 Welcome, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome Patrice Serrington to start the program. Welcome. Within the Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation is a real estate development program, which, contrary to common opinion, is not singularly focused on making profits in real estate. But rather, in the MSRED program, we guide and encourage our students to understand the impact of the built environment on people and communities, and especially where there is inequality and oppression inherent in the work of real estate development. Evidence of this is the work of some of our illustrious African American alumni, such as Ernst Valerie in Baltimore, Cecily King, who has been working in Detroit, and Diane Branch, the class of 2003, who today has worked with our program faculty, Ed Poetit, to create an ongoing symposium for our students and also our guests on the inequality that we have within our African American communities associated with real estate. Today's session is specifically on the impact of redlining on black Americans. This is hosted by Diane with some extraordinary guests to discuss this critical issue. Welcome, Diane. Diane, you'll have to unmute yourself. Thank you, Patrice. This webinar on redlining is the first in a series on black Americans in real estate. Before we get to our distinguished panelists, I just want to share some background. To tell the true story of systematic racism and redlining in this country, it is important to explain the role that real estate plays in creating a wealth gap between black and white America. The Federal Reserve Board reports that the medium-worth net worth of white households in 2016 was $171,000. This is about 10 times higher than the median net worth at that time of black households, which was $17,600. According to the Brookings Institute in a report, it stated that the barriers to black households in buying homes has created a cumulative wealth disparity over time. In 2015, the median non-Hispanic white homeowner had $100,000 of home equity. As compared to the median, black homeowners' equity was slightly more than half that much at $56,000. So we have a lot to cover. Let's go to our distinguished panelists. I'll give you the background in order of their speaking. Dr. Kevin McGruder is an associate professor of history at Antioch College. He received an MBA in real estate finance from Columbia University Business School in 1984. Dr. McGruder is the author of Race in Real Estate, Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1992. In the 1990s, he was director of real estate development for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit church-based organization. Dr. Brian Goldstein is an assistant professor of architectural history at Swarthmore College. He received national recognition for exemplifying scholarship in planning sustainable development. His book, The Roots of Urban Renaissance, gentrification and the struggle over Harlem, which chronicles the history of community-based efforts to shape the neighborhood's redevelopment from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. He recently received the 2020 John Friedman Book Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. His current book project is on the life and work of the celebrated black architect J. Max Bond Jr. Dr. Andre Perry is a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, a scholar-in-residence at American University and a columnist for the Heckinger Report. He is the author of the book Know Your Price, Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities. His research focuses on race and structural inequality, education, and economic inclusion. Dr. Perry's recent scholarship at Brookings has analyzed black majority cities and institutions in America, focusing on valuable assets worthy of increased investment. But we have a lot to cover, so I will start with Dr. McGruder. Kevin, what is race redlining? And what does it have to do with black wealth? The question of the hour. I received an article recently. It's called New Perspectives on New Deal Housing Policy, Explicating and Mapping the Home Owner's Loan Corporation Loans to African-Americans. And it's by Todd Michne and Liddell Winling. And it has a very concise answer to that question. So I'm going to take a couple minutes and read some excerpts from the article, and then I'll talk about how my research intersects with it. And so as they're answering that question, what is redlining, they give some background. The Home Owner's Loan Corporation was created as a provision of the Home Owner's Loan Act passed in June of 1933, near the end of the first hundred days of the New Deal legislation. And you may know that when FDR comes into office, during the Depression, unemployment nationally is 25%. And the black community is 50%. People have lost their homes. And so this is an intervention during that first hundred days. When registered by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, it was empowered to refinance the mortgages of non-farm homes to a maximum of $14,000 using bonds issued to lenders. These bonds were fully insured by the government. The refinance mortgages were 15 year fully amortized loans, meaning the principal was repaid simultaneously with the interest. The arrangement more favorable to borrowers had been pioneered by savings and loans, small shareholders, shareholder owned banks and thrifts, starting in the 1920s. And was a reform widely called for by the New Deal housing policy advisors. Before this typical home purchase financing was five to 10 years interest only with the balloon payment of the principal at the end. And people paid that either by refinancing again. That's really the only way, in most cases, often they had to pay 50% down. And so the kind of long term mortgages that we're familiar with now just were not available until this, this period. Most lenders agreed to turn over their mortgage holdings for government bonds, despite a lower profit margin because a return on their investment was assured, which had previously not at all been certain considering the large number of delinquent borrowers facing foreclosure at the time. The homeowners loan corporation proved extremely popular by the time the agency stopped accepting applications during this first wave on June 17 1935 some 40% of the entire country's eligible homeowners had applied with more than half receiving loans. That was over a million people in all. By 1936 the homeowners loan corporation help more than 20% of all mortgages on non farmed dwellings. When its rescue phase ended. The homeowners loan corporation shifted focus to managing the considerable inventory of properties on which it now held the mortgages, as well as compiling infant information, its staff believe could prove useful in shoring up the housing market well into the future. That the agencies mortgagee rehabilitation division, which was created in July of 1935 initiated city surveys, mapping the locations of non white and other neighborhoods considered to be poor future investment risk. The homeowner loan corporation for color system of letter grades, red, or the neighborhoods were the lowest rated, hence the term red lining, since mortgagee mortgage underwriting was thereby discouraged in such areas. And just to look at the full scale of the rating. The top was green and that meant best blue was still desirable. See the third the third was definitely declining was yellow and red was known as hazardous. Even before the mapping there had been complaints of racial discrimination within that program in 1934 the Cincinnati NAACP