This chapter focuses on the honorific monuments that professional and neighborhood-based associations raised to members of the Vedii family. Studying their linguistic formulae, and their archaeological and historical contexts, it clarifies the social situation, and hints at the economic relationships that the Vedii had with the makers and sellers of goods in Ephesos, who were part of the plebs media. These inscriptions allow us to see these associations as key constituents of the urban community and the Vedii as having economic interests in them. Furthermore, we are able to map physically the influence of the family on the city Ephesos by locating the places of the neighborhood associations that honored them.

This chapter examines how the legal climate around prostitution in Baltimore changed in the wake of the Civil War. Growing fears about vagrancy following emancipation and the triumph of a free labor economy prompted crackdowns on streetwalkers and public sex workers, who found themselves incarcerated in the city’s growing network of carceral institutions. Meanwhile, real estate speculators’ growing disenchantment with brothels as investment properties and pressures from a growing urban middle class that expected the state to act as an active guarantor of their property rights brought challenges to the decades-old regime of toleration around indoor prostitution. Brothels, once regarded as a comparatively benign sexual labor arrangement because they kept illicit sexuality contained and out of sight, came to be firmly defined as threats to private property rights and to the future of the middle class. Authorities began to utilize the precedent set by an 1857 equity decision, Hamilton v. Whitridge, as they moved to crack down on sex workers and evict them from “respectable” neighborhoods. As they did so, they began to create informal red-light districts.

Chapter 6 then explores how these individuals stymy housing development using a mix of quantitative analysis of meeting minutes, in-depth case studies, and dozens of interviews with government officials, developers, and community activists. We analyze the wide range of concerns raised by meeting attendees and how commenters use in-depth knowledge of local zoning regulations to raise objections to special permits and variances.