In this episode Leah Rothstein underscores the need for a revitalized civil rights movement. We explore examples of communities that have succeeded in peeling back policies and actions that have led to segregated cities and have begun to break down silos. The power of visualization in bridging racial divides is brought to life by discussing the inspiring Map Twins project led by Tanika Johnson in Chicago. Leah further highlights the importance of professional involvement and biracial and multi-ethnic committees in this fight. Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation, as we discuss her book Just Action and a clear plan of action towards racial justice.
Show Notes:
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In this episode Leah Rothstein underscores the need for a revitalized civil rights movement. We explore examples of communities that have succeeded in peeling back policies and actions that have led to segregated cities and have begun to break down silos. The power of visualization in bridging racial divides is brought to life by discussing the inspiring Map Twins project led by Tanika Johnson in Chicago. Leah further highlights the importance of professional involvement and biracial and multi-ethnic committees in this fight. Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation, as we discuss her book Just Action and a clear plan of action towards racial justice.
Show Notes:
Episode artwork by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanning
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Before we jump in, we want to take a moment to thank our episode sponsor, Marvin Planning Consultants. Marvin Planning Consultants was established in 2009 and is committed to our clients and our professional organizations. Our team of planners have served on chapter division and national committees, including as Nebraska Chapter President. In addition, we are committed to supporting our chapter in various APA divisions. You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska Chapter of the American Planning Association.
Stephanie Rouse:In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked On Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Leah Rothstein on her book Just Action how to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. This was a great follow-up episode to our first in season two, where we interviewed Leah and her father on the Color of Law, the book that he authored several years back, just Action was forthcoming, so we dove a little bit into some of the strategies in that episode, but wanted to have her back on to get more into the weeds.
Jennifer Hiatt:I really appreciated that Just Action picks up where the Color of Law left off. After reading the Color of Law, I really wanted to know what the next steps were. Just Action does just that introducing the reader to the many ways that we could take action to rectify our past realms.
Stephanie Rouse:So one aspect of the book that I think is most valuable are all the examples of each solution in action by various communities. Leah describes in depth one of these examples, the Block Twins, which I thought was such a cool project created by an artist, which then led us into the discussion of all the various groups that can and should be involved in the work to undo decades of racially biased policies that have led to such segregation in our communities.
Jennifer Hiatt:As Leah mentions in the interview. Each of these examples made it seem like each solution is doable. You see that there are already groups who have done the hard work of starting People interested in making changes in their community now already have an excellent blueprint to start from. It doesn't need to feel as overwhelming as it seems.
Stephanie Rouse:The book has dozens of ways activists, realtors, banks, governments, lawyers and all others could start to make change, but, as Leah said, there isn't one specific program or policy that all communities should start with, other than understanding the racial policies of the past that have led to the current situation. That's where the work of deciding what takes priority and what action should be taken to start peeling back the layers of racial injustice that have built up over time. Well, let's get into our conversation with Leah Rostine about her book, just Action. Well, leah, thank you for joining us again on Booked on Planning to talk about Just Action how to challenge segregation enacted under the color of law.
Stephanie Rouse:We had both you and your co-author and father, richard Rostine, on the show for our first episode this year to cover his 2017 book Color of Law, which recounted the unconstitutional fashion by which governments at all levels created segregation. Just Action is the book that talks about how we can begin to undo that. We started to talk a little about Just Action in that earlier episode, but wanted to have you back on now that the book is out and dive into the details a little bit more. So, to start off, how did you collect and identify all the action items that are detailed in the book, and was it based on your experience or research or a combination of both? And third question, if there was any ideas that didn't make it into that book.
Leah Rothstein:Yeah Well. So the book, as you know, is full of dozens of ideas for local groups to take on to begin to challenge and redress segregation. So there are policy changes, policy reforms, programmatic changes or new programs to adopt on the local level. So, yeah, dozens of these strategy examples and dozens more that couldn't make it in the book because we had a space limitation and nobody wants to read a book that goes on forever.
