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HGTV:
What Home Improvement Programming Tells Us about Race, Redlining, and the American Dream
The following article is for educational purposes only. I use a Black feminist, socio-political, and pop culture lens to delve into the intersections of race, home ownership, and Black American history. Any trademarked images/video/audio belong to: PPG BUFFALO, BERKELEYSIDE, CITYLAB, DUKE UNIVERSITY, FAST COMPANY, LANSING STATE JOURNAL, MAPPING INEQUALITY, MOUNTAIN XPRESS, MSNBC, NPR, PACIFIC STANDARD, PBS, RETHINKING SCHOOLS, SMITHSONIAN, THE ATLANTIC, THE PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE, THOUGHTCO., THE NEWS TRIBUNE, VOX, WESA 90.5, WHYY, ZOCALO, AND JPN, SAMASHI, AND TELEPATH. Thank you for reading/watching. Enjoy!
From lavish houses and stately apartments to high-rise condominiums and grandiose mansions HGTV caters to every expensive eccentric housing taste one can imagine. With its shiny veneers and picture-perfect catalog presentation, HGTV and other television programming channels such as DIY have tapped into a very (bourgeois) market of the average citizen that aspires to wealth and picturesque living. With the discussion of wealth seekers, there is the converse of affordability. If you weren’t aware there’s even a new TV and social media market of white millennials that seek tiny house living, not in preexisting neighborhoods or near non-white people, but built exclusively to their tastes and price point.