charged after an investigation that the local homeowners loan corporation with systematically undervaluing black owned properties. And this is going to align with with Andre's research indiscriminately labeling African American neighborhoods is blighted and flagging applications by non whites as color complaints relating to an all black housing development in jip maker Queens, New York, had led the community to persist in its inquiries despite the FHA's insistence that it did not discriminate lead attorney Thurgood Marshall, then got the local administrator to admit that the FHA designated white and Negro areas where insured loans could be secured, only by members of those neighborhoods and that it considered racially mixed neighborhoods to be cushion areas where it would guarantee no loans at all. Furthermore, in the Negro areas where it did underwrite loans FHA would not ensure those on properties valued significantly higher than the average. And the authors of this article they conclude by saying the by federalizing long standing discriminatory practices in the mainstream real estate industry and applying a veneer of social scientific methodology to property valuation. The homeowners long corporation, along with the federal housing administration helped to perpetuate a still persistent belief, among whites that the presence of African Americans, invariably depreciates home prices. By closely regulating the extent and restricting where black borrowers could take advantage of state backed home ownership supports. The homeowners home owners corporation the FHA and later the veterans administration contributed to a long standing black white wealth gap that is young increasingly wide in recent decades and so that is kind of the backdrop to what Diane was talking about. My research looks at the three decades before this in looking at Harlem 1890 to 1920. What we see in that is the making of this process that the depression era belief that the presence of blacks reduce property values, didn't come out of kind of the thin air it was being developed from the 1890s forward. And so what I look at in race and real estate is appearing Harlem 1890 to 1920. So before 1990 90% of black people lived in the south. In New York. After 1900, the numbers are increasing. After 1904 with the opening of the subway as black people new moves to New York, they're moving to Harlem. What we see at the beginning of that period. If you look at 135th Street, if you're familiar with Harlem. The south side 135th between Linux and Fifth Avenue there were a roll of walk up tenement buildings there and that block 134th 133rd were areas where black people predominate it but they weren't only there and that's what you see in many northern cities in around 1900. Black people can't live anywhere, but they do live in different places. There's often confined in in certain areas. And in Harlem what we see is that on that in those areas. There are all black buildings there are some all white buildings. There are some buildings in Harlem where black people white people live in the same building. In some cases they live in the same apartment. And so there's some racial the racial residential patterns are somewhat fluid that begins to change in Harlem. When the subway opens and the number of black people in the area increase. And what happens is the hostility against them grows and so what we see in the decade between 1904 and 1914 growing hostility is practices that white residents who are hostile develop and one of the main one is a restrictive covenants the first one I found in the area was 1907, where a group of 23 residents on 137th Street between Linux Avenue and seventh enter into a covenant that's placed in their deeds that they won't rent sell allow black people to occupy their buildings. And so what they're doing is trying to establish a white terrain when one had not existed before. And when you look at the text of the covenants, they explain why they're doing it because they do understand that they may be brought to court and they say oh it's not racial discrimination we just want to stabilize the market. And so implicit in that is a belief that as black people move into areas that have been predominantly white. And that is becoming unstable. One of the reasons the subtitle of my book is conflict and cooperation is because what I found we tend to know the hostility, but we don't know the cooperative elements from white people in black in areas where they don't want to dominate. In Harlem, there are a handful of white property owners who sell to black people and not only sell, they take back mortgages to help those black people buy those properties and so there is a cooperative element in 1913 in Harlem. I heard when Bonder Horst Horst Koch, who was the head of the Harlem Board of Commerce. He, at one point he says that the Negroes have a right to live in the privilege of going to Fifth Avenue or Riverside Drive, if they can pay for it. Many obnoxious things have arisen from antagonisms stirred up between the two races. And so it's not a uniform hostility there is a mix but it becomes more hostile as we move into the teens. And this is happening in, across the nation, somewhat different times but around this period. What's also happening is a parallel professionalizing of the real estate brokerage industry. The National Association of Realtors is created. Black people could not be in that organization and they could not call themselves real tours. So black people in 1947 they formed their own organization they call themselves real tits. This becomes codified what I would call writing race in the housing and the patterns that we see with red lining of the FHA during the Depression. In 1924, the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics article 34 of it, where they're saying what realtors can and cannot do a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character or property or occupancy members of any race or personality or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood. And so they believe social scientists are backing this belief up. And so, so that really sets the stage for nine years later, when the homeowners loan corporation does this rating. I believe it's backed by social science then. And so I'll leave things there, and Brian is going to kind of continue the story around Harlem in the decades later. I also like to introduce, introduce Brian again Brian has been working on the book on J Max Brown I'm not sure if that was clear when I said before. I'm not sure if I gave his full background. Brian is assistant professor of archaeology, archaeology history at Swarthmore, he's received national recognition for exemplifying sustainable development. Brian. Thanks Diane. I'm going to share my screen. Okay, so I do want to thank Diane and the organizers for inviting me here today and and also Andre and Kevin I look forward to, to our conversation that will follow. And certainly thanks to all the audience for attending my remarks will focus on the impact of redlining in the post World War two era, especially the consequences that redlining and the world that produced redlining in three decades after creation of the HLC residential security maps in the 1930s. And as Kevin said, you know my research also focuses on Harlem and I'll use Harlem as a case over the next few minutes, although the dynamics that played out in Harlem weren't unique. They were pretty typical of the way breadlining unfolded for urban black Americans in the mid 20th century. So my interest is in the history of redevelopment in Harlem and the ways that Harlem residents work to