Leah Rothstein:So how we came up with that list is, I think it's a combination of experience and research. So, as my dad was writing the color of law, he developed a list of solutions, and I have worked in housing policy, affordable housing, community development policy. So I had my own list of ideas and solutions and we put those together and came up with sort of a rough outline of all of the different strategies we could discuss and then, in researching them, learned about more ideas that community groups or local governments were enacting or implementing or looking to implement all around the country. And so then we expanded the list and then we had to pare it down, combine some ideas, and so, yeah, we talk about everything from zoning reform to housing production, to ban the box ordinances, to make it easier for those with criminal records to rent apartments and housing. So there's so many different ideas that we uncovered and in each one there's kind of an endless amount of opportunities and strategies for addressing that. So we did learn a lot more ideas that we couldn't talk about in the book.
Leah Rothstein:I'll give one example. We have a sub stack newsletter that we're continuing to write about these issues. That's just action dot sub stack dot com. And I wrote about one really important issue that I just wasn't aware of when we had written the book and so I wrote a column about it there, and that is the idea or the issue around a state planning having an estate plan when you own a home.
Leah Rothstein:If you don't have an estate plan and a will in place when you, the homeowner, dies, the home or property isn't passed down to heirs the way that they maybe thought it would be.
Leah Rothstein:And then over half of the states in the country when a homeowner or property owner doesn't have an estate plan in place, when the property owner dies, there's this whole process in place where the family that owns you know, collectively all of the heirs that own the property can lose all of it If one heir who owns any fraction of the property wants to sell their share, it can force a sale of the entire property in auction.
Leah Rothstein:So families, many African American families, particularly in the South, who've owned property for generations, are losing their family inherited you know what they think is inherited property in this way. So there's ways to reform the laws so that that doesn't happen. But we can also ensure that you know we advocate for down payment assistance programs and programs that help African Americans and first time homebuyers get into home ownership, and those programs should also come with free legal assistance to have an estate plan in place once home ownership is acquired. So that's an example of an issue that didn't make it in the book but is very related to what we're talking about and important to implement.
Jennifer Hiatt:And we have actually linked the registration form for your sub-stack in the show notes. So if readers want to go down and get registered for that. I have read every single article that you guys have sent through at this point and I cannot stress how I opening there, I'm a lawyer and I am even learning even more about how truly messed up a lot of our especially the state planning works through. So Nebraska. It's all legislated out who gets what and nobody can force a sale. So when I was reading about that, it just surprised me so much.
Leah Rothstein:Yeah, yeah, it's crazy and it's not a lot of people I talk to, you know, in the housing world lawyers who work in housing don't know about this. So it's important that we talk about it and, just you know, embed it in all of the other programs that we're implementing.
Jennifer Hiatt:Right. One weird thing about me and the way that I read a book is that I always flip to the end and read through the notes section. And I was glad that I did in this case, because at the end of your book you have a note on word usage, and I know from experience it can really be a challenge, especially in housing justice, to make sure that everyone is on the same page. We throw terms around intermittently and some people mean this and some people mean that. So how did you guys actually determine which terms you were going to use and how you were going to give them that special attention?
Leah Rothstein:Yeah, that's a good question and a lot of folks who've made it that far to the notes at the end have questions about this. You know we were very intentional and purposeful in how we wrote this book to be accessible to the widest audience possible. You know, we're writing about complex housing issues. We're writing about racial justice issues, another field of which is very accessible often to people not familiar with those fields. So we wanted to write this to people who maybe are just learning about racial justice and racial inequality or just learning about housing affordability and housing. You know development, and so we had to be very careful in the words we used. I think especially that note on word usage had a lot to do with how we didn't capitalize black when referring to African Americans. We don't use words like white privilege, and those are things that are very common in the fields of racial justice and people who are talking about racial inequality. They're used to seeing black capitalized or used to talking about white privilege. But there's a lot of people that we hope this book will reach that I think if they saw that and read those terms, they'd be maybe put off or not feel included in the language we use, or it would limit our ability to reach them, and so we avoided anything. That would be kind of jarring to people who aren't already familiar with those terms and in some ways it's a little jarring to other people who are used to hearing talk about white privilege when we're talking about racial inequality. But that's sort of a risk we take in trying to open the umbrella wide enough to include people, new people, into this conversation who aren't as versed in all of those terms and word usage and in the housing space.
