JUST ACTION

A useful framework for “policies that need to be as forceful in the redress of segregation as those that created it.”

Historian Richard Rothstein, whose book The Color of Law exposed how federal, state, and local laws have perpetuated segregation, teams with his daughter, community organizer and housing-policy expert Leah Rothstein, to argue forcefully that residential segregation underlies the nation’s social problems, including inequalities in health care, education, and income. Addressing readers who seek to remedy housing segregation, the authors present a tool kit for activism and advocacy, with myriad examples from communities, groups, and individuals that have confronted challenges from legal, real estate, banking, and development industries. Some obstacles to Black homeownership, they reveal, hide within long-standing laws. Homeowners in Modesto, California, for example, were shocked to discover that their property deeds contained restrictive covenant stipulations prohibiting them from selling their homes to non-White buyers. With the help of student researchers, they mounted a campaign to publicize the offensive stipulation. In Oakland, the Greenlining Institute was founded in the 1970s to encourage increased investment from banks in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In Mount Airy, Pennsylvania; Oak Park, Illinois; and Cleveland Heights, Ohio, local groups were successful in ensuring racial stability after their neighborhoods became integrated, making sure that White flight did not occur. The authors counter NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitudes that result from unfounded assumptions about the consequences of integration. Gentrification, they assert, can produce racially and economically diverse communities where there is robust community involvement. They suggest strategies for closing the wealth gap that has made homeownership unaffordable for middle-class Black Americans, especially as home prices have skyrocketed in many areas. These strategies include savings support plans, subsidized down payments, fair and responsible appraisals and assessments, modifying single-family zoning to allow large, multifamily housing developments, and instituting low-income housing tax credits. Although the authors acknowledge that not every reader will become an activist, anyone can support efforts to redress segregation.

A thoughtful, pragmatic manual for reform.