story of Race, Housing Inequality, and Dispossession in Baltimore, Maryland

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Jurjevich, Jason R., and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2024. “The Ground Rent Machine: The Story of Race, Housing Inequality, and Dispossession in Baltimore, Maryland.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, May. doi:10.1080/24694452.2024.2353172. Annals of the AAG open access

Summary

Working with Jason Jurjevich, we found that in Baltimore, Maryland, more than 55,000 homes—roughly 30 percent of all residential plots—are subject to ground rent, a legacy of British feudal property law. Under this landlord–tenant system, the homeowner makes payments to the ground leaseholder, who maintains rights to the land. During the early 2000s, many Baltimoreans fell behind on their ground rent due to recessionary headwinds and were “ejected” from their homes as leaseholders took ownership (as collateral). Maryland lawmakers responded by passing housing protections in 2007, but several laws were overturned by the courts (Corma 2017). Using census and ground rent administrative data, we map the geography of ground rent in Baltimore. Our results reveal that originally a tool of class dispossession, ground rent became racialized in the 1950s and 1960s and today overwhelmingly affects Black communities and low-income households. Drawing on work by critical Marxist geographers, work on the production of decline, anti-Blackness, and property relations theory, we rely on a critical quantitative framework to illustrate how people, place, power structures, and relationality produce the pernicious and predatory “ground rent machine.” Telling the story of ground rent—a largely underexplored topic—illustrates how local racialized property regimes shape the geography of urban segregation and urban inequality. Key Words: ground rent, housing and property, race, segregation.

Telling the story of ground rent in a critical quantitative geography framework illustrates how data can be used to fight for emancipatory futures. Census and administrative data, situated in a relational and postpositivist approach, can empower individuals and community groups fighting for laws that address this sinister form of profit-making (Carter 2009; Wyly 2011). These lessons underscore the power of critical quantitative geographic research for advancing progressive human geography (Sheppard 2001). We see this as a fruitful avenue for future research and action. Building on the work of the Baltimore Sun, future research should advance the story of ground rent with oral histories of ground rent dispossession.

The below maps show the spatial overlap of percent black and percent of homes with ground rent.

National Forgetting in the American South

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White Innocence and the Racial Violence of Historic Places

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Kinkead, Conley, Daniel Campo, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2024. “National Forgetting in the American South: White Innocence and the Racial Violence of Historic Places.” Sociální Studia / Social Studies 20 (2): 57–73. doi:10.5817/SOC2023-37713.
Sociální Studia / Social Studies open access

Summary

This paper came from Conley’s amazing Master’s Thesis, asking questions about whose memory is preserved in “our” landscapes. This paper was super fun to write and has important implications. There’s an interesting connection here to building re-use, but not from pressures of urban growth but from the perspective of de-industrialization.

Using a cultural landscape approach, this study examines all National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) sites in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, located in the southern United States. The NRHP recognizes sites representative of “our” national heritage by listing them on this registry. From analysis of these records and related archival materials and observations garnered from field visits to select historic sites in the parish, this study interrogates the officially-designated memorial landscape of the American South. We find that preservation and reuse practices of NRHP-sites have engaged in racialized “purposeful forgetting” (Roberts 2020) and reinforced power relations while enabling the appropriation of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) labor and culture.

In the parish, the NRHP has in some cases been used to perpetuate white supremacy and privilege, and in others, been powerless
or exercised too late to preserve vital Black cultural sites. Clearly, it is a weak tool to bring more just historical narratives to the public consciousness and serve as evocative and lively markers of lost culture.

Below is the Miller-Roy building in its heyday, and the Logtown Plantation, which is a historic site. Images from knoe.com.

Assessing performance of ZCTA-level and Census Tract-level social and environmental risk factors in a model predicting hospital events

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Goetschius, Leigh G., Morgan Henderson, Fei Han, Dillon Mahmoudi, Chad Perman, Howard Haft, Ian Stockwell. 2023. “Assessing performance of ZCTA-level and Census Tract-level social and environmental risk factors in a model predicting hospital events.” Social Science & Medicine 326 (2023): 115943. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115943

Summary

In the US, a lot of health data is analyzed using zip codes: they can easily be derived from addresses. Address zip codes are not addresses. They are mail carrier routes. The Census publishes Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs), however, these aren’t the same as carrier routes. Both ZCTAs and carrier routes change quite a bit. So what happens if we geolocate addresses and then aggregate to the Census Tract level?

Results showed that increasing the granularity of area-based risk factors did not dramatically improve model fit or predictive performance. However, it did affect model interpretation by altering which SDOH features were retained during variable selection. Further, the inclusion of SDOH at either granularity level meaningfully reduced the risk that was attributed to demographic predictors (e.g., race, dual-eligibility for Medicaid).