shape the transformation of the built environment. And I write about this extensively in my book, the roots of urban Renaissance. But for today, I wanted to hone in on three aspects that show a more complicated picture of redlining legacy then perhaps we might expect. My main argument, redlining created reverberations that were certainly extraordinarily detrimental in ways that extended well beyond mortgage lending, but also seated movements for self determination and community control that were remarkable in their imagination and ambition. Ultimately, Harlem's limited access to traditional forms of capital created great turbulence in the neighborhood, and ultimately that left dreams of black power incomplete in their realization. So, first I want to speak to some negative consequences and focus especially on post war urban redevelopment, which is popularly called urban renewal, kind of in statute those were different but we use them interchangeably so I'll do the same. Urban renewal involved the large scale, federally backed clearance and reconstruction of urban blocks, often replacing dense, aged housing with modern developments for low income or middle class residents, civic centers, stadiums, office buildings, and other uses to urban renewal arose from pretty complicated circumstances, we have to sort of be realistic to understand that cities were struggling at the same moment with rapid suburbanization, accelerating the industrialization and, and certainly places like New York and Boston and Chicago Newark, many of the cities that really jumped into urban renewal were struggling with how to retain a viable tax base. Urban rule was one of those responses to that to that struggle. I'm just showing you a photo of the clearance of Lincoln Center down downtown from Harlem but a good, a good photographic record of what this looked like in practice. The reality is that urban renewal was not equal in its costs in New York as elsewhere disproportionately targeted low income communities and often communities of color. And that was certainly the case in Harlem. Urban renewal reconstructed hundreds of Harlem's acres to point to just one example in the area east of Fifth Avenue officials cleared 162 acres of dense blocks to build 15 public housing projects between 1941 and 1965. What does this have to do with redlining. Well, no one caused you officials to clear and reconstruct these dense blocks and places like Manhattan's predominantly black and Puerto Rican west side or uptown and Harlem racism, expediency and differential political power all played a role. But so too did deteriorated building conditions which are often filtered through the invented category of urban blight. And invented category because blight is it's something that happens to plants it's a biological metaphor that's then adopted in the context of planning and development, but buildings of course don't naturally deteriorate. The elimination of blight was it legally justifiable use of eminent domain powers, and those powers allowed officials to take land and buildings from one private owner, clear it and then give it to another public or private owner, displacing residents who in Harlem, we're mostly African American. The physical deterioration of Harlem was exacerbated by redlining already in 1937. The assessor of area number 26, which the assessments shown here in the middle of my slide, those are the Harlem blocks circled in my map and they include the neighborhoods original note of black settlement which Kevin just described to you. That pretty much that assessment pretty much cemented the neighborhoods fade the assessor described an area that was 90% black. It was crowded amid a racist housing market and in as he described it, fair to poor repair. He graded the area at D. As you now know that was the worst assessment effectively assuring that owners would have little access to the capital, they would have needed to maintain or upgrade buildings. And indeed when in 1957 officials announced the project that would become Lennox terrace middle class African American development within these boundaries at 135th and Lennox the very same intersection. You just heard about in my and Kevin's presentation. The New York Times described the effort as quote slum clearance and as a replacement of quote blighted properties so thinking about this neighborhood as slums as as blight with private mortgage financing absent here until banks got involved in this project something that the projects back are celebrated, you know banks are suddenly willing to invest, because they have the benefit of public money to clear the blocks. This outcome was pretty much for ordained. And it was hardly unusual. In recent analysis that paired HLC maps and many but not all of the urban renewal projects on the books found that 47% of redevelopment projects and 70% of New York City public housing the kind of close cousin of urban renewal was constructed in derated areas and in my squares here in the box you see the area that's Harlem specifically. Assessors created a self fulfilling prophecy and in a lot of cases urban renewal finished the job. Now, for an unexpected outcome of redlining. Harlem was frequently subject to the decisions of outsiders with urban renewal, one symbolic example and perhaps the most disruptive. But Harlemites were not powerless in the face of redevelopment, following the habits of mid century racial liberalism and the class politics of a segregated but certainly not monolithic community. Some Harlemites ministers politicians business leaders, even supported and encouraged urban renewal. They sought as a way to bring in public and private dollars and otherwise under invested community and, and for that group the kind of racial liberals. Government involvement could be a tool in the struggle for civil rights. And if we think of something like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that suggests a government remedy to the problems of civil rights and sort of surprisingly maybe for some of us. Urban renewal was also seen by many as such a tool. But over the course of the 1960s, a younger generation of civil rights activists came to a very different understanding. And then Harlem and similar majority black communities as victims of racist domination in which countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya had all gained their independence from colonial rule. And so they saw great power and potential in the identity that redlining and other means of racial exclusion had created in segregated neighborhoods to put it simply they saw these kind of, you know, these in city colonies as many as as sources of power. Most vividly this took shape in the philosophy of black power, whose leading advocates like the activist Stoeckli Carmichael picture here. So Harlem is a base for claiming racial self determination and creating new kinds of organizations to demand community control. Mr. Carmichael and Charles v Hamilton explained in the 1967 book, black power black Americans had seen urban planners and schools and police all neglect their needs. Now they wrote quote, we must devise new structures new institutions to replace those forms or to make them responsive and quote. Those new structures took the shape of community school boards, experiments and grassroots urban planning and new approaches to development that met Harlem's physical dilapidation and capital deficits with creative imagination. In my limited time I want to highlight just one of those new forms, the Community Development Corporation often called the CDC. CDCs took the philosophy of black power and community