Leah Rothstein:Similarly, we are careful in how we talk about affordable housing. I think people who are in housing work were used to hearing affordable housing and assume it means subsidized low income housing, tax credit housing for very low income people, when really the term affordable means a lot more than that, and so we tried to use it more intentionally to again create a wider umbrella where there's many, many middle income people most African Americans are middle income who make too much to qualify for low income housing and not enough to afford market rate housing, so they don't have affordable housing either. So when we're talking about affordable housing, we mean housing affordable to them as well. Another example is workforce housing, a term that's used by houses a lot to talk about this sort of middle income housing. An assumption in that term is that low income housing is for people who aren't in the workforce, and that's just not true, so we avoid that term when possible.
Jennifer Hiatt:Also, Some of those are the people who are in the workforce three or four times over. So it's exactly we at the city. We're trying to create a policy with a tax incentive that we have to provide affordable, with the quotation marks, housing. And we keep getting all of these questions that are you trying to hit it at the 60% mark or the 80% mark or the 30% mark? We're just trying to figure out what's affordable to the average person in our city, because our market rate apartments currently are not. So it's not, we're not trying to subsidize, we're trying to find rates that just a general person of average income can find in our city and it's been really hard to hit on.
Leah Rothstein:Yeah, it's true everywhere. Yes, I know.
Jennifer Hiatt:I think that the use of narrative in the book actually really drives home each strategy that you outline. I wasn't really sure which approach you would take the color of laws, a little more technical, I would say, other ways to address the problems. Book can be very academic and kind of difficult to access and I know you're trying to hit a wide range of audience. So what made you decide on the style of writing?
Leah Rothstein:Yeah, again, trying to reach and make this accessible to as many people as possible, including people who not only don't maybe haven't thought about or read about racial justice or housing policy, but also people who don't think of themselves as activists. And this book is really trying to inspire people to become more active in their communities, to begin to work on issues around redressing segregation in their own communities. And in order to really redress segregation across the country, we need an activated civil rights movement advocating for changes on the local level. To begin with, to really build that movement, we need a lot more people involved. So in order to reach all of the people we'll need to activate and engage in to create this movement, we need to reach people who maybe haven't been to a march before, haven't gone to their city council meeting or written letters to the editor or engaged in a grassroots campaign, and so to inspire those people, we needed not only to explain the policy ideas that they could advocate for, but also give examples of communities that have been doing this and have implemented these changes, have created campaigns to advocate for these types of policy reforms. For almost every strategy we give in the book, we give an example, a story of a community or an individual or a group that's been working on it or successfully implemented that strategy. So I think it's important that, as we read about and learn about these different ideas of what we can do, that we see that it actually can work somewhere and that people are already doing it.
Leah Rothstein:I think it's easy to just feel like this is an overwhelming problem and it's too hard to do anything about it. So we not only need to see success stories, but also just to understand that it's doable and achievable and understandable that other people are getting it and working on it as well, and I think it's just more interesting to read about people than policy. So we tried to make it interesting as well. And you know a lot of the issues.
Leah Rothstein:There's very few ideas of strategies in the book that are new to us, that we came up with on our own. We didn't invent any of this. We're really just pulling from a lot of different sources and for every one of these policy issues there's a whole group of academics working on it, writing academic studies, creating policy memos. There's so much detailed analysis about all of this and we really tried to get out of those weeds and up into a higher level to explain to your average person what they all mean and what they could do for our own community. So we really tried to take it out of the academic level and make it more realistic and accessible.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, I'd agree. I definitely like reading the books that are more narrative in format than just really textbook heavy. Yeah, you touched on the fact that you kind of have a lot of different strategies at a higher level so that a wider audience can understand them, and then you also talked about how some communities just feel like there's too much. How do we even start? What would you recommend as how communities can get started on this? Are there a few strategies that you think all communities should start here and move forward?
Leah Rothstein:I don't, because we talk about the redress of segregation. Segregation was created by numerous. The whole book, the whole color of law, is about all of the many policies that were enacted by government and private forces to create and maintain segregation. Dozens and dozens of policies, actors, agencies, institutions went into creating it. So it's going to take just as many actions and policies and actors and institutions and agencies to challenge and undo it and there isn't one sort of strategy that will be the best for every community or that will achieve full redress of segregation.
