This week we’re joined by Leah Rothstein to chat about her book she wrote with her father Richard entitled Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. We discuss building wealth and ideas for building more equitable housing policies as well as convincing people why they are important.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: I also have a question about the comparison that we have between the United States and other countries that are in our same economic orbit and the lack of services — and the connection between the race issue and lack of services like healthcare, childcare — and all that stuff struck me, after reading both Color of Law and Just Action is, like, we have this whole system that we’ve built up of segregation that’s actually created a poorer country overall versus many of these other countries that seem very well off.
They have good social services, they’re very connected to each other. I’m wondering if that’s something that came across to you all when you’re writing this book, is that, comparing what’s happened in the United States in the past and how we built our housing and how we grew up has affected what’s going on today in terms of how we access social services and the things that we need to thrive as a country.
Leah Rothstein: Yeah, it did occur to us, and maybe not in those same words, but it’s very clear when you look at the history and you know the current landscape of our communities, how where you live makes such a big difference in what sort of services and opportunities and resources you have access to. The fact that a child growing up in a segregated African American community can have a life expectancy that’s decades shorter than a child who grows up a couple miles away in a affluent white community. That is just horrendous and it’s not something we should stand for, and that is due to how we segregated people and then segregated resources between different kinds of neighborhoods. So yeah, it’s definitely a piece of the puzzle.
The other thing that strikes me in learning about these issues and talking about them that I think is different here in this country is because of our lack of services and social safety net, there’s so much put into the value of our homes, right? Homeowners rely on their home appreciating and value indefinitely because we don’t have a good enough safety net for retirement or for weathering health emergencies. Homeowners rely on the equity they build in their homes. So homeowners in more affluent communities where those home values have rise feel entitled and feel like they need those values to continue to rise and will do whatever they can to try to protect their property values.
Because we lack the other social safety nets that they should be relying on. That sort of fear and need for property values to always rise is behind a lot of the efforts to keep exclusionary communities exclusionary and to maintain their segregation. So there’s a lot that’s all tied together in these issues for sure.
