Richard Rothstein on our long history of housing segregation, and how communities can roll it back today

As Madison faces continuous housing crises, the author of “The Color Of Law” offers a wealth of context and strategy that could help Madison navigate its current housing crisis.

April is National Fair Housing Month, but it should really be every month in Madison. After reading numerous op-ed columns and hearing outbursts from Madison’s single-family homeowners opposing any potential density in their neighborhoods, it seemed a good time to remind everyone that the roots of our current housing situation are explicitly racist. Single-family homes in neighborhoods zoned only for single-family homes were explicitly built for working and middle-class white people. Housing segregation was reinforced through the federal, state, local governments, banks, developers, and the real estate industry. The families who bought those initially inexpensive homes accrued wealth as their values rose, enabling them to invest in the next generation—sending them to college, giving them funds for down payments, and leaving them inheritances. All of this was denied to Black families, who could have afforded the homes when they were initially built, but now have been priced out of these all-white neighborhoods. 

There’s no one who’s researched and documented this more thoroughly than Richard Rothstein, a mostly-retired researcher and writer who has written several books on education. In 2017 he published the book The Color Of Law, which detailed local state and federal laws and policies that forced Americans into segregated housing. Richard and his daughter, Leah Rothstein, an expert on housing policy and community development,  co-wrote Just Action: How To Challenge Segregation Enacted Under The Color Of Law, which was published last year. I spoke with Rothstein on WORT 89.9 FM’s noon talk show A Public Affair on Monday, April 8, and am republishing highlights of our conversation.

Before we get into the interview itself, a little more context from my intro to the segment: Like many cities across the country, Madison is experiencing growing pains stemming from a housing shortage and growing population. The city’s population grew by nearly 37,000 people between 2010 and 2020, but [the city] built a little more than 16,000 housing units during that same time period. Projecting that growth into the future, some experts estimate that the city will need to build 10,000 new homes every five years just to keep up.

Which is not easy to do in a city that is predominantly zoned for single- family homes. Up until the end of 2022, 75% of Madison’s residential neighborhoods were zoned for single- family homes. Since then, the city has made an effort to loosen up restrictions in order to promote density in all neighborhoods. But there’s been pushback, particularly from homeowners. 

What those homeowners may not realize is their neighborhoods are a direct result of segregationist housing policies. And those policies have had a rippling effects on housing, education, and generational wealth. 

The transcript of this conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Tone Madison: So first, I want to talk about The Color Of Law for people who have not read the book. Your goal was to demonstrate that segregation is “not the unintended consequence of individual choices, or otherwise well-meaning law or regulation, but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” Why did you feel it was important for people to understand that segregation was not de facto, but de jure?

Richard Rothstein: Well, the purpose of The Color Of Law was to demolish that de facto myth—the idea that the reason that we’re a segregated society is because of private discrimination, or redlining, by banks or real estate agents, or insurance companies, or maybe because people just like to live with each other, the same race, or maybe economic differences. All of these “unintentional consequences” of segregation give us no responsibility to remedy it. Once we understand that it was not these private activities, but it was government at all levels—federal, state and local—that were designed to ensure that African Americans and whites could not live near one another in any metropolitan area—once we understand that—it imposes an obligation upon all of us as Americans, to remedy it. These were unconstitutional and unlawful policies on the part of government at every level. And when you have an unconstitutional policy, when you have a violation of constitutional rights, we have an obligation to remedy it. So it’s very important that people understand this history. Because if we think it all happened by accident, or by private activity, we can only imagine that it can unhappen by accident or by private activity; once we understand that it was a racially explicit policy of government, that changes entirely the obligation that we have to fix it.

Tone Madison: You also mentioned that it hides this history of multiracial communities that did exist in the United States, and then were forcibly separated from one another. And it reinforces this idea that people do not want to live in such communities or that these communities cannot thrive, or that there’s some inherent reason why we can’t live together.