Leah Rothstein:It's going to take all of these sort of more incremental pieces and so we're not very prescriptive in our book about what every community should start with or what is the best way to get going. We really just advocate for forming committees, learning about the history of your community, learning about the present landscape, political landscape of the community. What are the issues that are important there? For some communities it's lower income tenants are being evicted at really high rates. So maybe adopting a just cause eviction ordinance or a right to council program for tenants facing evictions.
Leah Rothstein:Maybe those are the most important thing. In another community it might be that there isn't any housing but large single family homes and so prices are very high, and so maybe it's a rezoning effort that's the most important thing in that community. Or maybe that community is sitting on some vacant land. You know a school site, say, in a suburban community that the schools are under enrolled, so the school site isn't being used and it's vacant. So maybe the first thing that a group there would want to do is advocate that their local government devote some of that unused land to building housing, or maybe donating it to a land trust to build affordable home ownership housing.
Leah Rothstein:It varies greatly by community. What I like to say is that it doesn't matter what we get started with, just that we get started somewhere. The worst thing that we can do is say you know, I'm not going to do anything until I find the perfect solution and the one thing that's going to do the most. Instead of that approach, we need to just get started somewhere and start working on it and start tackling the issue a little bit at a time.
Jennifer Hiatt:You mentioned getting to know like the political lay of the land, and as I was kind of reading through, given my legal background, the thing that struck me the most was your recommendations on Supreme Court reform and I kept thinking to myself we can't even get Congress to pass the simplest of things, so I have no idea how we're going to work through Supreme Court reform. As you were looking at your strategies, did you see things that were going to be especially difficult to implement and how should we start thinking about those larger things?
Leah Rothstein:I think you're right in your framing of that question. It feels impossible to enact these changes federally, Even the Supreme Court reforms that we discuss in the book. We don't have the political will on the federal level to do any of this really right now, and so that's why this book is focused entirely on local strategies, because we can build the political will locally in our own communities. We can start to elect city council members, board of supervisors, representatives, you know, we can start to create the political landscape.
Leah Rothstein:we need to make these changes locally and then eventually work on federal policy change, which you know will be necessary eventually, but we kind of can't just jump to that and expect to see the changes we want to see in our own communities. So that's why we focus on the many things that can be done locally. That can go a long way to affecting change around this, and I would say that a lot of these will be challenging in most communities. I just saw an article yesterday about some Gallup polls from the last half century and how little support there was for the civil rights movement even right after Dr King's I have a Dream speech. In the March of Washington. We think of it as this movement that the whole country was supportive of, because you know we have Martin Luther King Day now and we celebrate that speech. But he was doing that work and all of the people involved in the civil rights movement were doing that work in the face of opposition. A majority of the country wasn't supporting what they were advocating and I think it's important that we remember that, because a lot of people look at the kinds of strategies we're talking about and say, oh, there's no way we can do this, people don't support this. There would be so much opposition. In my community there's always opposition to these sorts of changes to advancements in civil rights, to advancements in racial justice, and we do them anyway, and then society catches up. So I would say a lot of the strategies will be challenging. For a lot of these reasons we very explicitly advocate for race-based solutions because we're talking about remedies to race-based crimes, the crimes of the government, the unconstitutional government actions that created segregated communities. You know, were specifically targeted to keep African Americans out of white communities, and so if we want to remedy the harms of that, the ongoing consequences of that government action, we need very specific solutions. So subsidies for African Americans for home ownership, when we open up exclusive suburbs through zoning changes, having preferences on the new housing bill for people who were historically excluded from those communities. I think these kinds of changes will be challenging for the reasons I talked about. That when we talk about advancements in racial justice or referencing African Americans, there's going to be opposition and pushback. But it's not impossible and I think that the more we ground it in the history of the policies that got us here, the more successful have, and I'll just give one example. Again, this didn't happen by the time we finished the book. I'm writing a sub-stack column about it now. That should be out soon.
