Although the 2008 recession was triggered by the collapse of a speculative housing bubble, the housing market in New York City was back to business in record time. During the 2010s, luxury construction and condo sales soared and rents reached an all-time high. At the same time, predatory equity companies scooped up rent-stabilized buildings and pushed out working-class tenants, sparking a pushback that led to the historic rent law reforms of 2019. Now, as we enter an even more devastating recession prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, the consequences of neighborhood inequality are on stark display.
From 2012 to 2015, at the start of the real estate market’s resurgence, sociologist Max Besbris shadowed real estate agents in New York State. His recent book Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality examines the ways agents use identity and emotion to ensure buyers pay top dollar for their homes — and how this accelerates the segregation of New York’s neighborhoods by class and race.
KN: What motivated you to write Upsold?
MB: When I began my research, I was really influenced by two things. One is the consistent finding in sociology and economics that where you live determines a great deal about your life. It affects your health, the quality of your children’s education, your access to consumer and labor markets, your exposure to violence, your family’s wealth, and your overall chances for economic mobility.
The second issue that really shaped my thinking goes back to Engels and The Housing Question. He argued almost 150 years ago that as long as housing was a commodity, society would never be able to adequately provide it for everyone and that the housing market would remain a key site of exploitation.
With these things in mind, I decided to study real estate agents. Real estate agents are central actors in helping people find a place to live. They handle over 90 percent of residential real estate transactions in the United States. So they seemed like the right lens through which to understand residential mobility and neighborhood inequality, as well as the inherent tensions that are present when something so central to living a good life — housing — is commodified.
I had the added benefit of examining real estate agents at a time when housing prices in New York and many other cities across the United States were spiking. I was curious about what role agents played in driving prices back up so quickly after the Great Recession had exposed the housing market as a site of extreme speculation, financialization, and economic exploitation.
KN: Housing plays a big role in shaping people’s identities. How do real estate agents both use homebuyers’ identities to guide their choices and further shape those identities throughout the process of buying a home?