Richard Rothstein: Yes. I don’t want to exaggerate the extent to which we were an integrated society in the mid- to early- 20th century. We were not, but we did have broad urban areas that were multiracial. We were a manufacturing economy. Factories had to be located near deepwater ports or railroad terminals to get their parts or ship their final products. And both African American and white workers needed to live close enough to those factories and others to be able to walk to work or maybe take short streetcar rides. Same thing is true with the banks and the insurance companies that serviced those factories, those manufacturing facilities. So, in a broad sense, we were a non-segregated society, although there were certainly pockets of segregation within those urban areas. 

But the federal government embarked on many programs. One of them is the first public housing in this country, built in the New Deal during the Depression, the Roosevelt administration. We had never had any public housing before that. And the government created that public housing on a segregated basis. And I’m not referring to the south; I’m referring to the north, to the Midwest. The government created separate projects for whites and African Americans, frequently creating segregation where it hadn’t previously existed. 

In The Color Of Law, I described the autobiography of Langston Hughes, the great African American poet, novelist, playwright. He wrote in his autobiography, [that] he grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood. That’s not how we think of downtown Cleveland today. He said his best friend in high school was Polish. He said he dated a Jewish girl in high school, [and] he went to an integrated high school and [lived in] integrated neighborhoods— something that doesn’t exist anymore—in downtown Cleveland. And the federal government went into that neighborhood, demolished some housing, and built two separate projects: one for African Americans, one for whites, creating a segregation pattern that was much more rigid than anything that previously existed. And then with other public housing projects elsewhere in the Cleveland area, further intensified that segregation, building separate projects for whites and African Americans. So this was all over the country.

Tone Madison: This was also something that happened with urban renewal projects. In Madison, specifically, we had a neighborhood called Greenbush. The neighborhood still exists, but before it was part of an urban renewal project, it was a multiracial community.

Richard Rothstein: The federal government typically considered those communities slums. And the idea was to redevelop those communities by demolishing the housing of lower-income families and building colleges and schools and museums and other amenities for what were increasingly middle-class families, commuting to the cities from what were all-white suburbs. And the whole story of those all-white suburbs—which you refer to in your introduction about zoning—was also an explicit racial creation of the Federal Government. There are suburbs all over the country that are exclusive: single family homes only, whites only. The creation of these suburbs everywhere was a federal program to move the whites out of those urban areas that I described before, those multiracial areas, into single family homes in suburbs, and prohibit African Americans from doing the same, even though their incomes were comparable. They were particularly aimed at returning war veterans in the period after World War II. 

The most famous of these developments was Levittown. I describe it in detail in The Color Of Law—17,000 homes in one place, an enormous project. But no bank would lend William Levitt, the developer, the funds to buy the land and build this enormous suburban project. They didn’t think anybody was going to buy these houses because we weren’t a suburban country at that time. The only way that Levitt—and this is true of developers everywhere in the country, in Wisconsin, and Illinois, and the West Coast, anywhere—the only way that the developers could build these projects was to go to the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans’ Administration requesting a guarantee of his bank loans. because the banks wouldn’t give him the loans otherwise to build the projects. In order to get this guarantee, he had to describe the architectural design of the homes in great detail, the materials he was going to use, and make a commitment—required by the federal government—that he never, never sell a home to an African American. 

This was not the action of rogue bureaucrats; this was a written federal policy. The Federal Housing Administration and Veterans’ Administration had a manual that was distributed to appraisers all over the country, whose job it was to evaluate the application of builders to create these suburban developments of single family homes. The manual said that you could not recommend a federal bank guarantee a loan to a developer who was going to sell to African Americans. The manual went so far as to say you couldn’t even recommend a federal bank guarantee or loan to an all-white developer, or a developer for white homes if it was going to be located near where African Americans were living. The manual said that that would run the risk of “infiltration by inharmonious racial groups.” So that’s how the suburbs that you were referring to before were created. 

African Americans could have afforded to move to those suburbs just as easily as whites, or almost as easily as whites. Returning war veterans all could have afforded those homes that were inexpensive. All the suburbs initially were created as modest working class homes, typically two-bedroom, one-bath, homes, [in] Levittown and everywhere else. They were inexpensive. They sold at the time for about (I’m talking now about 1950 or so) for about $8,000, $9,000 apiece. That’s not what they sell for today. In today’s money that was $100,000. You can’t buy a home in any of these suburbs for $100,000.