The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) strikes again.

Mapping for Whom?

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Communities of Color and the Citizen Science Gap

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, Chris L. Hawn, Erica H. Henry, Deja J. Perkins, Caren B. Cooper, and Sacoby M. Wilson. 2022. “Mapping for Whom? Communities of Color and the Citizen Science Gap.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21 (4): 372–88. ACME open access

Summary

In this paper, we examine the geography of the citizen science project Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS). This project is an important project because it is used to produce national rainfall data. Capturing rainfall data is also important because of increase in hyperlocalized precipitation events. Using a zero-inflated hurdle model, we find that the geography of the rain gauges are in primarily wealthier, white neighborhoods, leaving communities of color and low-income communities unrepresented in weather models.

Scholars have shown that communities of color and low-income communities are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and without intervention, scientists will miss localized events in these neighborhoods and these communities might go unrepresented in rainfall models, further exacerbating the disproportionate impact.

This paper should be construed as a critique of the important work by CoCoRaHS and its volunteers. Instead, it should be a call for deliberate engagement of “missing geographies and people” in all participatory/citizen science projects. We argue social and natural geographies are co-constructed, and thus if we are measuring only part of a social geography, then the natural science we produce from that geography may only serve one part of society.

Abstract

Citizen science harnesses the power of nonscientist observations, often resulting in a vast network of data. Such projects have potential to democratize science by involving the public. Yet participants are mostly white, affluent, and well-educated, participants that contribute data from their residence or places they frequent. The geography of the United States is heavily segregated along lines of race and class. Using a Census Tract-level hurdle model, we test the relationship between the locations of the rain gauges from the citizen science project Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) with continuous variables for percent non-Hispanic white and median household income. We find whiter and more affluent Census Tracts are significantly more likely to have a rain gauge. The highly localized nature of precipitation combined with the uneven geography of storm-water infrastructure make data missing from citizen science projects like CoCoRaHS of vital importance to the project’s goals. We warn that scientific knowledge created from citizen science projects may produce scientific knowledge in service of wealthy, whiter communities at the expense of both communities of color and low-income communities.

Discussion

Baltimore, Maryland and Portland, Oregon and the geography of tracts with rain guages.

One way to visually see the difference is by looking the geography of rain gauges with the percent BIPOC in Baltimore and Portland. On the left, Baltimore has numerous >80% BIPOC tracts with no rain gauges. The wings of the “black butterfly” are mostly unrepresented with the exception of rain gauges at large parks near the western city border. On the right, Portland’s inner eastside, where there is a cluster of tracts that are >80% white, are also well represented by rain gauges. Conversely, there are no tracts that are >80% BIPOC, but the 5 tracts that are 60%-80% BIPOC have no rain gauges. The areas that are 40-60%, especially outer east Portland, are not well represented. The paper has a more in-depth discussion and includes the hurdle model.

Doing Critical GIS

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, and Taylor Shelton. 2022. “Doing Critical GIS.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21 (4): 327–336. ACME open access

Summary

In 2019, Taylor Shelton and I organized a series of events at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Cafe. This paper is the attempts to bring together many of the themes we saw in the presentations. We focus on “what” we map and “how” we map. For example, how might we think about absences and presences on a map? Why is it that, for example, poverty are present in some places and absent in others⁠—and what is the relationship of those two (this is one of the core questions of the Relational Poverty Network)? And what is the process of critical mapping? Towards what end?

Doing Critical GIS Workshop and Conference

The full schedule and itinerary is available from the 2019 workshop and conference. UMBC hosts the workshop and conference website.

ACME Vol 21 No 4 Doing Critical GIS

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies hosts the special issue. Major appreciation to the incredible ACME collective for working with us and the authors during COVID to get these papers out.

Doing Critical GIS
Dillon Mahmoudi, Taylor Shelton

What Can GIS Do?
Nick Lally

Situated Mapping Visualizing Spatial Inequality between the God Trick and Strategic Positivism
Taylor Shelton

Digital Cartographies of Displacement Data as Property and Property as Data
Erin McElroy

Mapping for Whom? Communities of Color and the Citizen Science Gap
Dillon Mahmoudi, Chris L. Hawn, Erica H. Henry, Deja J. Perkins , Caren B. Cooper, Sacoby M. Wilson

Mapping Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls Beyond Colonizing Data and Mapping Practices
Annita Hetoevehotohke’e Lucchesi

