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This article uses a subsample of low-income American Voices Project respondents who rent their homes to examine how households coped with housing insecurity at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, some renters reported more housing stability because of the expansion of existing programs. However, access to and distribution of these resources was uneven. Second, renters continued to rely on social ties to secure housing but the interpersonal and financial issues that often arise with such arrangements remained during the pandemic. Third, the pandemic provided some renters with reason to request and receive flexibility in payment plans on existing leases, though landlord largess was far from universal. Our findings reveal the limitations of temporary policy responses that are administered in uneven ways, require eligible individuals to seek out and enroll in novel benefit programs, and do not intervene directly in markets to increase supply or control prices.

Using a unique data set of millions of advertisements for rental housing and data on the geographic distribution of housing voucher holders, we examine the limits of housing market policies that rely on private-market landlords to meet public needs. We find that although advertised affordable housing is more prevalent in some zip codes than others, voucher households are more geographically clustered than affordable housing. Moreover, voucher holders are overly concentrated in “lower opportunity” zip codes, those with fewer resources for children’s well-being, despite the advertisement of affordable housing in higher opportunity neighborhoods. Using text-analysis techniques, we identify advertisements that explicitly accept or reject voucher holders and find that ads seeking voucher-holding tenants are overrepresented in lower opportunity neighborhoods. We evaluate the significance of these findings for theories of predatory inclusion.

This special issue aims to display the breadth and depth of qualitative studies of the environment. In terms of breadth, the work here demonstrates that sociology should have a capacious definition of the environment and treat it with the same scrutiny as other folk concepts. Doing so—with the caveat that individual studies need to carefully operationalize ‘the environment’—reveals how a sociology of the environment has great deal to contribute to our understandings of community, culture, and inequality. In terms of depth, these articles develop new theoretical and empirical areas for environmental sociology, expanding the subfield internationally and bringing it up to date in terms of its relevance for understanding our current moment of pandemic, global warming, and nature fetishization. The outstanding papers collected in this special issue provide manifold lessons, connect to other sociological subfields, and, together, generate a sense of urgency for more qualitative studies of the environment.

Although rates of residential racial segregation and home prices are undoubtedly related, the temporal nature of the relationship has rarely been studied. Using fixed effects models in a cross-lagged framework, we examine how prior changes in segregation and home prices at the metro level predict changes in the other. Our findings suggest that increases in home prices predict increasing racial segregation years later, but increases in segregation fail to predict subsequent change in home values. Metros that experience a 1 standard deviation increase in home prices experience an associated 0.25 standard deviation increase in Black-White segregation 10 years later and a 0.18 standard deviation increase 20 years later. No relationship is observed for Hispanic-White segregation. We discuss implications for understanding the economic underpinnings of segregation. Findings also offer insight into future segregation trends and illuminate how changes in the housing market may drive demographic trends more broadly.

America’s current housing regime—meaning the ways housing is allocated, owned, taxed, and regulated—is a major barrier to the kinds of collective action needed to decarbonize the economy and the atmosphere. We outline why this is the case and argue that major reforms to the housing regime are necessary for fostering collective climate action.

Increasing Spanish fluency in the United States likely shapes ethnoracial group boundaries and inequality. We study a key site for group boundary negotiations—the housing market—where Spanish usage may represent a key source of information exchange between landlords and prospective renters. Specifically, we examine the use of Spanish in advertisements for online rental housing and its effect on White, Black, and Latinx Americans' residential preferences. Using a corpus of millions of Craigslist rental listings, we show that Spanish listings are concentrated in majority-Latinx neighborhoods with greater proportions of immigrant and Spanish-speaking residents. Furthermore, units that are advertised in Spanish tend be lower priced relative to non-Spanish ads in the same neighborhood. We then use a survey experiment to demonstrate that Spanish usage decreases White, Black, and non-Spanish-speaking Latinx Americans' interest in a housing unit and surrounding neighborhood, whereas Spanish-speaking Latinx respondents are less affected. We discuss these findings in light of past work on neighborhood demographic preferences, segregation, and recent theorizing on within-category inequality.

Sociology must worry less about theoretical innovation and more about empirical description.

Abstract Many professional labor markets are currently experiencing signs of deprofessionalization, including automation of tasks and increasingly unstable employment conditions. Drawing on the case of journalism schools, this article examines how these shifts affect professional education, which has historically been positioned as a means to avoiding precarious employment. How do professional schools cope with inimical disruptions to the labor markets for which they are training students? Based on 113 in-depth interviews with faculty, staff, and administrators from 44 U.S. journalism programs, we argue that journalism schools have sought to reframe labor market instability as an inevitable and even desirable aspect of journalistic practice and professional identity. They do this by dismantling boundaries, valorizing entrepreneurialism, and seeking to alter institutional practices to emphasize skills over abstract knowledge. Taken together, we call this professionalizing contingency. As labor market precarity continues to spread within expert and professional fields, our findings have implications for broader sociological understandings of professional education.

Across various markets, consumers rely on brokers to help them select goods. How do brokers shape consumers’ valuation? We address this question by drawing from two independent but analogous ethnographies of brokerage and purchasing in the New York housing market and the New York art market. Building upon the relational turn in economic sociology, we identify the interlocking mechanisms by which brokers influence valuation in face-to-face interaction: Brokers (1) build trust by establishing rapport and displaying expertise, (2) prepare consumers to purchase by priming the consumption setting so that consumers compare a specified set of goods and experience urgency, and (3) posit matches between consumers and products, relying on demographic and cultural characteristics of consumers to complete transactions. Our novel theorization of brokerage has broader implications for understanding valuation and consumption.

Drawing on the human ecology framework, which describes social structure as dynamic and social action as environmentally contingent, this article examines behavior and attitudes around accepting help after disaster. Through two years of longitudinal in-depth interviews with 59 households in one community whose homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey, this study describes perceived shifts in the help provided by local organizations, institutions, and the social networks of community members—or what we call the local ecology of aid. While flood victims experienced an immense, and seemingly universal, outpouring of support in the immediate aftermath of the storm, in the ensuing months they reported a sharp decrease in this interpersonal support. In the absence of a local ecology of aid marked by the universal provision of aid, concerns about stigmatization began to inform decisions about accepting help. Our findings have implications for ecological theorizing, for understanding stigma and help-seeking or accepting help, as well as for fostering community resilience—a growing concern given the expanding scope and intensity of climate-related disasters.