control into real estate and business development, arguing in short that highly segregated communities like Harlem did not need the capital of outsiders and the often harmful influence that came with that capital. Instead, among their thousands of residents they claimed they already had the means to build what such communities most needed. We can kind of think of this as a response to redlining, not to say we need outside capital as a solution to redlining but we need to harvest our own capital. Harlem became the site of one of the first such groups called the Harlem Commonwealth Council and launched in 1967. The CDC emerged preaching a gospel combining equal parts market orientation and mutual aid with initial ventures including a small foundry, sewing store, pharmacy, travel agency and office furniture store, all seem to meet local needs of different sorts. But crucially the financial engines for such ventures initially funded with foundation money was to be the sale of $5 shares to residents to be used to procure larger loans. In 1972 advertisement in the New York Amsterdam news New York's black paper suggested all the promise of an organization where residents would self fund local investments whose profits were to then flow back into the community. Support your community. You can see it says in the opening line, get involved, most symbolically, HCC promise that residents could own a piece of the block. Discrimination and other technologies of racial segregation had created mono racial communities that struggled to gain resources from private banks. Inadvertently those conditions seeded a wave of community development corporations across American cities. The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, Huff area Development Corporation in Cleveland and Acostia Economic Development Corporation in DC, and Union Sarah Economic Development Corporation in St. Louis were just some of the few that came up in this era. Many pursued business developments. Others pursued housing, and they encompassed not just African American communities but also other communities that had suffered from years of lack of access to capital Latin X communities, Asian American communities and Native American communities to But the path these organizations would walk was never as simple as realizing utopian dreams of community control and grassroots economic development in the face of racist lending. Local funding was slow hard work and their community orientation appeal to officials across the political spectrum who shared a post 1960s goal of reducing government's role in urban policy. So one effect was that new federal programs spring up to provide venture capital to community development corporations and otherwise get out of their way. As scholars have explained in the context of housing as well, opening spigots that had been largely shut off did not simply reverse the harms of years of discrimination. So Harlem Commonwealth Council a flood of money from from the government allowed bigger investments like an office building on 125th street with the group purchased, but also reduced accountability to the community it was to serve. Without shareholders to guide its work, the organization became increasingly focused on commercial development, and ever less motivated to sell ownership shares. This is a much more complicated story than I can get into today though it's something I do describe in my Harlem industry extensively. And without a stock sale ever happening. Parliament's did not gain the capital or the self determination they were promised. When those public funding sources dried up and they did in the early 1980s. After Reagan's election, early community development corporations had very little to fall back on. So once private funding began to flow more steadily to communities like Harlem in the mid 80s into a new generation of community development corporations focused on housing, a generation that included the Abyssinian Development Corporation which we can certainly talk more about. It often came with strings attached private bank backed entities like the New York City Housing Partnership funded housing in Harlem, with a specific focus on increasing middle class homeownership which banks saw as a safe investment for their green lined dollars. They really wouldn't invest directly in low income housing, except through, you know intermediaries like the low income housing tax credit, other groups like that direct funding generally favored homeownership. That goal helped gradually shift the economic composition of Harlem's residents. That was an outcome that met the desires of some Harlemites but which other saw as the sunset of their dream of a community rebuilt by and for its long time residents. When gentrification comes into a story things get messy quickly and, and perhaps we can take up the connection between red lining and gentrification and our conversation later for now and by way of conclusion. I'll simply point out that Harlem's turbulent relationship to outside capital brought turbulence inside its borders to with effects continuing for years after the neighborhoods blocks were delineated and read, and even for years after efforts that promised community after the cake was baked it proved impossible to simply add back in the missing ingredient. Harlemites have a history of creatively making the best of what they have but red lining casts a long shadow. So with that I just want to thank you again and I will look forward to our discussion in a few minutes. We can have Andre next Andre your work talks about today the result of red lining and what our communities are looking, looking like and, you know, is there hope for, you know, a different research or an energy in those communities so I turn to you. Yeah, so thank you Diane and I also like to thank Kevin and Brian for their wonderful presentation I learned a lot there. And I think I'll present something that resonates with a lot with your work and so I'll begin with my presentation hopefully you can all see my screen. Yep. A lot of this can be found in my book know your price valuing black lives and property in America's black cities available wherever fine books are sold. I study black majority cities places where the share of the black population is greater than 50%. I also study black majority neighborhoods, but there are obviously too many of those to put on a map but you can see there are a lot of majority black cities. There's more than 1200 of them. And, but today I'm going to talk about a little bit about homes and the impact of racism on on those black cities and places. This is where my where I grew up this is where like most good stories they begin at home. This is 1320 Hill Avenue Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Wilkinsburg is a small black majority municipality surrounded by Pittsburgh on three sides and you can see the home is in this repair. It's boarded up the roof is bowed. You can get this home if you want it by agreeing to pay the taxes to the municipality of Wilkinsburg but it for me is worth so much more. This woman on the upper right hand corner her name is Elsie Boyd, I call her mom. The story was told when I was born, she made a deal with my maternal grandmother that she would take me in. Because my mother was poor she already had a child when she was 15 she had me when she was 17. She was probably abused. And so mom did what a lot of black women did during that period. She filled the breach that government or private industry did not she took in kids and as you can see, there were a lot of kids that she took care of in 1320 Hill Avenue some