Luis Flores: Remaking Landed Economic Security in America | City & Regional Planning Lecture
Free and open to the public
The transformation of household life in contemporary America has been interpreted through the lens of “financialization.” However, in important ways, the postwar home had long been “financialized” — reduced to exchange value rather than the sites of productive and commercial life that anchored older notions of landed independence.
In this presentation, Flores draws on two case studies to propose a fuller theory of what changed since the 1980s, involving the shifting foundations of homes as sources of economic security. Flores traces divergent and conflicting efforts to turn homes into liquid and short-term resources by supporting the deregulation of second mortgages (for home equity loans) and for the relaxation of zoning restrictions on accessory units in single-family homes (enabling rental incomes) in the 1980s.
About the Speaker
Luis Flores is assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Sociology Department. He draws on historical methods to examine the regulatory politics at the boundary of home and market, shaping the extent to which homes can serve as sites of production, exchange, and speculation. His previous work examined how early American zoning laws shaped wealth and labor markets, in part through the separation of the domains of the household and the economy. His current research turns to the contentious blurring of home and market in the post-industrial present. Flores’s dissertation and book project, The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking After the American Family Wage, received the 2024 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. He received his Phd from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
ACCESSIBILITY
If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, please contact dcrpadmin@berkeley.edu at least 10 days prior to the event.