Pressing Pause, “Doing” Feminist Mapping
Meghan Kelly, Amber Bosse

Toward Queering the Map 2.0 A Conversation with Michael Brown, Larry Knopp, and Bo Zhao
Jack Swab, Jack Jen Gieseking

Toward a Fourth Generation Critical GIS Extraordinary Politics
Sarah Elwood

Mapping Juvenile Justice

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Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services

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Fountain, Erika and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2021. “Mapping Juvenile Justice: Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services.” American Journal of Community Psychology 67 (1-2): 116-129. doi:10.1002/ajcp.12474

Summary

This paper was part of a special issue in the American Journal of Community Psychology which explicitly sought to engage in interdisciplinary approaches to community psychology. Our paper incorporates insights from human geography and GIS to identify the landscape of mobility for justice-involved youth in Baltimore. We argue that practitioners and lawmakers need to think spatially about uneven development to reduce the number of justice-involved youth that end up in prison because they could not get to court-mandated Department of Juvenile Services locations.

The majority of justice-involved youth are placed on probation; however, many of those same youth struggle to comply with probation requirements and are subsequently confined. In Baltimore, a full 20% of newly committed youth were detained for violations of probation. While there are various reasons youth fail to comply with probation requirements, there have been recent calls to consider the impact of structural and spatial barriers to accessing probation programs and services. In this study, we take a novel, interdisciplinary approach to identifying structural or spatial barriers facing justice-involved youth in Baltimore, MD. Specifically, we explore transportation barriers (i.e., vehicle access) and spatial disparities between youth residences and probation office locations. Our findings suggest that there are several barriers facing Baltimore’s justice-involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with juvenile probation. Specifically, we found that 1 in 3 youths reside in areas with extremely low levels of vehicle access and where the median household income is 25% below the city median. We also find that the majority of youth live beyond walking distances; many would require lengthy transit commutes. These findings highlight the structural and spatial barriers facing justice-involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with probation services.

Our findings indicate there are various spatial and structural barriers that justice-involved youth in Baltimore City face. First, a majority of youth live in areas marked by concentrated poverty and where many residents do not have access to a vehicle. About a third of the youth sampled live in areas marked by the most disadvantage; these youth live in areas where the median household income falls 30% below the Baltimore City median household income, and where between 30 and 70% of workers do not have access to a vehicle. Furthermore, almost all of these youth live beyond walking distance from DJS probation locations, effectively requiring them to use public transit or costly alternatives to attend regular meetings with their probation officer.

Household income, redlining, car access and the residence locations of justice involved youth.
Walking and bus travel times from Department of Juvenile Services locations in Baltimore for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 40 minutes. The majority of youth (78%) live outside of walking distance (more than 20-min) from DJS and in areas marked by low to extremely low car access,

Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism

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Digital labor and data infrastructures

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, Anthony M Levenda, and John G. Stehlin. 2020. “Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism: Digital Labor and Data Infrastructures.” In Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformations in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge and Everyday Life, edited by Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin, and Kevin Ward, 1st Edition, 40–52. New York: Routledge. Routledge link

Summary

This chapter with Anthony and John was a chance to revisit our Beyond the Screen paper in tripleC and reformulate data collection in the built environment with particular attention to labor and the platform economy. One of our contributions is to connect deskilled platform labor with the programmers who make the platforms. Our approach builds from digital political ecology (DPE) to understand the physical infrastructures and digital components of platform urbanism. In this chapter, we combine insights from more recent scholarship on the city and digital geography to examine the infrastructures that undergird platform urbanism to understand how a new division of labor (re)inscribes social disparities in the uneven geographies of the city and its hinterland.

the Uber platform forms a hinge between the urban built environment and the physical infrastructure of data circulation on the one hand and between dead labor embedded in algorithm production and the living but deskilled labor of driving on the other. The output of this function is not just a mobility service but also increasingly valuable data “fumes” (Thatcher, 2014). Scholars, therefore, must question how the data is being transmitted, where it is stored and copied, who has access to it, and how it is used to create or add to an advertising profile. Equally, they must ask about the division of labor involved in producing the platform itself: who uses this data to provide a service under what conditions of deskilling, automation, or punitive “reskilling” and who programmed the platform architecture that structures this labor process … infrastructure of the built environment affords the collection of data through situated platform services, its circulation through physical ICT infrastructure, and the materials and energy on which this process depends.