black some white. One of the reasons why she did what this is my father, Floyd Criswell, he was a heroin addict, and he was in and out of prison. For most of his young life he died he was killed in prison, a day before his 27th birthday in Jackson State Penitentiary right outside Detroit near where where he was born. He comes from Detroit to Pittsburgh all throughout his life. But for my book I actually followed where he lived to get a sense and and where mom lived to get a sense of the conditions they lived under. And to save I actually have slides on all of these circles but because so many of it was explained I'm just going to go breeze past them. But they lived in areas that were red line where homeowner loan corporation drew red lines around their neighborhoods. He lived in areas where high they lived in areas where highway construction barrel through black neighborhoods destroying commercial corridors and neighborhoods. They, they lived in areas where there was urban renewal they had to bounce from neighborhood. That's actually how my family ended up in Wilkinsburg. They lived with an urban renewal product project. There was predatory lending in the form of a particular rent to own schemes that were throughout where they lived, and there were restrictive housing covenants so racial housing covenants so he they could not move to lots of areas around them because they were prohibited by the law to do so. Now, but I wanted to look at the impact of these things on current home prices. So, if you can look at a chart this chart. This is a chart of home values by zip code. And then, as you can see on that bottom access that x axis. That's a percent of black people within a neighborhood or zip code. And on the y axis, as indicated by the price on top of the bars. The, that's the average list price of homes in those neighborhoods so as you can see, homes in areas where the share the black population is less than a percent on average our price about $340,000. That's about half as much in areas where the black population is 50% or higher now a lot of people will say that's because of education. That's because of crime. But those are things that you can control for in a study and that's what we did. We looked at that absolute price, but we control for structural characteristics so we looked at the square footage. For instance, because we really wanted to get an apples to apples comparison between the homes so same kinds of homes and look at the price but then we control for neighborhood amenities. We control for education, crime walkability all those fancy zilla metrics to again to get a an apples to apples comparison. And what we found that homes in black neighborhoods where the share the black population is on average are underpriced by 23% about $48,000 per home. Cumulatively, that's about 156 billion and lost equity. And you can see wherever this is occurring all across the United States wherever you see a magenta circle. That's where devaluation is occurring, wherever you see a green circle that's where homes in black neighborhoods are priced higher than in the metro areas in their, in their white count counterparts. Just to give you a sense of the New York, Newark, New Jersey City Metro, there's about a 10% difference about 47, 48,000 per home in the area. And but you can see this, there's rangey differences all across the United States, Lynchburg, for instance, 81% different Rochester, New York, 65% different so again, if you helicoptered a home, a home in a black neighborhood and put it in a white neighborhood of similar social circumstances, it would increase in value by that much. That's quite the largest black city in terms of population and size, 37%. But there are places where the share of the, the, that homes in black neighborhoods are priced higher Nashville plus 10, which tall falls plus 16 Boston, plus 23, but I always tell people, no Boston is not less racist than Lynchburg, but the home prices are higher. Now, I just want to put this 156 billion in perspective, what does it mean, what does it look like 156 billion would have financed more than 4 million black owned businesses based on the average amount black people uses to start up their firms. To finance more than 8 million four year degrees based on the average amount of a cost of a four year public education, replace the pipes in Flint, Michigan 3000 times over nearly covered all of Hurricane Katrina dam and it's double the annual economic burden of the opioid crisis. Why all of you should pay attention to this as and it's the reason why I put this last bullet there and the reason why I talked about my personal story in the beginning. If my father lived in a neighborhood where there was not housing discrimination, he would have better opportunities. He would have better schools, better infrastructure, more capacity to start a business to go to college. His life would have been different and I never excuse his behaviors. He probably abused my, my mother, but without question that if he lived in areas without housing discrimination, his life would be different. My life would be different. My wealth status would be different. And so I just want I wanted to highlight this point, because so often we blame black people for the conditions in black neighborhoods. This is why I say all the time that there's nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve. We need to stop blaming people when things go awry and really look at policy and ways to figure ways to change policy. My research shows that there's still discrimination of some sort in the market still one of the down the the the legacies of redlining. Yes, it certainly robbed people of material work but it set a horrible template of saying that black people are not worthy of investment. And we see that time and time again in different aspects of the housing market and banking and in other areas, black people are not worthy they are hazardous, not deserving of investment. Let's play this one clip in closing. And this is representative Al Green of Texas I had the opportunity of presenting to the financial services committee a few years ago I actually just presented this month, early this month on a similar issue but he has the basic question. Does do we feel that there's discrimination in appraisals. Now, if you've been paying attention to the news you've seen individual cases of racism. In various areas in which a homeowner replaced themselves with a white stand in, and the, the second appraise appraisal came in hundreds of thousands of dollars higher but I just want to play this clip, so that folks can get a sense of the mindset that it is in the real estate industry. If you think black people are being discriminated when their property is being appraised, would you kindly raise your hand, one person on the panel. If you think that for fear that I'm not communicating well. If you think that black people are not being discriminated against when their property is being appraised, if you think they're not being discriminated against kindly raise your hand. Okay, hence now we're getting some consternation I see. Now when I was listening to Kevin and Brian, so much of their research is really resonated with what I've been studying time and time again and, and I will say that that the, the, the other part of this is that communities are organizing. I, you know, I titled my book know your price based off my favorite play in the whole wide world to trains running by the great August Wilson. In the play there's a character by the name of Memphis and Memphis is about to have his property seized through imminent domain. And the