Tone Madison: You can’t find a house anywhere for $100,000.

Richard Rothstein: Two hundred, $300, $400, $500 [thousand], a million dollars or more in some places, for these homes. The white families who bought those homes gained wealth, because they had an unexpected appreciation of the value of their homes. They didn’t expect to get rich by buying these suburban modest houses. There was a housing shortage, [and] they were looking for a place to live. Nobody expected this price appreciation that would take place over the next couple of generations. But the white family who bought those homes gained wealth from the appreciation of the value of their homes. African Americans were prohibited by explicit federal policy from buying those same songs in these appreciating neighborhoods. The white families used the wealth to send their children to college. They perhaps took care of temporary emergencies—maybe temporary unemployment or maybe a medical emergency. They used it to subsidize their retirements and they used it to bequeath wealth to their children and grandchildren, who then could buy homes of their own with down payments from that wealth. 

African Americans were prohibited by explicit federal policy for participating in this program that ended up generating wealth—not intentionally—but ended up generating wealth. And the result is it determines much of the inequality we have today. Once those suburbs were created, and those homes appreciating in value, many of those suburbs then locked in their exclusivity by adopting the zoning laws that prohibited the construction of duplexes, triplexes, many kinds of multi-unit housing that would be affordable, still, to working a little middle class families. That’s how they maintain their racial exclusivity. African Americans could not afford to buy those single family homes once they appreciate in value. They might have been able to buy duplexes and triplexes in those communities, but their zoning prohibited that. 

This all ties together as the consequences of an unconstitutional—and I want to emphasize: that the federal policies of the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration were blatant violations of the Constitution, blatant violations of Civil War Civil Rights Acts [the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution] that were in existence at that time. It’s like an apartheid system; we have an unconstitutional unlawful arrangement of housing by race in this country, that we’ve never accepted an obligation to remedy, and it’s time that we did. 

Tone Madison: One thing that’s pretty wild in The Color Of Law was that you talked about that policy under the Federal Housing Administration. They continued that policy even after the US Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional. And they did it on financial grounds on valuation grounds. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Richard Rothstein: For a brief period, until 1955. In 1948, The [U.S.] Supreme Court said you couldn’t have a deed clause that prohibited resale to African Americans or rental to African Americans. These are called restrictive covenants. These clauses, 1948, the Supreme Court said you couldn’t enforce them. As in you couldn’t go to court, neighbors couldn’t go to court, and order the eviction of African American families who would purchase homes in violation of these clauses. But the Supreme Court continued to allow, for another seven years, a different kind of restrictive covenant that did require courts to evict African American families. [They] required the sellers of those homes to pay damages to their neighbors that were far in excess of the value of the homes. So in effect, it’s maintaining that policy. But that’s not the main reason the policy continued. 

The main way that the policy continued, is that the federal government continued to guarantee mortgages, to guarantee loans and to issue mortgages that were being marketed by real estate agents, who would only sell to white families. Now, every one of those real estate agents in Wisconsin and every other state of the union is licensed by the state government. Every time, the federal government contracted with a real estate company, to market homes in one of these new developments or financed developers to build homes, in the knowledge that those homes would be sold only to whites, because those were the real estate agents who were handling the projects. That was another violation both of the federal government for doing it knowingly and state governments for licensing real estate agents, who continued the practice of excluding African Americans from these communities when they were still affordable.

Tone Madison: I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about zoning. You wrote about Harland Bartholomew, who developed comprehensive plans for cities all over the country, including Madison from 1921 to 1922 and Kenosha in 1925. What was Bartholomew trying to accomplish with zoning and how did it work?

Richard Rothstein: In the early 20th century, planners like Bartholomew created segregation explicitly, by designating areas where African Americans lived as being open to industries—frequently polluting industries, commercial development of all kinds—and designating areas where whites live for residential—usually single-family homes, but not necessarily for residential use only. These kinds of explicit racial zonings pretty much fell out of favor in the early 1920s. And that’s when the Supreme Court upheld a substitute of non-racial zoning that was in effect, designed to exclude families who are not white. 

