“Making the Numbers Work”: Anti-Blackness and the Financialization of Market-Rate Rental Housing in Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri, has seen record rent growth in recent years. This comes at a time when the city reels from a deep shortage in affordable housing, an ongoing eviction crisis, and persistent racial segregation. How is investment in new rental housing intertwined with entrenched patterns of anti-Black residential segregation and long-standing spatial inequalities? How are speculative real estate practices understood and legitimated as neutral, rational, and nonracial? This article examines these questions through ethnographic fieldwork on the everyday practices of real estate development. By examining the calculative routines and anticipatory devices deployed in the financing and designing of rental housing, the article shows how the constitution of market-rate apartment buildings into legible, predictable, and tradable financial assets is premised on reinscribing anti-Blackness onto the built environment vis-à-vis ostensibly neutral market categories and financial concepts.