city of Pittsburgh offers Memphis $15,000 for his property to which the Memphis says no I'm not selling my property I know my price I got my price. I'm, it's I'm paraphrasing but it's a refrain throughout the play. There's another character hand bone who paints a fence for a hand in exchange for a hand so he paints a fence, but he never gets his hand. In the play, he says, give me my hand, give me my hand, give me my hand and we don't know if he had mental illness before he painted the fence but eventually goes crazy and dies demanding his hand. Now there's actually a happy ending. I know you're like, well damn that's a sad story. But the happy ending is that Memphis gets $35,000 well above is asking price. And there's this, you got to know that you have worth. And what my book know your price tries to do is give people the price to stand on. But at the end of the day you got to know that you have worth and you have to fight for it, even if it means going crazy and dying. I'm going to close there because I'm looking for this conversation but yeah, you got to know your value know your worth because just like in housing, we are more valuable than we are priced. So I'm looking for the conversation. Thank you all. Wonderful conversation I just have one question before we turn to the audience, we've established this redlining we've established its results in the community. We didn't talk but there are a number of subsidies that were given in this country to whites that blacks didn't get. Why is it that when you have this discussion about equalizing about looking to the community to help. I won't say the word reparations I'd like to say reckoning. People really jump at that. Why is there such a. People just just don't want to deal with it they say it's wrong why would we help them. So I asked you all that question. I think because the veterans World War two veterans who got the VA loans that allowed them to get houses in the summer, they think that they got those houses just because of their hard work. And they don't recognize the fact that they didn't have black neighborhood neighbors because black people couldn't even get out there, and they were denied VA loans in many cases and so that's why this history is so important. And that congressional hearing showed like those people raising their hand. They may, they probably never even heard of the history, but even if they had it will take a lot for them to understand how they're living it and they're benefiting from it and people have a hard time realizing that they got privileges. America is, you know, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps that's what people think, but nobody did that in this country, and they don't want to admit it. And maybe just add to that you know the, the, the subsidy for ownership continues at a much greater scale than any other kind of public subsidy for housing certainly more than goes into affordable or low income or public housing but you know it's an affordable subsidy it's not described as public housing it's described as private housing to Kevin's point. Yeah, and home, you know homes. As I often tell my students buying a house is the, you know, it's, it's the easiest investment in the world we're investing is really complicated you, for the most part in the United States if you put money into a house. At one point you gained your money back and more and that's, you know, relatively straightforward and people are hyper protective of that particular investment and I think, you know, because race has long been conflated with with value as as Andre shows us well, you know that that that calculation that risk calculation becomes racialized, and has stayed that way for what 90 years now 100 years. I have slightly, it's not a different take but I actually think most people believe in reparations, especially white people, because when you saw the PPP loan, or after being socially distance for a few weeks the business federal government, you need to bail us out, you need, you need to help us, you need to repair because you're asking us to shut down. How are you going to repair. So, we believe in reparations in fact we've seen it in recently with 911 victims we've seen it to a certain extent with the Japanese internment we've seen it with a lot of Americans, and certainly not the kind of reparations that we want but we believe in it. But when it comes to black people, it's like no. No, we, that's too much. I didn't pay for slaves I didn't do, you know, and now you hear all these silly, I mean, absolutely silly reasons why not to do it, when we do it every day, particularly for white suffer. It's like, we got to be clear what the, how we've racialized the term reparations, but in practice, we repair injured communities, all the time, all the time, but which when it comes to black people then it's a problem. What would you guys, what would you all tell the Biden administration, Biden in January issued a memo memo to HUD, and asked HUD to look at any possible destruction that the last administration might have done to the Federal Fair Housing Act, but what is really important we've got about I think five minutes what's important what would you tell by looking at this problem. I would suggest putting some pressure on the industry professional organizations. When I looked at the National Association of Realtors website. Last week, they were encouraging their brokers to volunteer to take implicit bias test. They should push that so it's not voluntary. When I looked at the, there's a national appraisers organization I saw the clip that Andre played today I saw it, but I looked at how that national appraisers organization responded to that hearing. And it was just bluster and oh they don't know is ridiculous research that HUD and that federal money has the possibility of pushing them. And I do think the black lives matter moment even though it seems to be passing. There is some momentum that HUD should use to push these because that's their continuing through their practices to perpetuate this, and it can't change unless they change. I will say this that our research shows that there's not not only with appraisal appraisals. It's in lending practices is in real estate agent practices. There's discrimination baked in and so many different things that people see as just natural practices but they don't understand that many of them was were developed during segregation and that's a part that was legal to discriminate and when people say for most of our history, the legal to discriminate and then, you know, give take 4050 years right. So there's no discrimination, knowing that so many of our industries were built off of this fact so I would certainly look at, again, accountability is key. Holding organic, these different industries accountable, but also let's understand how we got out of the Great Depression. Let's understand how to a certain extent we got out of this current pandemic. We, we give gave direct subsidy to the injured. And, and so we need to replicate that for those who have been injured by past discrimination and so that's what I would encourage the administration to do. I think, you know, it's very hard to control behavior and the fact that had kind of kind of say like, don't, don't enforce this and then do enforce this says a lot about the ability to disassemble and sort of, you know, ignore and beat around the bush when these kinds of egregious, you know, offenses emerge so I mean one thing I'd like to see is a much more experimental attitude towards some of the solutions to these problems I was reading recently in November, Harlem, East Harlem, got