 So hi everybody. I'm Jess Hyman with CVOO, the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. And we're so excited that you're all here tonight. And we're especially grateful for our special guests, Leah Rothstein and Richard Rothstein. So I have a few just logistical details to go over before we start. First off, everyone's got a seat. Everyone looks happy. That's good. If you need to use a restroom, there's one restroom just outside around the corner. And the second restroom on the second floor, and the code is by the elevator. You've all had some snacks and drinks. After the presentation, we'll have more snacks and drinks and a nice reception with some sweets and some delicious food and the opportunity to get your book signed by the Rothsteins and to chat with each other about what you've learned today. So this event was made possible by a lot of partners and sponsors. And I just want to take a brief moment to thank folks now. I want to especially thank the Human Rights Commission that our wonderful partner in this work and the organization that made this event possible. So could we have a round of applause for the Vermont Human Rights Commission? And then as you all know, this event is kicking off Fair Housing Month. And Fair Housing Month both celebrates the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which enshrined essential protections into law to make sure that everyone could be treated equally and have equal access to housing opportunity. It's also an opportunity to remind ourselves that there's still a lot of work to do. So all over the country, all over Vermont, we still have a lot of challenges in our housing. And so we use Fair Housing Month as a way to raise awareness about the important laws that are enshrined into both state and federal law, and also the importance of vibrant and inclusive and thriving communities. So we're grateful that you're all here to be part of this important discussion. I do have to thank some sponsors. So as Fair Housing Month is made possible by a lot of wonderful organizations and businesses. So I wanna give a shout out to our friends at Feral Properties and Champlain Housing Trust, at Redstone, VHFA, the city of Burlington's Community and Economic Development Office, as well as their Office of Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, Vermont Housing Finance Agency, and Main Street Landing, of course, for hosting this, Cathedral Square, Two Rivers Aduquici Regional Commission, Ever North, the Mount Ascutney Regional Commission, and Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. Additionally, there were some other folks who made this event tonight happen. We're very grateful to, as I said before, Main Street Landing for donating the space, to Phoenix Books, who brought copies of Just Action and The Color of Law for available for purchase and for personalized signature afterwards, as well as Vermont Wine Marchants and Pro Pig Brewery, who donated some of the drinks for the event, to Skinny Pancake for doing the bar service and to April Cornell. And of course, to all of you for being there today. So I would like to turn this over to Big Hartman from the Human Rights Commission, followed by Paul Dragon from CVOEO. And then we'll introduce our special guests. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks so much, Jess. I really wanna thank you for all of your hard work in planning and organizing tonight. I am the Executive Director and General Counsel at the State of Vermont Human Rights Commission. I wanna make sure everyone here knows that we exist. Our office works really hard every day to enforce Vermont's anti-discrimination protections. We have a small staff that does all complaint investigations under Vermont's Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act. So if you think you might have experienced discrimination, please know that we are a resource to you. We're really inspired at our office. Our whole team is really inspired by the ideas in this book. And we can't wait to see how we can bring some of these ideas into action here in Vermont. So please reach out to us if you're excited about seeing how we can all work together to make a more just and inclusive Vermont. Thanks. Thank you, Big. Thanks to the Human Rights Commission. Thank you, Jess. So I'm the Executive Director of CVOEO. Jess had asked me to talk just for a few minutes about CVOEO. But I think I can't talk about CVOEO without talking about justice. Fair Housing is about justice. So I wanna start for myself and maybe for you because that's why you're here with what is going on. We have 140 people, approximately, living unsheltered in the Burlington area. 80% of the people that we see who are experiencing homelessness, whether they're in a shelter or living outside, are people with disabilities. At our Community Resource Center, one of our programs, 28% of the people that we see are 55 and older and 14% are 62 and older. So what's going on? Have we forgotten to take care of our older Vermonters and people with disabilities? What's going on with our rents? They're skyrocketing. We talk a lot about rent stabilization. Last week at our winter warming shelter, we had a guy wake up every single morning, take the bus to work and take the bus back every night. He worked 40 hours a week. For five years, could not afford rent in Chittenden County. He is 62 years old. So what's going on? We also are in favor of just cause of eviction. Three months ago, we had a guy camping outside our feeding Chittenden program. He had been in his apartment for 14 years, got evicted. It was not for non-payment. When our staff asked the landlord why he got evicted, he said, I don't need to give a reason. We should expect that. That's important. So I need to know, you need to know what's going on. Our work here at CVOEO, it is all about justice, economic, environmental, racial and social justice. Fair Housing Month is a time to recommit to justice. And on behalf of CVOEO, I wanna thank you all so much for coming and to learn more about our programs. You can see our annual report out in the lobby. So thank you so much for coming tonight. Man, Paul. Getting me emotional before I have to do my job. All right, welcome everyone. Thank you for coming. I am Corinne Yantz. I'm here with CVOEO's Fair Housing Project. And through our striving for equity work, I've collaborated with a lot of housing committees, many of the members that you see here today. Oh, and housing committees make up an influential and unique role in how we shape