Before single-family-only zones of wealth-appreciating homes that became more and more expensive, we had explicit racial zoning. In the early 20th century in many cities, planners like Bartholomew were hired by cities to create these zoning maps. And then, in the mid-1920s, the Supreme Court upheld a purportedly race-neutral substitute. But at that point, it had a racial effect. It was designed in many communities to have a racial effect.

Tone Madison: I grew up in Kansas City, and so we had JC Nichols. And I remember learning in my late 20s about the way that Kansas City has these really pretty boulevards and these parks and golf courses, but those were intentionally placed in areas to separate people by race and by class. So that would have maintained these exclusive neighborhoods. 

Richard Rothstein: And developers like JC Nichols, they developed these communities before the federal government got involved in housing. But also the National Association of Realtors, at that time, had a code of ethics that prohibited the sale of homes in white neighborhoods to African Americans in their code of ethics: any real estate agent, any realtor, any broker, who was licensed by state governments subscribed to that code of ethics and was a member of the National Association of Realtors. A state government was committing a constitutional violation when they licensed those realtors. And that’s another aspect of the remedy that is imposed upon us as Americans, if we take our constitutional responsibilities seriously.

Tone Madison: I want to switch to Just Action, which is kind of a companion piece to The Color Of Law. It’s essentially answering the question of what we should do about the mechanisms of segregation you describe inThe Color Of Law. In one segment, you talk about holding people accountable. Not just individuals; I’m talking about industries, in particular. You’ve mentioned banking, real estate, developers, a lot of industries that have profited handsomely off of these policies. How would you like to see them be involved with remediating and addressing these issues?

Richard Rothstein: We wrote the new book published last year, Just Action, to answer that question: what do we do about the segregation that was unconstitutionally created. And one of the first observations we make is that although much of the segregation that we created was done by the federal government, and federal policy. Once you have a segregated society, it’s local practices and local actors that perpetuate that segregation, sometimes even exacerbating it. And so there’s an enormous amount we can do at the local level to redress the segregation that was unconstitutionally created. 

We begin the book Just Action by describing the necessity of biracial groups organizing to press for local policy change and local actors in order to create redress, and they can accomplish an enormous amount. One of the policies that we described, and there are dozens of them in the book, Just Action, but one of them stems from the very restrictive covenants that I was describing earlier, the deed clauses in homes that prohibit resale to African Americans. Frequently, these deed clauses identify and are signed by the developer, the realtor, the bank, who initially created those suburbs. Many of those have are even still in existence today, or have successors that are still in existence today. And what we argue is that a local group, if organized, can begin a campaign to get those private institutions that participated with the federal government in creating segregation, to come up with the significant funds to remedy it. Many of these institutions have responded by creating DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs promising to hire more black real estate agents, for example, or black bank executives—that doesn’t do anything to create additional housing opportunities for people who are excluded. What we need is substantial contributions from those institutions that profited and created the segregation that we have today and that can be identified. 

We give a number of examples in Just Action of communities, where people have begun to identify these banks, realtors, and developers, who created segregation: Charlottesville, Virginia, Rochester, New York, San Mateo, California, Modesto California. We describe a number of them where you can identify and name the banks, the realtors, or developers who can be identified by their signatures on these restrictive covenants, who created the segregation and who should not be permitted to remedy it simply by creating a more diverse workforce. What they need to do is to come up with substantial funds to subsidize the movement of African Americans into communities from which they were previously excluded, both by governments and by these named institutions.

Tone Madison: I want to talk about zoning a little bit again, partly because this has become such a contentious topic in Madison. So in the past year and a half or so Madison has made zoning changes to promote density in all neighborhoods in response to our housing shortage. For example, they loosened the single-family zoning to include duplexes and accessory dwelling units, (granny flats, carriage houses). We had a law that constrained the definition of family and they’ve removed that so more people who are unrelated by blood, or marriage could cohabitate. And they’ve also got something called Transit Oriented Overlay, creating zones for higher density that are closer to public transit, as well as just future planning zoning to promote more density in single family neighborhoods. But these efforts have met a good deal of pushback, particularly from homeowners, mostly on the grounds of home values and neighborhood character. How do we get buy-in from homeowners for these dense multiracial neighborhoods?

