Please email Jacob for copies of these papers.
Faber, Jacob. "Segregation and the cost of money: Race, poverty, and the prevalence of alternative financial institutions."
A long history of racialized exclusion from and exploitation through financial products is reflected in an ever-widening racial wealth gap and persistent residential segregation. While the subprime boom and foreclosure crisis increased sociological attention on the role of finance in shaping these inequalities, scant research has investigated a related manifestation of the institutional marginalization of communities of color: the dramatic expansion of “alternative” financial services (AFS) in recent years. Payday lenders, check cashers, and other AFS have garnered attention from policymakers and advocates for the poor because they are more expensive than traditional banking—draining millions of dollars from communities and constituting what some call a “Ghetto Tax.” This is the first study to explore neighborhood-level AFS geography on a national scale. Leveraging a dataset comprising the universe of AFS in 2015, I show that not only are there substantial differences in AFS presence between white and non-white neighborhoods, but that these disparities are largest in the most segregated metropolitan areas. This finding supports theories that racial segregation creates easily identifiable markets for institutions to avoid, target, and exploit. I further show that the gap between black and white neighborhoods in AFS exposure is widest among high income neighborhoods, reflecting the unique vulnerability of even affluent blacks to institutional marginalization. This work documents how the overlapping geographies of racial isolation and AFS prevalence shape the very cost of money for different racial groups, illustrating the importance of institutions transmitting the effects of racial isolation.
Faber, Jacob. "On the street during the Great Recession: Exploring the relationship between foreclosures and
homelessness."
During the Great Recession, policymakers and advocates for the poor raised concerns that the foreclosure crisis, which forced millions from their homes, was causally linked to the concurrent rise in homelessness. Despite these warnings—and the widespread consequences of the economic collapse on the housing market—no national-level research has evaluated the connection between foreclosures and homelessness. In this study, I combine homelessness data from HUD with foreclosure data from RealtyTrac to analyze changes over time in both phenomena on the metropolitan level. I find that foreclosures within a given year are significantly correlated with homelessness in the following year net of controls for demographic, housing, and economic characteristics, regional time trends, and metropolitan area fixed effects. This relationship is strongest among single homeless individuals (compared to families) and the unsheltered population. These findings carry important implications for housing policy as well as our understanding of the Great Recession’s consequences.
Faber, Jacob and Jessica Kalbfeld. "Complaining while black: Racial disparities in the adjudication of complaints against the police."
Police departments across the country have processes through which officers are ostensibly held accountable for illegal or improper activity. However, reports of how citizen complaints are adjudicated often note that officers are rarely disciplined. Furthermore, several recent, high profile incidents of alleged police brutality involved officers against whom numerous complaints had previously been lodged, suggesting that changes in the process of complaint adjudication may prevent such incidents and improve community relations. This project investigates how race and segregation shape the outcomes of allegations made against the Chicago Police Department between 2011 and 2014. We find that complaints by black and Latino citizens and against white officers are less likely to result in sanction. Additionally, we show neighborhood context can interact with complainant characteristics to influence outcomes. Incidents alleged by white citizens in high crime and predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to result in sanction of the accused officer. These disparities help provide context for understanding tensions between communities of color and the largely white Chicago Police Department and constitute an important flaw in a procedure supposedly designed to enforce accountability upon those empowered with the right to take human life. These results are consistent with theories that white victimhood is prioritized by individual and institutional actors. They also reflect recent developments in the neighborhood effects literature stressing the interaction between individual and contextual factors in shaping outcomes.
Steil, Justin and Jacob Faber. "Legislating Violence? The Relationship between Local Segregation Ordinances and Racialized Violence."
Place, race, and the law intersect in particularly explicit ways in the passage of early 20th century zoning ordinances requiring “the use of separate blocks, for residences, places of abode, and places of assembly by white and colored people respectively” State v. Gurry (1913). These laws were enacted as Jim Crow became entrenched in the rural South and African Americans moved in greater numbers to cities. As the black population in Southern cities increased and expanded into formerly all-white neighborhoods, white residents sought to draw racialized boundaries around their property. Baltimore enacted a comprehensive racial zoning ordinance in 1910 and 30 cities throughout the South quickly followed, adopting identical or similar segregation policies. The first three state courts to consider these policies, however, all struck them down and there was considerable uncertainty regarding the validity of these laws until the Supreme Court invalidated them in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). Roger Gould (2003) has suggested that social and political instability, especially instability that affects the social supports for established status relations, contributes to increases in violence. This interpersonal and intergroup conflict is especially likely where group solidarity is questioned or group status challenged, as was the case with the seeming inability of white residents to “protect” what they saw as “their” neighborhoods. This paper analyzes the relationship between racial zoning laws and racialized violence in the form of lynchings and race riots to test the applicability of Gould’s theory of conflict and explore its relationship to particularly territorial policies and conflicts.