Leah Rothstein:But Washington State has recently adopted what's called the Covenant Home Ownership Act, where they're continuing to document all the racially restrictive covenants on homes throughout the state of Washington. You know these are covenants that say that the home could only ever be owned or occupied by whites. Obviously, those covenants are no longer legally enforceable, but they're still on the deeds of homes, so researchers at the University of Washington and volunteers have documented all of these covenants. Based on that history and some organizing of a broad-based coalition including realtors and banks and housing developers, got this act passed through the Washington State legislature where, based on that history, they're providing a benefit to anybody who lived in Washington State prior to the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, when that kind of discrimination was legal or who is descendant from someone who was and was prohibited from home ownership through these restrictive covenants, is eligible for this down payment assistance fund Pretty significant down payment closing cost assistance that's funded through a hundred dollar fee applied to every new real estate transaction in the state.
Leah Rothstein:It's new. They're still doing the study to hammer out the details, but by basing it in the history of discrimination and as creating this harm-based solution to remedy the harm of that past discrimination. They can target the solution and the benefits to those who were harmed by that past discrimination. I think it's a very promising approach. It's what we're advocating in the book to be race-based in our solutions to remedy the race-based harm. So it's something to keep an eye on how that develops.
Stephanie Rouse:Wow, that's really fascinating and I'm sure it took a lot of coordination and different groups coming together to get something like that passed.
Leah Rothstein:Yeah, it's amazing that Coalition they have. You know, realtors aren't haven't historically been on the side of this sort of work, but they were behind it. The Realtors Association in Washington and the local ones as well were on board, so it's really really great.
Stephanie Rouse:A recommendation in your book. The first one is actually an easy one to get going, not not one of the challenging ones that we've been discussing, but you recommend forming a biracial committees to confront the residential segregation. Should these be government committees to undo the harm from previous administrations, or should they be activist led, or is there a middle ground?
Leah Rothstein:When we talk about these biracial committees we talk about them as activist led or community member driven. Some local governments are creating, you know, task forces and study groups to look at these issues and to start to figure out how they can act to undo those harms. I think that's important. But the only way those government committees can be effective is if there's organized support from local voters and local residents.
Leah Rothstein:I've also heard of these local government committees that are formed and then nothing happens because maybe a new mayor comes in. So what's really important to get and maintain focus on these issues is groups that are formed by residents of the community that are biracial, multi ethnic, that bring people together from segregated parts of town. That may be easier than the other strategies we talk about, but that also isn't necessarily that easy. You know, we live in very segregated communities so we don't necessarily have relationships with people of other races easily accessible to us. So we have to do some extra work to form those committees. But, yeah, those committees should be resident activists led that can then pressure their local government to push them on these issues and pressure also local institutions banks, realtors, financial institutions, insurance brokers, developers in this industry and field to push them to implement the solutions.
Stephanie Rouse:And a lot of the examples you gave, those advocacy groups were very specific to one solution. Have you seen any advocacy groups that kind of formed on the issue at large and then have small segments in them that are then going and focusing on trying to advocate and make change in certain areas?
Leah Rothstein:It's true a lot of the examples we gave were focused on one area because that's the example we were given, but I mean we were writing about for that purpose. But a lot of the groups focus on a wide variety of issues. You know, in the book we give towards the end three examples of communities kind of mid 20th century that when white communities were defegregating then they tended to then flip. Realtors would block, bust and pressure all of the white families to sell low. Those same realtors would sell those homes at higher prices to African American families and the community would go from all white to all black pretty quickly. We profiled three communities that resisted that trend and developed committees that were very broad and comprehensive and how they approached maintaining and integrated a stable integration in their community. So we talk about Oak Park outside of Chicago, mount Airy outside of Philadelphia and Cleveland Heights, obviously in Cleveland.
Leah Rothstein:All three of these communities are still pretty integrated. They never sort of flipped and became resegregated and they did that by having a broad base approach. So they approached how realtors sold houses and they, you know, ensured that realtors weren't steering people to same race neighborhoods. They approached school issues because you know, once schools segregate, neighborhood segregate. They kind of go hand in hand. They started community centers and art co-ops to create community with their neighbors. They started funds to help homeowners rehab their houses so the home stayed in good condition. So they looked at sort of the variety of issues that their communities were facing to in order to maintain a stable, desegregated, integrated, diverse community. And they continue to do that. All three of these communities, those are a few examples of committees that take a broad view.
Jennifer Hiatt:My favorite example is Tanika Johnson's Map Twins project in Chicago. You really led the book with it. Obviously, since it's my favorite, I think that was a great idea. Can you share the basics of that story and the changes that the project have been able to make?