Richard Rothstein: Let me make a couple of points related to your question. We have such an enormous housing shortage today in this country. It does not just affect African Americans. Young white professionals, people forming families, middle-class whites can’t afford housing anymore today in the neighborhoods in which they grew up. So simply changing zoning, which is an essential first step, I’m not minimizing its importance—you can’t do anything else until you change the zoning. But that in itself is not going to address the segregation that we’ve created. Because if we simply permit duplexes and triplexes, sometimes more density along transit, whites are going to outbid African Americans for the housing that’s created. There are more whites [affected by the housing shortage] in every community in this country than our actual African Americans [affected by the housing shortage] simply because the white population is so much larger in this country than African Americans. 

I was speaking a couple of months ago in Boston, Massachusetts, where Massachusetts has issued a law similar to the one you described, that creates the authority to build multifamily units, duplexes, triplexes, along transit cars in the metro Boston metropolitan area. And the city manager of one of the most elite suburbs in Boston, explained that this was a very important reform, because the children who grew up in his community need to be able to move back to the community in which they grew up, and that’s what this reform might accomplish. Well, he’s right, that is what this reform might accomplish. But the people who were up in those communities are not African Americans, they were excluded. So we need to do more than simply reform zoning, although reforming zoning is an important first step. 

Now you ask, how do we oppose the resistance? Well, the only way to oppose the resistance is to organize. One of the things that we mentioned in Just Action is that 20 million Americans participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020. They were white and Black, probably more whites participated in those demonstrations than blacks over the course of the whole country. They were both urban and suburban. They were both middle class and lower income families, a very diverse group. But then, after those demonstrations were over, those people went home, they put Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns, or in their windows, and did nothing further actually to make Black lives matter. 

So our view is—this is the view of Just Action— there is this enormous silent base in this country, for redressing the unconstitutional segregation that we created, but it needs to be organized. People need to get together and create the kinds of committees, civil rights groups, reinvigorated civil rights groups, that will press for the kinds of reforms that are necessary. We argue that [we need to] create those kinds of multi-ethnic, biracial committees that are going to take direct action to create pressure on the banks and the realtors and the developers, to make sure that we’re not simply providing housing for middle class whites, but for the African American as well. Without that kind of pressure, it’s not going to happen. 

In addition to publishing the book Just Action, we also are writing—my daughter Leah Rothstein, who is the co-author of Just Action, and I—we’re writing a frequent Substack column. It’s free, [and] you can just go to Substack and find the Just Action Substack. And recently, Leah wrote a column in which she interviewed people in a very elite white community in the south San Francisco Bay area, where the community was having trouble retaining teachers—had a 30% teacher turnover every year—because nobody could live, even on a teacher’s salary, near their schools.

The school district had some empty land and it proposed to build multi-unit housing on that empty land. A group of the kinds of residents you describe who were claiming that was going to change the character of the communities—for teachers—and to change the character of the community shouldn’t be permitted. They put an initiative on the ballot, to prohibit not only this development proposed by the school district from being created, but any future change in zoning in the community. A group of people in the community who had been studying the history of segregation—they had a study group around The Color Of Law—and investigated the history of segregation in our own community. This is one of the places where we identified the bank and the real estate agent and the developer that created the segregation. They were frustrated; they thought that they were hopelessly outnumbered, that this initiative would pass and there would never be any multi-unit development, any breakage in the single family zoning rules. But they started to go door-to-door in the community and campaign for the defeat of this initiative. They were stunned by the amount of support that they had—silent support. But then all of a sudden, they wound up defeating the initiative in one of the most elite, Not-In-My-BackYard [NIMBY] (purportedly) communities in the country.

This is what people can do if they organize and don’t just talk about it, but actually do something about it as this group did. And Leah interviewed many of the people who went door-to-door and [documented] their reactions when they found the support that they never expected to find. And this can be done anywhere in the country.

Tone Madison: In our last mayoral election, a candidate who did not win, [Gloria Reyes] said that we didn’t need to change Madison’s neighborhoods, but instead needed to focus on homeownership for Black and Brown families. You have a chapter in Just Action that’s titled “Is homeownership the answer?” Can we talk a little bit about the extent to which homeownership can and cannot address these inequities and segregation?

