The Rise of Home-Based Moneymaking in the U.S.

Today, every home is a potential business or a speculative asset, every person an entrepreneur, and every relationship a potential economic opportunity. How did we get here? Are these practices an antidote to labor alienation or disguised precarity? How did these practices go from being regulated as racialized informality to a solution to rising economic insecurity? How do they reflect efforts to navigate the demands of carework? And what do these trends suggest for debates over the “future of work”?

My dissertation The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking After the Family Wage, examines the origins, regulatory conflict, and contested incorporation related to forms of household economic informality in the United States. Home-based moneymaking refers to household strategies aimed at generating money outside of formal employment.

The resurgence of the “informal” economy came from pockets of household experimentation among groups excluded from or unaccounted for by postwar “breadwinner liberalism:” housewives, immigrants, workers of color, and the elderly. As labor market restructuring broadened experiences of precarity, the appeal of once-marginal moneymaking practices spread. These practices quickly came into conflict with regulatory boundaries, in land-use zoning, tax codes, labor law, and mortgage law, that enforced the postwar separation between home and market. Their contested incorporation remade gendered divisions between home and market, and regulatory and racialized constructions of economic informality.

My dissertation research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the ASA’s Minority Fellowship Program, U-M’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, and the Rackham Graduate School.

For my dissertation, I received the 2024 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association, and a 2023 Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award, from the University of Michigan.

Four chapters:

• Wither the ‘Useless Child;’ From the Problem of Child Labor to the Crisis of Youth Unemployment

• Legalizing Work from Home: Industrial Homework and the Home-Work Advocacy Movement

• Suburban Boardinghouses: From Illegal Garage Conversions to Granny Flats and Accessory Dwelling Units

• From Home to ATM: Locked-In Wealth, Inflation, and Efforts to ‘Liberate Home Equity’ For All

Dissertation Committee: Greta Krippner (Chair), Elizabeth Anderson (U-M Philosophy), Robert Jansen, Josh Pacewicz (Brown Sociology), Fabian Pfeffer.

 Origins of American Land-Use Zoning

Pre-dissertation research examines America’s first case of citywide land-use zoning in Los Angeles. The western city created the first “residence districts” in 1904, and blanketed the city limits in “residence” and “industrial” districts in 1908, becoming the first city to successfully defend zoning before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915. Los Angeles’ piecemeal (and partially accidental) invention of American zoning offers a stark view of the political contestation and distributive stakes involved in the invention of what is arguably the central instrument of municipal governance. Two papers have come out of this research.

The first paper, “Beyond Exclusion: Land-Use and the Properties of Home Wealth” is in preparation for submission.

Homeownership is increasingly central in studies of wealth inequality and economic insecurity, with the elimination of regulatory barriers to accessing private wealth, like zoning, seen as their antidote. Moving beyond access, this article argues that zoning marked a crucial development in the institutional construction of the American home as a financial asset. Extending insights from the economic sociology of corporate property to homeownership, this article theorizes that zoning provides asset shielding and asset standardization, facilitating stable values, liquidity, and collateralization. Drawing on archival evidence surrounding the creation of the first American land-use districts in Los Angeles, I trace how zoning came to delegate public authority over the state’s “police power,” and drew jurisdictions that differentiated homeownership from other classes of landownership. In a context of private property, choices confronting policymakers today are not between regulated and deregulated property markets, but over the desirable scale of regulation, the distribution of market privileges among competing propertied and non-propertied actors, and the extent to which economic insecurity should be managed with private wealth.

A second paper, “Zoning as a Labor Market Regulation,” published in Theory and Society.

An instrument of wealth accumulation and racial segregation in housing markets, the intersections between zoning and labor are often overlooked. Expanding literatures in the urban sociology of housing and drawing on historical and archival evidence, I elaborate three ways that land-use zoning emerged to shape labor markets: (1) zoning constrained households from engaging in direct market activity, acting as a regulatory source of proletarianization; (2) zoning first emerged as a xenophobic tool for regulating labor competition; and (3) zoning introduced racialized boundaries distinguishing formal work from a sphere of economic informality. I arrive at these theoretical-historical propositions from a study of the frontier origins of American land-use zoning laws in late-19th-century Los Angeles. This first and influential approach to residential zoning emerged amid racial dynamics of western settlement, frontier domestic culture, and the rise of a national labor market. I demonstrate how efforts to regulate the labor and domestic practices of poor urban households and Chinese immigrants on the frontier became the direct legal basis for the dichotomous categories of “residential” and “industrial” districts that Los Angeles first defended before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915. By theorizing the intersections of land-use zoning and labor markets, we stand to gain new insights into the contemporary trend toward encouraging flexibility in urban land-use. As cities consider mixed-use zoning, cottage food laws, and encourage home-based businesses, they are simultaneously reworking gendered and racial regimes of economic order in housing and labor markets.

Collaborative Theoretical Writings

With Prof. Greta Krippner - We draw insights from American Legal Realism to assess sociological treatments of contractual exchange and propose an approach that avoids persistent distinctions between the economic and non-economic elements of contract. This paper “Toward a Sociology of Contract,” was published in 2024 in the Journal of Law and Political Economy.

With Prof. Neil Gross - The pragmatist action model posits that actors tend to act more habitually before familiar situations and exercise greater creativity when encountering novelty. But actors can err in their assessments of situational familiarity—errors that are often socially patterned and consequential. In this chapter we develop a theory of “problem situation misassessment” and illustrate its explanatory potential by examining the case of the 2007-8 financial crisis. This chapter “Problem Situation Misassessment and the U.S. Financial Crisis,” was published in 2022 in the edited volume The New Pragmatist Sociology: Agency, Inquiry, and Democracy, with Columbia University Press.

Community Engaged Research on COVID-19 Impact

As part of my participation in advocacy for public health equity along California’s southern borderland during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have contributed to community based research projects focused on the region’s migrant farmworkers.

This research is led by Dr. Adrienne Kenney (social work) and Dr. Amy Quandt (geography) at San Diego State University, and has been funded by UC Davis’ Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety. I assisted in conducting 199 Spanish-language surveys and 12 in-depth interviews with migrant and resident farmworkers in the Imperial Valley in the summer following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. This research has been presented in numerous local venues and has yielded the following papers:

• Amy Quandt, Annie J. Kenney, Luis Flores, Daniela Flores, and Mercy Villaseñor. 2022. “’We left the crops there lying in the field’: Agricultural worker experiences with the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Rural US-Mexico Border Region.” Journal of Rural Studies.

• Annie J. Kenney, Amy Quandt, Mercy Villaseñor, Daniela Flores, and Luis Flores. 2021. “Occupational Stressors and Access to COVID-19 Resources Among Commuting and Residential Hispanic/Latino Farmworkers in a US-Mexico Border Region.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19(2): 763-778.

  • OP-ED: Amy Quandt and Luis Flores. “Farmworkers Face Stress and Depression. The Pandemic Made it Worse.” Civil Eats. July 28, 2022.