the second community land trust in New York City, which is a way of essentially having community ownership through the land trust of the land and then nonprofits rent the land to build affordable housing and I think models like that are very encouraging as an alternative to just kind of trying to do a better job with, as I said, you know, the cake is baked. If the cake doesn't have salt in it, you can't just shake salt on top of the cake and make the cake taste good. You know, some part of the cake is still going to not be very salty so I think it's important to be willing to experiment in different ways I think certainly community land trust or one of those ways I think, you know, even though it's not about housing paying people with children and allowance as Andre suggesting this is compelling to you know trying to sort of work around some of these baked in pathways would be really important. We have a question from the audience is Manhattan seeing its last days of black residents. Why isn't there more outcry about the displacements of blacks in Harlem, and where's black power now and I think that can go across the country. That same question so Andre. I actually think there is a lot of crime. You know, and it, you know why I think Brian's work is important. We're seeing in Evanston, Illinois, for instance, they just instituted a reparations ordinance or fund. Now a lot of people will criticize it and say hey that's not the federal government. But the reality is when it particularly when it comes to housing, it wasn't just the federal government, it was federal state and local ordinances that sort of work together. In order to develop the, the maps, the banking remember, you know, all this, the private industry and government kind of work together to create all this. So I think it's a step in the right direction and evidence that people are responding and demanding change, not just by marching in the streets, but changing policy. And look at that effort is sort of like a, you know, a an effort that is destined to fail, we should see this as a start towards developing local state and federal policies that will repair the damage that that has been done. Brian or Kevin. I mean, there's always these kinds of shades of gray and these kinds of assessments to you know Harlem has had black middle class people throughout the whole time it still has black middle class people. So, you know, I do not think Harlem will ever have no black people living in it, but I do think, you know, the days of it as a kind of minutes. It lost its position as the little largest population of African Americans in New York a long time ago. I mean, we talked about this because it's part of your own story but you know people moved out to the outer boroughs but you know I think I think that that probably has passed but I think black power is is emerging in different forms and I would again just point to something like the community land trusts I think people really are trying to be quite creative and dealing with some of these things through through community I mean, even stuff like the the move to mutual aid which has been an astounding sort of outcome of the last year. The amount of mutual aid groups that have emerged that are not just talking about food for people but but housing aid, childcare. These are all alternatives to the kind of problems of capitalism in America's communities that cause things like displacement and are pretty compelling even if, even if they're self made they're really quite, quite encouraging about other models that get outside of some of the exploitative frameworks that cause things like aggressive gentrification. I mean I lived in Harlem for 25 years before moving back to Ohio, nine years ago so I lived through a lot of the changes that, at least the latter part of the changes that Brian talks about in his book. The tension within the black residents of Harlem is there are some who do benefit from the change and want to, and it's been that way all along really, even in cases where it might be exploitive in some cases. And there's another threat that wants Harlem to be a place where you can live regardless of your income. And that's the tension, and the political class has not been that ladder group, they tended to be the former, and they have played a key role in zoning in decisions. And so the idea about a community land trust. I also agree that, like if I could go back and turn back the hands of time in the 80s when I was part of a group founding the advocacy development corporation, we should have done that. We didn't but so a lot of those properties that we developed in the 80s and 90s that were through the low income housing tax credit. It was a 15 year period of keeping them in that. And we thought the organization would stay committed to it. I left in 97. And the organization did not stay committed to it. And so a lot of those buildings have been sold. And a community land trust, you can't, you don't necessarily sidestep that. But its mission is to do that. And I'm on the board of land trust in Yellow Springs, Ohio where I live now, it's a CDC that uses the land trust model. And we should have done that years ago, because that's one way to the people who want to have a place that is more permanent than trying to appeal to politicians can ever make it. Can I just add just quickly, I think what you're hearing is that we need alternatives to ownership model alternatives to ownership. Because the because of past discrimination because of inequities. It's hard to actually create the inventory to, and particularly in some markets is almost close to impossible to buy given certain income levels. And you really do need alternatives to what we currently have. And, and you're starting to see cooperatives and land trust and, you know, and different things that because what is central is that we almost have to have people be able to work and live relatively close to each other. It's untenable for people to have to work in one part of the city and live too far away. And this gets back to our sort of roots of discrimination. Folks want black and brown labor. They don't want them to be neighbors. You know, so, but we've got to keep this focus on in order for a current local economies to be healthy. We need overall environments where you can work and live in the same place and we need multi or different levels of income to be able to reside in the same place and unfortunately we just are now. We just are now so fixated on curating our communities to be, you know, some this exclusive enclave of schools and homes and it's, it's really deteriorating our very notion of what a community can be in is. You're on mute. There is a question for you. Oh, Andre. Have you completed any research in PG County, Maryland, as it relates to devaluing properties in communities where there's over 50% black population. Oh, of course I mean and I would actually, I'll put this in the chat. You can actually look at the interactive in the chat you can scroll over. The area of that's close to you if towards the bottom of that web page, you'll see a map and you can scroll over and see the, the area that you're in, if it has enough black people in it to make those kind of comparisons. In the DMV Metro, it's 15% difference about 48,000 per home. That's what we find so, and we're also going to do deeper analysis here in the coming months on commercial properties as well. So we'll be adding on to that, that sort of portfolio of devaluation research that we're putting out. Some other questions. It's an interesting one. To what extent was the destruction of black communities