Richard Rothstein: It is an answer, but some of the discussion that you see in the housing community exaggerates the extent to which it can be the answer. Certainly, increasing opportunities for African Americans to own homes will contribute to the desegregation of our communities. But you need to do some work to make that happen. One, as you mentioned, is zoning changes that permit the purchase of homes that might not be single-family homes on large lot sizes, [instead] more dense, but not out of character with the community. That’s one way. 

But there’s much that local communities can do to, for example, recruit African Americans to purchase homes that are constructed once those zoning changes are made, too: educate African Americans who don’t come from families that have for generations owned homes, so that they can learn how to do it. This may seem to be a very obvious thing, but people whose parents haven’t bought a home, have never thought of how you would go about doing that. There are down-payment assistance programs all over the country, most of them run by local governments that provide down-payment assistance to families who can afford to maintain a mortgage, but who don’t have the wealth that whites created through the unconstitutional policies I talked about before, to create a down payment to buy those homes. But most people don’t know about those down-payment assistance programs, and so one of the things that needs to be done is educate the African American community—the middle-class African American community, working-class African American community—about their availability, to enable them to buy a home. 

Then, as I said, there are dozens of policies which are described in Just Action: One of them is the discriminatory nature of the credit scoring system. As you know, your ability to get a mortgage depends on how good your credit is, and how good your credit is, depends on whether you’ve faithfully repaid loans you’ve had in the past. Well, in today’s economy overall, nationally, about 70% of white households own their own homes, about 40% of African Americans own their own homes. The result is that, if an African American [person] applies for a mortgage, that African American is less likely than whites to have or had a previous mortgage, which shows a good credit record, a good payment history. Whites are more likely to have owned a previous home and have had a good credit history if they’ve repaid their mortgage on time and on a monthly basis.

When the credit scores are created, people’s faithful mortgage payments are recorded to give them extra points on their credit score. But people’s rental payments are not recorded. You could have paid your rent on time every month for your entire life, and you get no points in your credit score for that. The result is that the credit scoring system is discriminatory—not an intent but in effect—because the kinds of credit that African Americans have is less likely to generate a benefit on your credit score than the kinds of credit that whites have. 

This is an example of what I was talking about before, with what you can do in a local community to redress segregation: local banks, local credit unions, they issue mortgages and could change the way in which they calculate their credit, and whether they count the kinds of credit that African Americans have. But unless there’s a pressure group in the community, as I described before—a biracial committee, a new civil rights group that presses those banks and credit unions to count the kinds of credit that African Americans have—it won’t happen.

I’ll give you an example of another on its face, race-neutral policy that’s discriminatory, in effect, like the credit scoring system. Throughout the country—in Wisconsin, and in Madison, and everywhere else in the country—the property assessment system that’s conducted by counties and cities is racially discriminatory. African Americans pay property taxes, and their landlords pay property taxes, meaning they pay higher rent as a result at a higher rate than whites do. 

Now, this is not because when an assessor looks at a property, the tax assessor considers the race of the occupant of the renter or the owner. It’s because the system itself is discriminatory in effect. There are many reasons for this. One is, for example, that the way assessment systems work is, usually a tax assessor (sometimes an elected official, sometimes appointed at the county or city level) [does] an assessment that is a judgment of what the value of the home is. They apply a certain [uniform] percentage to it.

But basically they’re judging the value of the home, and then they adjust it each year by some inflation rate, some constant inflation rate. Over time, the assessed values become outdated. In that period, while the assessed values are becoming outdated, homes in white neighborhoods are appreciating at a faster rate than homes in Black neighborhoods. The result is that over time, increasingly, African Americans are paying property taxes at an assessed value that’s closer to their real market value than white families, whose assessed values remain relatively stagnant. Adjusted maybe for inflation, their assessed values are farther below their actual market values. The result is that African Americans are paying higher property taxes. This has the effect of excluding African Americans, other African Americans from the housing market because the houses are unaffordable because of the higher property taxes that are not paid in white neighborhoods. 

