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A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida
Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete , N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story. Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy. Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century.
A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida’s landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians.
Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners’ power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.
A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida’s landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians.
Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners’ power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.
376 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 3, 2020
Phenomenal. The best book I've read this year. It blends the history of housing segregation with histories of Black capitalism, property as a rights framework, and the Caribbean as a distinctively American imperial space. Well written and each section is worth it.
January 24, 2019
***Just a note that all of the books I'm tagging "CPLN 624" are for a course in my school's city planning department—Readings in Race, Poverty, and Place.
AWMC addresses one of my lifelong questions: how is and isn’t Miami the South? My great-grandma was from Miami, and her people were among the city’s many 1880s—1940s Bahamian immigrants. Later, she later moved to Raleigh, and had five regular-degular Southern children, so I’ve always had a hard time trusting South Florida’s “we’re not country, we’re Caribbean!” narrative.
Connolly details how the benevolent dictatorship of real estate top-dogs like Luther Brooks and black elites’ roles as de-escalating peer mediators curbed rent strikes in Southern cities. Here, Miami fell in line with the South’s anti-union model and patterns of hypersegregation. These mediators renounced boycotts occurring in other Jim Crow cities, and I wonder if (black) resistance to (some) Southern Civil Rights struggles limited Miami’s reputation as a Southern city. Connolly concludes that my question isn’t important, and the better one is how Miami continued Jim Crow policies, even while importing Caribbean residents and having no first-hand Antebellum notions of property.
I was really convicted by his takedown of the black middle class, who embraced “Jim Crow’s Faustian bargain” to get ahead through property rights. His delightful shadiness implicates this whole group of people. Before dealing with the devil, Miami’s “black landlord class” did their research—in other courses, I’m learning about real estate’s colossal impact on wealth creation, and Connolly explains that many of our historic faves were able to found schools and wage national justice campaigns BECAUSE they made their money as landlords...or worse.
Herein lies the convoluted “racial logic” of real estate, accompanied by the African-American belief in property ownership as freedom. If the first step is simply to own a home, the second is to own an appreciating asset, which requires acknowledgment of the depreciating values in many black neighborhoods. At this point, is one participating in a destructive appraisal system? Encouraging it? As I near graduation, it’s a question I desperately ask, since I’m hoping to maintain my class status while supporting opportunities for others in my race. Real estate does all and none of this; this is the gamble Connolly exposes.
AWMC unpacks a fact realized by too few: BLACK PEOPLE WERE WOOED BY SUBURBIA, TOO! Connolly qualifies that through discriminatory policies like the overplacement of public housing, our suburbs are markedly different than white ones (@Prince George’s County, Maryland.) This is largely because we aren’t afforded the “discernible distance from poor black people” Connolly argues is baked into the suburban ideal. In many ways, this explains why our concepts of place, poverty, and property are far from settled.
Today, I fear we haven’t learned from the history Connolly discusses. If the “widespread belief in suburbs originated within the Jim Crow urban context,” what’s the context of the back to the city movement? Have Millennials, while chasing “authentic” cities and abandoning our auto-oriented hometowns, fully grappled with the failed suburban ideal? Or, are we following another American Dream with little concern for the racial illogic and real estate mishaps of the past?
AWMC addresses one of my lifelong questions: how is and isn’t Miami the South? My great-grandma was from Miami, and her people were among the city’s many 1880s—1940s Bahamian immigrants. Later, she later moved to Raleigh, and had five regular-degular Southern children, so I’ve always had a hard time trusting South Florida’s “we’re not country, we’re Caribbean!” narrative.
Connolly details how the benevolent dictatorship of real estate top-dogs like Luther Brooks and black elites’ roles as de-escalating peer mediators curbed rent strikes in Southern cities. Here, Miami fell in line with the South’s anti-union model and patterns of hypersegregation. These mediators renounced boycotts occurring in other Jim Crow cities, and I wonder if (black) resistance to (some) Southern Civil Rights struggles limited Miami’s reputation as a Southern city. Connolly concludes that my question isn’t important, and the better one is how Miami continued Jim Crow policies, even while importing Caribbean residents and having no first-hand Antebellum notions of property.
I was really convicted by his takedown of the black middle class, who embraced “Jim Crow’s Faustian bargain” to get ahead through property rights. His delightful shadiness implicates this whole group of people. Before dealing with the devil, Miami’s “black landlord class” did their research—in other courses, I’m learning about real estate’s colossal impact on wealth creation, and Connolly explains that many of our historic faves were able to found schools and wage national justice campaigns BECAUSE they made their money as landlords...or worse.
Herein lies the convoluted “racial logic” of real estate, accompanied by the African-American belief in property ownership as freedom. If the first step is simply to own a home, the second is to own an appreciating asset, which requires acknowledgment of the depreciating values in many black neighborhoods. At this point, is one participating in a destructive appraisal system? Encouraging it? As I near graduation, it’s a question I desperately ask, since I’m hoping to maintain my class status while supporting opportunities for others in my race. Real estate does all and none of this; this is the gamble Connolly exposes.
AWMC unpacks a fact realized by too few: BLACK PEOPLE WERE WOOED BY SUBURBIA, TOO! Connolly qualifies that through discriminatory policies like the overplacement of public housing, our suburbs are markedly different than white ones (@Prince George’s County, Maryland.) This is largely because we aren’t afforded the “discernible distance from poor black people” Connolly argues is baked into the suburban ideal. In many ways, this explains why our concepts of place, poverty, and property are far from settled.