Urban Real Estate Technologies

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Genealogies, frontiers, and critiques

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Payne, Will, Sarah Knuth, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2020. “Urban Real Estate Technologies: Genealogies, Frontiers, and Critiques.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1033–36. doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1820678

Overview

This is the special issue introduction to Urban Geography (Volume 41, Issue 8, 2020) on Real Estate Technologies organized with Will Payne and Sarah Knuth. The papers in this special issue of Urban Geography began in the material first presented for the “Real Estate Technologies” sessions at the 2017 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. This collection argues that the politics of property manifest in crucial ways through the development and use of urban real estate technologies and that geographers and urban planners are well positioned to offer insights into such technological and political economic mediations, past and present. Organizing questions ask how technologies developed and used for urban real estate: 1) reorder existing exchange practices, spaces, and relationships; 2) capture or create accumulation frontiers; and 3) render property technical, quantifiable, and governable.

Through this collective intervention, we argue that developing a richer engagement with the role of technology, broadly construed, in reshaping urban property relations is both intellectually significant and politically timely for an engaged urban geography. We suggest that all too often, novel players and techniques in urban space aggressively claim the mantle of the innovative and technological, “rendering technical” (Li, 2007) and technocratic broader urban problems and contestations and removing them from democratic disputation.

The issue had phenomenal contributions:

Dalton, Craig M. 2020. “Rhizomatic Data Assemblages: Mapping New Possibilities for Urban Housing Data.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1090–1108. doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1645553.

Shatan, Nicholas, and Kathe Newman. 2020. “The State Market Relationship as a Real Estate Technology: FHA Multifamily Development and Preservation, 1934 – Present.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1065–89. doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1670571.

Shaw, Joe. 2020. “Platform Real Estate: Theory and Practice of New Urban Real Estate Markets.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1037–64. doi:10.1080/02723638.2018.1524653.

Reproducing Spatial Inequality

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The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, Amy Lubitow, and MacKenzie A. Christensen. 2020. “Reproducing spatial inequality? The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon.” Urban Geography 41(6), 801–822. doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1698865

Summary

We explore how the language of “just sustainability” may become subsumed into a sustainability fix strategy, depoliticizing the utility of concepts such as justice and/or equity. Building from critical GIS insights,we combine digitized spatial data from participatory mapping exercises and community-organization-based focus group in Portland, Oregon, regarding a proposed six-mile biking and walking path around downtown. We find that 80 percent of participants’ typical travel destinations are outside of downtown Portland and that participants experience planning and sustainability in a highly localized manner, challenging the equity rationale of downtown investment. We argue the top-down planning model, which presumes that the spatial diffusion of benefits is equitable, is inherently ahistorical and fails to benefit those in historically marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, we argue for the value of community-oriented research, which, in this case, inspired a coalition of community organizations to formally oppose a city-led project based on the inequitable distribution of infrastructure benefits.

We show how development based on a sustainability fix hinders an equity evaluation whose primary metric is access to central city amenities, where “access” is perceived to be a mechanism that serves traditionally marginalized populations. The uneven spatial structure of the city instead reveals that wealthier, white central city residents have much higher rates of access to the proposed project than those connected to the project later through bike and pathway development.

When asked about their typical travel concerning the central city, participants either didn’t want to travel downtown or found that there were barriers to doing so. Traveling to and from the central city was not of immediate interest for a clear majority of our participants, despite the Green Loop project’s goals of creating infrastructure that would serve a large share of Portland residents. As one participant put it:

And the reality is that a lot of people who now live here don’t or can’t work downtown because toward downtown requires higher education. And it requires you being in very specific industries . . . a lot of folks are working in blue-collar industries . . . So a lot of our folks who live here, downtown isn’t where people are going to work.

Critical Geographic Information Science (GIS)

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What is Critical GIS?

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Mahmoudi, Dillon. 2020. “Critical Geographic Information System.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Audrey Kobayashi, 2nd edition, 3:31–36. Thousand Oaks, CA: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10530-X

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by N. Schuurman, volume 2, pp 363–368.

We also published commentary in EPA covering the topics and discussions at the 2014 Revisiting Critical GIS workshop and conference.

Summary

Critical GIS combines the technical field of geographic information science (GIS) with heterodox social theory. The result is a rich field whose technical focus incorporates cartography, computation, big data, and information science, with theoretical moorings in critical human geography, feminism, STS, and scholar-activism. A series of critiques of the technoscientific nature of traditional GIS undergird the formation of critical GIS as a subdiscipline and continues to contribute to its evolving definitions. One notable challenge for any definition of a critical GIS is the continued development of the technologies of GIS itself and the social, political, and economic transformations that reflect and feedback into the continued evolution of technology. Critical GIS is thus dynamic but has rich histories that include critiques and contributions of scholars that mirror science and technology studies (STS), feminism and GIS, ontology, research, and participatory GIS (PGIS).