Leah Rothstein:We advocate forming biracial multi-ethnic committees and we acknowledge that that's not always easy because we live in segregated communities. So we gave some examples of communities that took these extra steps to bring people of different races together to develop some social relationships. So Tanika Johnson is an artist in Chicago, she's a photographer and she took advantage of the unique layout of Chicago. It's laid out on a perfect grid and the South side of town is mostly African American. The North side of town is mostly white. When you fold the map in half you have a North side part of the street sitting right on top of the South side of that same street and the house numbers are the same. They're just North and South of the same street, one in the white neighborhood, one in the black neighborhood. So she folded the map in half and called the houses that sat right on top of each other map twin houses and she took photographs of those homes to show that the same house number on the North side of town and the houses were fairly similar but the contexts they were in were very different because one was in a well-resourced white neighborhood and one was in an under-resourced African American, segregated neighborhood. So she started with that photographic exhibit to show visually the consequences of segregation. And then she went a step further and introduced herself to the residents of these homes and asked if they wanted to meet their map twin and most of them said yes and to be a part of her project. They agreed to meet their map twin and take them on a tour of their neighborhood and tour their map twins' neighborhood.
Leah Rothstein:And so they did that and these were people who'd lived in Chicago, many of them their whole lives, and had never been to the other race side of town or known anybody from that side of town. And they learned that they had a lot in common. They had similar hopes and dreams and challenges and they learned how different their communities were, even though they were a handful of miles away. So they started to just learn about what segregation means to them and to their communities and have a more personal view and personal stake in it.
Leah Rothstein:And then the groups went on to form block twins, so whole blocks now have social events, they do some neighborhood beautification efforts, and now this is an example of bringing people together and these groups have not yet become activist organizations to advocate for changes to really address the segregation of their communities, but it's a great example of bringing people together that it's now ripe for an organizer to come in and talk to these block twins and say what can we do now to ensure that the block twins on the south side of town have resources in their community that are similar to the ones on the white side of town? So it's a first step and it takes advantage of this unique layout of Chicago. But any community could do something similar. We also describe example in Winston-Salem, where churches are the same denomination, but three were all white and three were all African American, brought members of their congregations together to meet and start to form relationships. So it can be done everywhere. But yeah, tanika Johnson's work is really amazing.
Stephanie Rouse:We just discussed an example of an artist leading a really amazing education event to help bring awareness, and we've talked about banks and realtors and then just advocates in general. What other groups or professions should be involved in this work and how can they contribute?
Leah Rothstein:I think everybody should be involved in this work as members of our communities. We all live in a neighborhood, we all have neighbors, we all likely live in a segregated metropolitan area, so we're all affected by these issues and we should all be involved personally, in terms of professions, certainly realtors should be involved Financial institutions, banks, credit unions, insurance brokers, sort of everybody who's had a role to play historically in creating and maintaining segregation. And many of these groups, like the National Association of Realtors, has issued an apology for its past sort of support of segregation and the ways that it helped to create segregationist policies, and so that apology is important and now the realtors need to step up and do something to remedy what they've helped to create historically, what that profession has helped to create. One idea is law firms, so law firms also should contribute to remedies. I'll get to that in a second.
Leah Rothstein:Many law firms have a pro bono arm of their work where they provide free legal assistance to lower income individuals or nonprofits. It's just sort of part and parcel of what they do. They have a certain percentage of their hours devoted to pro bono work. Realtor associations could do the same and have a pro bono arm where they provide free assistance to home buyers or home sellers who are African-American, who have been living in red-lined communities, to start to remedy the ways their profession has kept African-Americans out of home buying Law firms again, not only their pro bono work but, like I mentioned before, the estate planning issues. In our book we talk about down payment assistance funds. That was started in Washington DC. It's called Birdseed. Sort of high end property management company started this nonprofit arm to give down payment grants to African-American and Latino home buyers in the DC area and they're now partnering with a law firm that provides free legal counsel to all of their grantees to implement an estate plan when they get into their home.
Leah Rothstein:So law firms could offer that kind of assistance could help families that own property without a clear title because of a lack of a state plan from previous generations. To clean that up. There's a lot that can be done. Appraisers have a role to play in this. Banks do. Yeah, there's just sort of no end. So banks there is authority granted by federal law that banks and financial institutions can adopt a race specific financial product like down payment assistance or favorable mortgage that's targeted by race If it can show the historical disadvantage that that race has faced in the financial institution. So if they're looking at down payment assistance for home buyers, they can target that to African-Americans If they can show that African-Americans have been kept out of home buying historically in that area, not hard to do.
Leah Rothstein:You know the color of law documents, all of the ways that that has happened. This is called a special purpose credit program. This has been an authority given to banks and financial institutions since the 70s, but only recently have they started to wade into the waters of adopting special purpose credit programs, because they've been afraid of being race specific, even though it allowed. And so some banks are starting to adopt these, but doing it still, I think, in a watered down way. So they're saying we'll provide this financial assistance to home buyers in majority minority neighborhoods. So they're targeting it by neighborhood rather than by individual borrower. So by targeting it by neighborhood, we're either enforcing the segregation of that neighborhood or fueling the gentrification of that neighborhood. We're not actually helping the people in that neighborhood live wherever they want. So we argue that banks should be adopting special purpose credit programs more often and have the courage to use the authority given to them.
Leah Rothstein:And they are more sort of adopting them as we go. But when they do they should ensure that it's by individual so that the program itself doesn't further promote and perpetuate segregation. That Washington State example I gave earlier, that will be a special purpose credit program and that will be the first state agency to adopt one of these, also momentous in that regard too.
Jennifer Hiatt:I felt like my biggest takeaway from the book was that all of the examples you give, things that jumped out to me the most was the appraisers and how it's ridiculous that even in 2023, we were dealing with that, and I think that the thing that the book does the best from my perspective was it really does give courage, I think, to groups that haven't started yet, because you show you can start and here's how, and here are all these groups that have already done it before, so you're not alone and you have someone to reach out to, and I just thought that that was the best takeaway from the book and I think everyone should go pick it up. Great.
Leah Rothstein:I hope it encourages people to reach out, either through our sub stack or find us, or find the groups we mentioned, and we're going to soon be putting on our website, justactionbookorg, our online version of our end notes that have links to all of the organizations that we mentioned so people can find them and start conversations and learn from them. They're not up yet, but they will be soon. We've been busy, yes.
Jennifer Hiatt:And we are starting a new outro to the podcast. So we are going to start asking our authors besides your book, which we obviously here believe everyone should go pick up a copy of, or we wouldn't be promoting it what is one book that you would recommend or more if you want, but we don't want to be overwhelming that you would recommend to our readers?
Leah Rothstein:Oh, it's so much harder to pick one, so I'm going to give you a few. So besides just action and obviously the color of law, some important books that I think anybody interested in these ideas should read are the Some of Us by Heather McGee. It's a great book about how we came to understand that there isn't enough to go around and that we'd rather all suffer than create equal opportunity for African Americans and whites, like kind of the underlying racial prejudice we have that limits all of us. Matthew Desmond's books, poverty by America and Evicted the evicted book is just so powerful to read. It's like an ethnographic sort of description of low income tenants who are in this eviction cycle and can never get out of it. What it's like to live that way.
Leah Rothstein:Another one that is great Golden Gates by Connor Doherty. It's about the Bay Area sort of the Yimbi movement, how it started, the yes in my Backyard and how the housing advocates in the Bay Area, where you know everything's magnified by a thousand from everywhere else. So that's an interesting history or recent history. So those are a few recommendations.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, I'd agree. I really loved reading evicted and it's been out for a number of years now.
Leah Rothstein:Yeah, and Poverty by America is his new one about. It's a good compliment, I think, to just action. It's less about specific strategies but more setting the stage of poverty abolition movement, and that it's not impossible to sort of change our understanding of policies so that we can eradicate poverty.
Jennifer Hiatt:He was just on the Ezra Klein show a few episodes ago, so if our listeners don't have time yet to pick up the book, they can go check out that episode, just to get a good background on that.
Stephanie Rouse:Well, leah, thank you so much for joining us again on Booked, on Planning, this time to talk about just action. Thank you, it's great to be here with you.
Jennifer Hiatt:We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Leah Rothstein on her book Just Action how to Challenge Segregation and Acted Under the Color of Law.
Stephanie Rouse:Thank you.