Now, this is a purely local issue. The federal government has nothing to do with tax assessors. The only way this will be reformed is with a local civil rights group that’s going to conduct campaigns against the way in which property taxes are assessed to eliminate the discriminatory nature of them. African Americans are paying a higher share of the cost of schools and fire departments and libraries, and all the things that are paid for by property taxes than whites are, relative to the value of their home. So that’s just one other example of the kind of policy that’s keeping African Americans out of homeownership and extorting higher rents from them as well, because their landlords are also paying higher property taxes relative to the value of their property.

Tone Madison: The city has approved a significant amount of new housing construction. But one issue is that a lot of the new construction is not really affordable to low-income and working-class people. And in some cases, naturally affordable housing, because it’s older housing, is torn down for more units of this housing. In Just Action, you talked about the importance of investing in Black and Brown neighborhoods, in ways that mitigate gentrification and can minimize displacement. How can we build more dense, quality housing without displacing lower income residents?

Richard Rothstein: This is a very complex conundrum, because one of the things that we talk about in Just Action is how important it is to improve the resources in Black neighborhoods. But if you improve the resources in Black neighborhoods, whites are going to start to move in. That’s what we call gentrification. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t both keep a neighborhood segregated and make it a healthier neighborhood, in terms of the access to good schools and eliminating polluting industries, and better quality housing. As it improves, more people are going to want to move in. So you can’t eliminate displacement altogether. But what we described in Just Action are a number of policies that can mitigate it. So what you wind up with is some displacement, but also a healthier, desegregated community in which many, if not most of the people who previously lived there can remain. 

So what are those policies? One is a policy called inclusionary zoning, which requires any new development to have a share of housing not just for low-income families, but for middle-income families as well, that previous residents can access. Another is land trusts. All over the country, in Madison as well, there are land trusts that can build affordable housing. The way they do that is they take donations of land, from cities or counties or even private philanthropies, who donate land on which they can build housing. And the land trust keeps ownership of the land, and only sells the house on top of it.

Now, as you know, the land is increasingly the most expensive part of the cost of a home. The reason that those homes I described earlier that were sold in the 20th century for $100,000 and now cost a million dollars is not because they’ve somehow remodeled the home with more expensive appliances. That’s a tiny part of it. The reason is the land has become so much more expensive. If you can keep ownership of the land and the trust and just sell the home, the home becomes much more affordable. Then when the homeowner decides to sell, there’s a restriction on how much of an increase in price that homeowner can charge so that it becomes permanently affordable. The homeowner gained some equity from the growth in the value, but there’s also a restriction on how much that can be so that the house further becomes affordable as well. So those are just two examples of policies that can prevent massive displacement from the community. And they exist all over the country but not in sufficient number to do a significant dent in the gentrification that is going on all over.

Tone Madison: We’ve got one last question from a caller. They wanted to know your thoughts on tiny homes available at market rate versus low-income or affordable housing. And just what are some of the pros and cons you see to some of these different approaches to making affordable housing.

Richard Rothstein: We have an enormous housing crisis, as I’ve said before, that we need all kinds of housing to be built that we don’t presently have. I think, by tiny homes, I’m referring to things like accessory dwelling units, for example, that are authorized in many places. We need those, but those aren’t—those accessory dwelling units, or tiny homes—can’t house families with children. They’re very good for seniors, for single people, maybe for young couples that don’t yet have children. But that’s just one part of the solution that doesn’t deal with the rest of the solution. What we need is—and we emphasize this very much in Just Action— we need mixed income housing that provides housing not just for the very poor and the very rich. Too often when we talk about affordable housing, we’re using it as a euphemism for housing for the poor. We certainly need housing for the poor. And as I mentioned earlier, we need housing for the middle class as well who cannot afford to live in homes that are now for sale because they’re too expensive, much more expensive than they were when their parents or grandparents bought those homes. That requires that there are federal subsidies for the poorest families—they’re called Section Eight, or low-income housing tax credit—the poorest families can get federal subsidies. You can always charge market rate for housing; there is no subsidy available for the missing middle. And one of the things that we place great emphasis on in Just Actio is the necessity of creating missing middle housing. And that requires local subsidies, either from local government, or from state government to permit truly diverse—racially and economically diverse—communities. And we have examples of places that have done that successfully as well in Just Action.