and global philosophy of oppression reference Cape Towns Mill of the night dislocation of black people to townships in the 1930s. And what exactly is a relationship, and that can you model it back here to the United States. It really wasn't a destruction. It was a creation of what segregation racial segregation does in America is it steers black people to certain neighborhoods to better exploit them. So if you look at the period I was talking about in 1900 is black people. The reason why there were black people in Harlem at all in 1900 was because they could be charged higher rents. And so you look at newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s in Harlem landlords are advertising for respectable colored families in Harlem, and they want them there because they charge them more 25 to 50% more. And if we understand that they want that to continue. And there are black property owners who do the same thing. I mean my book that comes out in July, Philip Peyton the father of black Harlem started the Afro American Realty Company in 1904. And he was going to bring about multiracial housing but quickly adopted that pattern. And so that's what we're fighting against and if you look at that really closely, it tells you the beginning of what Andre is looking at now. If you're charging people more for rent in a building that building should be valued more. If you look at how you price building. You divide the total revenue, you divide the total revenue by what a typical return is in 1900 a typical return in real estate with 6%. And so it's not a complicated process to value. But somehow they're bringing the value down when the black people they're charging, they're charging them more. And there's no explanation other than that racial explanation. And so the neighborhoods do end up being destroyed, in part because of the greed of the homo of the people who own the properties they don't invest in and they want to get every last penny out of them. And, but it wasn't a, it wasn't a program like I saw in the chat. It wasn't that, but you could almost call it a slow motion destruction instead. And it just add in this, you know, if we fast forward to the 60s and kind of the 50s and 60s the high point of urban redevelopment and highway construction, I think, you know, a similar story is unfolding where there's often a kind of intersecting with existing racial dynamics in ways that often serve to punish black people, even if the actors aren't, you know, kind of acting in the explicit name of, you know, Jim Crow style racism, there's, you know, political power is a medium through which, through which racism operates implicitly if not explicitly so it may be that locating, you know, driving a highway through Wilmington's black community in Delaware was a kind of technocratic decision by planners who were looking at maps and figuring out, you know, where to sort of find the path of least resistance. That path of least resistance of course is an index of political power where, you know, if they had run run it through a white middle class community. The, you know, the backlash would have been much more severe so you can see that I will say though that of course and Isabelle Wilkerson writes about this very well in her book cast which I'm sure many of you have read because it's a really well read the US was something of a global model for racism and discrimination and and certainly urban renewal was exported. It was imported from elsewhere but it was also exported to other places. South Korea was one example certainly colonial context in Africa and other places to so there is a way that the global conversation is very relevant here even if it wasn't always as direct maybe as as as we might imagine. We have about, actually we're over, but I was going to give you a chance to close the last question pertains to the class last question. There are there are clear connections between white supremacy colonization I should say colonization white supremacy in apartheid. I might look different in in in different in some respects, but at the root. They used a racial hierarchy of values to determine how to orchestrate society so there are certainly connections there but I just want to encourage all of you to continue this work on discrimination. I mean, since we released that report on home values, almost three years ago, since then, there's been a slew of other studies that take our, our model and to really isolate race, and to look at values overall so there are things on tax assessments, appraisals, all kind of things and while these were certainly issues, you know, since we can remember since they were developed. I think now you're starting to see a flood of research and activity that we haven't seen in in the past and and and people are hearing it. I just want students, if you're listening in faculty if you're listening, keep doing this work. It is actually paying off the the researchers from 2030 years ago are seeing the fruit of their labor and our work today. You know, so just keep working on these issues. So closing remarks, Kevin or Brian. Just to kind of take a detour, I guess as a closing remark, I think we haven't really talked about schools. Schools are so much at the, you know, I'm kind of, you know, starting to make a decision about whether I might want to go from being a renter to an owner and just schools are the mediator for all of these decisions in ways that are so predictable and so just completely overwhelming and I think, you know, it just reminds me pushing money to kids putting money into schools, you know, building infrastructure, just in my kind of earlier point about experimenting and thinking about this in indirect ways I think, you know, that is one way that a lot of the effects of red lining show up and might also be unwound in ways that aren't about, you know, new ownership models for about even political power but just about acknowledging that, you know, children have to be invested in and given safe, good places to learn and a lot of these other things would follow from, you know, a strong generation of investment in kids I would hope. Interesting that you say that I and many of my friends were bused out of our black neighborhood, our black middle class neighborhood. That's an interesting point. Some people say taking talent out, putting them in white neighborhoods. Kevin, did you closing. Yes, I think that what we're talking about this inequality and racism within housing I think it is the core to solving the problem of inequality in our society. We can't do that. We can achieve equality for so the housing link, the wealth link is even who we are. The fact that when we say black neighborhood. Most of us know what that means. And it's not positive. And Andre's research is showing that it shouldn't be that way. So how do we, and I'm very interested in kind of using my work and the work of others to push us to unlearn what we think we know. The facts are really saying something very different. And, and it, it is a moment I do believe that where we're talking about inequality and this happens every, you know, generation or so. But I think we've got some tools that those who came before us didn't have that we should use to do this. I'm not sure if patrice patrice is still on. If you want to close patrice. I'm, I am here. Thank you, Diane. But no, I'd rather you please sum up fantastic insights and invaluable for us to understand these issues. Thank you. All right. And I thank the panelists. This is so important with education. You can, oh, you can move only with education. And what you do is so so so important to us all. Thank you.