Today, I fear we haven’t learned from the history Connolly discusses. If the “widespread belief in suburbs originated within the Jim Crow urban context,” what’s the context of the back to the city movement? Have Millennials, while chasing “authentic” cities and abandoning our auto-oriented hometowns, fully grappled with the failed suburban ideal? Or, are we following another American Dream with little concern for the racial illogic and real estate mishaps of the past?
September 17, 2014
As the end of the book suggest it covers the complexity of the Jim Crow South in Florida and the ways capitalism or money making created strife for the poor black communities. Those communities forcefully being displaced at the wills and whims of the white AND black middle classes/capitalist classes. In the past the folks with the money would band together and decide the fate of a population manipulating the state but as recently as the 60's and beyond the state has stepped into that position as a greater instrument to capitalist using "urban renewal" as a cover for displacement and segregation, the new label being gentrification. From the beginning people have been moved around like objects in order to keep "people of color" separated from the "white" community", mostly on the basis of what can make money. Even though at times the purveyors of the socio-economic violence were a mix of black and white, so at times were the folks fighting for change and resisting displacement but the master purveyor of the violence of those times and it seems of them all is the color green, the money that can be made off of people and circumstances no matter their "race".
August 4, 2016
Connolly presents readers with a complex and productive analysis of the history of real estate and racial capitalism in the making of the South Floridian variant of American Apartheid. This is a well-written and impressive work of historical scholarship and will have much to offer to urban studies scholars, historians of race, and history of capitalism scholarship. It's too much to say that it's an enjoyable read, because of the subject matter, which is the displacement and exploitation of black working class Miamians by white rent-collectors and developers and their allies in the black middle class reformer cum landlord cohort, but Conolly's adept and provocative historical eye makes this book important and valuable
July 24, 2023
What a great book - incredibly well researched and compellingly written. As a FL transplant it was eye-opening to see the many moments, power plays, and deals that shaped history of this state and led us to where we are today. While there were frequent devastating episodes of state-wielded oppression, I finished the book feeling determined to learn from our history to escape its vicious cycles.
December 9, 2018
Incredibly powerful history of Miami. This book tells a comprehensive story that helps me understand a lot of the reasons why Miami is the way it is today. HIGHLY recommend if you’re in Miami, from Miami, or interested in how cities are made in the US.
June 17, 2024
I read this book for a book discussion group at work, and it continued my love of real estate books. I'm fascinated by real estate and how it's the story of this country. A World More Concrete is specifically about the city of Miami, starting from the turn of the 20th century until late 1960s. The book was strongest when it was showing how cultural factors impacted real estate at the time, from the differences between how Black Americans and Black folks from the Caribbean were treated to the immigrations of Cubans to the city to the city's tourist identity. The author also showed well how Miami was specifically not interested in tenant organizing, as a culture of landlord paternalism built up over time, and also introduced readers to fascinating figures in the history of real estate in the city, such as Luther Brooks and Dr. William B. Sawyer. I actually could have used more in the last chapter on the move to the suburbs and all the policy enacted at that time. One chapter was not enough to cover all the details of this, and I thought much was glossed over when it should have been expanded upon. I have only been to Miami twice and very briefly, but I'd love to return and explore more now that I'm familiar with the history of these neighborhoods (spoiler alert: most of the Black neighborhoods and structures are no longer there). I'm particularly interested in the history of Virginia Key Beach, the first "colored only" beach in the area, and the Mary Elizabeth hotel, where many people would have stayed while visiting Virginia Key and Miami, including W.E.B. DuBois, A Phillip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, and Adam Clayton Powell. I'm looking forward to reading even more books like this (this was my second) and incorporating real estate history into more of my writing.
June 19, 2018
Shocking read. People from multiple races — especially an alliance of exploitative white landlords and black property owners — collaborated to profit off Miami’s black residents, so that Jim Crow practices such as residential segregation endured past the 1960s. African Americans strove to acquire property in the hope that ownership would fix institutionalized racism. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. Landlords manipulated urban renewal projects to obtain federal funds, but not invest in black neighborhoods such as Overtown. African American leaders perpetuated the myth of ownership as the fix, even as minority neighborhoods grew poorer. This book conveys a powerful, Marxist-inflected call for grassroots tenant organizing, in opposition to institutionalized segregation. The real estate market is not a natural guarantor of civil rights.
February 1, 2020
An incredible exposition of the entanglement of Jim Crow and pro-growth urban politics, property rights, racism, and capitalism, Connolly’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in better understanding how urbanization and structural racism have gone hand-in-hand in U.S. history. Highly recommend.
January 25, 2020
Excellent
February 14, 2025
Nathan Connolly explores the more durable world that held and harden under the feet of marchers and rioters as Jim Crown died and segregated. The point of the book is to see the shared assumptions between how real estate and white supremacy nurtured in their subjects, regardless of skin colour or class. He focuses on the political and commercial transactions that inspired events like concrete parks.
"Order meant, among other things, protecting white commercial interests under the banners of capitalism, democracy, and modernity."
Connolly argues that Americans, immigrants and indigenous made investments in racial apartheid that helped govern growing cities and unleash the value of land as real estate. He says Black and White landlords worked together to bind real estate to structural racism and white supremacy to political power.
Overall it was a fascinating book.
"Order meant, among other things, protecting white commercial interests under the banners of capitalism, democracy, and modernity."
Connolly argues that Americans, immigrants and indigenous made investments in racial apartheid that helped govern growing cities and unleash the value of land as real estate. He says Black and White landlords worked together to bind real estate to structural racism and white supremacy to political power.
Overall it was a fascinating book.
February 7, 2025
Meh. I had to read this for class and honestly, I was lowkey boring.
August 14, 2021
essential background for understanding the history of South Florida's built environment and complex ethnic/racial relationships
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews