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With the country mired in a housing crisis, affordability solutions, especially for African Americans, are often intrinsically linked to how community members act to remove barriers to building new homes and integrating neighborhoods. Black and white residents who are determined to make a difference in confronting systemic racism in housing markets find the challenge daunting. How best can any group, much less one person, begin to address the residential segregation that many community members and public officials ignore?
Leah Rothstein, a San Francisco Bay Area housing policy consultant, points to cross-racial coalitions as a key element in a fresh menu of options in her new book, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. Her solutions matrix has its origins in more than two decades of experience of working with affordable-housing developers and local government officials. She co-wrote the book with her father Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. Their work is a sequel to the elder Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to the entire conversation on the Prospect’s YouTube channel.
Gabrielle Gurley: Creating cross-racial housing coalitions is difficult. You point to local projects in Chicago and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, among others. How do you move from intentional situations with small, committed groups to larger projects that encompass entire communities?
Leah Rothstein: We need federal policy change to enact the massive policy interventions and investments needed to address segregation nationwide, but we don’t have the political will on the federal level to do that right now. Organizing is rarely easy, or quick. It’s slow, methodical work. To effect local change, we need to start by building racial, multiethnic groups and committees willing to take on these issues. They have to be biracial. We have very little social contact with people of other races outside of the workplace.
The map twins [a cross-city art project involving people who lived on Chicago’s North and South Sides] was started by Tonika Johnson, a photographer in Chicago. In Winston-Salem, it was church groups that came together. These types of groups can educate other residents in their neighborhoods and start to advocate for change, but we need to start by building those relationships across races.
Looking across your own career, what is the most striking example of housing segregation that you’ve confronted?
That’s a good question. The issue that comes up the most often is the fear, sometimes rightfully so, of the opposition to building more housing, whether it’s affordable housing or multifamily housing—diversifying the housing type to, hopefully, diversify a community.
People say, in general, that they support affordable housing—until you propose to build an affordable-housing development in their neighborhood. Then they vehemently oppose it. NIMBY opposition has been very effective in stopping affordable housing and building more diverse housing in suburban communities. They use thinly veiled racial fear-mongering language about changing community character or an increase in crime when they’re talking about bringing lower-income people to their neighborhoods.
There are people who support housing affordability. They just haven’t been as loud as the opposers have been. There’s no reason why we can’t also show up to planning commission meetings and city council meetings and support these changes, just the way that NIMBYs have.
There is a community in Silicon Valley, a very exclusive, expensive community, where median home prices are over $2 million. It’s not a place where much affordable housing exists. But a group there started learning about the history of their community, what has led them to this housing affordability crisis, and what has made their community look the way it does. It’s mostly white, very few African Americans live there.
They did some research and developed a workshop about their own city and how it came to be segregated, the government policies that created the segregation, the institutions behind it and created a timeline and a workshop about this, that they did all over their community. The people who attended their training learned that their community looked the way it does was not by accident.
Then the local school district proposed to build 90 units of affordable housing for teachers in the city on a vacant site that it owned, because 30 percent of teachers left their jobs every year because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere near their work. Some neighbors opposed it. They put a measure on the ballot that would make not only this development impossible, but any future rezoning to allow for more multifamily housing would have to go before the voters, to make it virtually impossible to build more affordable housing.
The workshop group was already activated and understood that this ballot measure was another in a series of policies that had created and maintained segregation. They launched a campaign to defeat the ballot measure. They went door-to-door every weekend and talked to their neighbors.
The leaders of this campaign told me that they would stand in front of a house and think, “This person isn’t going to support our side.” They would talk to them anyway. More often than not, they did support them, because they understood that the exclusivity of their neighborhood was hurting their city, was hurting them. Their teachers couldn’t live there. Their [grown] kids couldn’t [afford to] move back home.
They ended up defeating the ballot measure. The teacher housing will be built. If it can happen in Silicon Valley, it can happen anywhere where we can find supporters of affordable housing and of inclusion.
Take the term “affordable housing”—do we need to change our terminology to help convey what many communities lack?
I think we do—or at least we need to be more clear about what we mean. The term “affordable housing” has come to mean something very specific, which is housing for the very poor, the lowest-income amongst us. Housing policy folks use it, housing developers use it, government uses it. But the fact of the matter is that housing isn’t affordable to most people, not just the poorest, right? So affordable housing encompasses a lot more than just the poorest people. It’s also a misnomer, a mischaracterization: Often people assume that affordable housing for poor people means housing for African Americans, that poor and Black are the same thing.
It’s just not true. Most Blacks, most African Americans are not poor, they’re middle-income, they’re working families—and housing isn’t affordable for them either. Across the country, market-rate housing is unaffordable to middle-income households. The affordable housing or subsidized housing for poor people? Middle-income households make too much to qualify for that. That’s why this group is called the “missing middle.”
Talking about that can address some of the NIMBY opposition. In the example I gave about Silicon Valley, neighbors were concerned that teachers couldn’t live in their community, that their kids couldn’t move home, that the people who worked in their favorite stores and cafés couldn’t afford to live there. Those aren’t the poorest people. Those are middle-income working people who couldn’t afford to live in their community because the market-rate housing was so out of reach of middle-income families.
When we talk about affordable housing, we intend to mean the full range of what is affordable to the full range of income levels. So, when we’re talking about building housing that’s affordable to African American families in exclusive, predominantly white communities, for desegregating those communities, it includes not only housing for low-income people but also middle-income housing, for that missing middle.
We go a step further and advocate that we should be building mixed-income housing developments where people of all income levels learn to live together and know each other and come to understand that we’re not all that different. But it takes building housing that has those low-income units, missing-middle units, and market-rate units together.
There are new housing opportunities potentially in downtown office-to-residential conversions. How can residents prevent these new developments from becoming the province of wealthy whites rather than having more mixed-income residents?
Local government has some control over how it’s done through their zoning and planning departments. There’s a policy, inclusionary zoning, that many communities have. It’s adopted through a zoning code that requires that when new market-rate housing is built, that a certain percentage of those units have to be sold or rented at affordable prices to lower- and moderate- income households. That’s a way that a local government could influence how these conversions are happening.
It will be different in every community, but doing it often involves doing an economic study of what’s economically feasible—to make the project profitable for a developer so they will do the conversion, but also provide some benefit to the community. One of the reasons why we don’t see a lot of truly mixed-income housing developments is because there are subsidies for the lowest-income units. Then market-rate units are profitable on their own, but there are few subsidies for the missing-middle housing.
How do you promote what you call “conscientious gentrification,” celebrating the experiences and views of an entire community in these new developments?
One reason we are so polarized is because we are separate, and so we think we’re very different because we have no contact with each other socially to negate those views. Living in mixed-income developments with people of different income levels and different races helps to do that. Creating social activities takes people willing and eager to do that to start to get outside of their bubble and meet other people and start to learn about how their community came to be how it is and what they can do to improve it for everybody. It takes people willing to be involved in just wanting to talk to each other.
We printed this flyer that one man in a gentrifying situation had circulated to his neighbors. They were all about how to just engage with the community. We understand that some gentrification will happen, so some people who haven’t lived in those communities, you know, for generations, will move in and to counter what usually happens, which is those people move in but don’t interact and don’t engage and don’t connect with the community that has been there before them. This flyer encourages neighbors to do that, to attend local churches, send their kids to local schools, get involved with local organizations, be friendly to their neighbors, start to understand what the issues are in the community.
The Biden administration has created an interagency task force on property appraisal and valuation equity, known as PAVE. What is your view on these initial steps to remedy some of the problems that homeowners and homebuyers of color run into as they navigate housing markets?
What we know about appraisal bias is only from anecdotal stories of African American homeowners who get their home appraised and then have a white friend stand in for them and get it reappraised. They get a lot higher appraised value. But we can’t know how widespread that is because that only happens sometimes when someone suspects a low appraisal.
With data collection and reporting, we can see how close appraisals are to their actual sales price, [which] will help us know where bias is occurring and then also help us identify the appraisers that are performing biased appraisals so that we can enforce the commitment to not be biased in their profession. Also, opening up the profession is essential. It’s a very white male profession. In order to address bias, we also need appraisers who understand the neighborhoods that they’re appraising in, which means we need more than just white men in that profession.
You write, “As a society, we are always more sensitive to unfairness experienced by whites when it’s designed to remedy unfairness experienced by blacks.” How do you craft remedies for this condition in this fraught political moment?
We have no choice. We have to grapple with this if we want to live in a truly democratic, fair society. We have to grapple with the unconstitutional actions of our government and remedy those actions. To do that, we need to grapple with the racial history of our past and present and we need to take race into account to be able to do that.
Some states and localities are trying to limit how we can talk about this. My dad likes to say that if they’re doing that, it means it’s because we’re talking about it. The fact that there’s pushback against it is because we are talking about it, we are teaching the true history, which I think is a step in the right direction. There is so much evidence of the ways that the government has taken unconstitutional actions to create and maintain segregation that there’s enough evidence there for us to base remedies on—we just have to get started doing it.
