Cartographic Editorial—Mapping the Racial/Ethnic Topography of Subprime Inequality in Urban America

The worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression—a wide-ranging, multidimensional catastrophe often labeled the Great Recession—began to unfold in late February 2007 as bond-ratings analysts in New York, London, and Hong Kong reviewed the latest quarterly disclosures on securities backed by millions of subprime mortgage loans made to borrowers in cities and suburbs across the United States. For many years, the high-cost, high-risk subprime market had flourished by exploiting the interdependent American inequalities of race, ethnicity, class, and place: subprime lending was disproportionately focused on racially and ethnically marginalized people and places (Bradford, 2002; Squires, 1992, 2003) and extracted profits from local, place-bound housing transactions to provide revenue streams for local brokers and lenders and investment opportunities for large national and transnational banks, Wall Street investment firms, hedge funds and monoline insurance companies, and institutional investors around the world. At its peak, the lending boom comprised a substantial (if ultimately unmeasurable) proportion of the highly leveraged web of promises in the seemingly placeless, Castellian space of flows of a credit-default swaps industry estimated at more than $60 trillion. As the housing boom collapsed, high-yielding subprime securities suddenly became known as “toxic assets,” and investor panic brought a cascade of structural failures in the architecture of the global financial system. Big failures begat big bailouts: by the spring of 2009, the International Monetary Fund estimated total worldwide losses to financial institutions of $4.1 trillion, whereas in the U.S. alone more than a dozen interwoven initiatives authorized by Congress in the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” committed almost $3 trillion of public funds to the financial system (SIGTARP, 2009). Even more money came