our regional housing policies across the state. And through our book group, we've been imagining new systems and solutions from just action to incorporate into our work. So it's a really incredible honor to introduce Richard and Leah Rosting. Just action co-author Richard Rosting also wrote The Color of Law, which you can purchase from Phoenix Books out in our lobby. He is a Distinguished Fellow of Economic Policy and Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NA, NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found on his webpage and at the Economic Policy Institute. Just action co-author Leah Rosting has worked on public policy and community change from the grassroots to the halls of government. She led research on reforming community corrections policy and practice to be focused on rehabilitation, not punishment. She has been consultant to nonprofit housing developers, cities and counties, redevelopment agencies and private firms on community development and affordable housing, policy, practice and finance. Her policy work is important by her years as a community organizer and labor organizer, working on issues such as housing, environmental justice, work for safety and youth leadership. So everyone, please join me in welcoming Richard and Leah Rosting. Thank you very much. Thanks all of you for coming here this evening. I hope you'll go away from this this evening deciding that April is not fair housing month. Every month should be fair housing month. If people believed that, we could spread out our speaking around the course of the year. As you probably know, you've heard in 2017, I published a book called The Color of Law. It was designed to demolish a widespread myth that all of us shared, I did too, before I demolished it. The idea that the reason we're a segregated society, the reason that African-Americans and whites in particular live in different places in every metropolitan area of this country is something we called de facto segregation, something that just sort of happened. In fact, it happened because maybe individual landlords or homeowners wouldn't sell or rent to African-Americans in white neighborhoods or maybe it happened because private businesses like real estate agencies or banks or insurance companies, developers discriminated in how they carried out the purely private sector activities. Or maybe it's because people just like to live with each other at the same race. We feel more comfortable that way. Or maybe it's just because of income differences. On average, it's not true in every case, but on average African-Americans have lower incomes than whites and maybe they just can't afford to live in white neighborhoods. All of these individual, bigoted, but private sector, self-choice, economic differences is what caused us to be an apartheid society. And we tell ourselves that it's too bad, but what happened by accident can only unhappen by accident. It's not a responsibility to do something about it. We may wish it was different, but it's not a responsibility. Well, the color of law I wrote to demolish that myth. The reality is that the reason we're a segregated society is not because of private activity or self-choice or bigoted homeowners. The reason we're a segregated society is because of racially explicit, frequently written public policy by the federal, state, and local governments. All of it unconstitutional, all of it unlawful, designed to ensure that blacks and whites could not live near one another anywhere in this country. The policies that the federal government in particular, but state, local governments as well followed were so powerful that they determined the racial segregation that we have still today and the racial inequality in so many other areas besides housing. It all comes to the segregation policies of the 20th century. I'll describe a couple of them if I have time. The most powerful one perhaps was a policy followed by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration in the immediate post-World War II period. Both of those agencies had a program to move the entire white working class and lower middle class population out of urban areas into single family homes in all white suburbs from which African Americans were excluded. This was a racially explicit federal policy. At the time, we were a manufacturing economy, not like today, then we were making things that was the primary source of employment. And factories needed to be located near deep water ports or railroad terminals to get their parts or ship their final products and the banks and the insurance companies to service those factories also needed to be located in those same downtown areas. And the people working in those factories and the banks and the insurance companies, many of them didn't have automobiles, they had to walk to work, they maybe take short streetcar rides, they all lived as well in those downtown areas. I'm not suggesting to you that every other house was of a different race, but the areas were broadly integrated. We had both blacks and whites living in much closer proximity in the mid 20th century over the early 20th century that we have today. The federal government, as I said, embarked on a program to move the whites only out of those urban areas into single family homes in all white suburbs. The most famous of those developments, and this is the one I used in the color of law as an example, but they exist everywhere in the country, the Boston area, Midwest, Southeast. The most famous of them is Levittown, East of New York City, I'm sure many of you have heard of it, 17,000 homes in one place in a rural area East of New York City. The builder William Levitt could never assemble the capital to build that project on his own. No bank would be crazy enough to lend him the money for such an enormous project and a speculative idea that people were gonna live outside the city. It was a new idea. The only way that Levitt, and this is true of developers all over the country, in every metropolitan area, the only way that they could build these suburbs was by going to the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administrations after World War II, submit their plans for the development, the architectural design of the homes, the layout of the streets, every detail, the materials they were going to use, and an explicit commitment required by the federal government never to sell a home to an African-American. The federal government even required that the builders, Levitt, for example, place a clause in the deed of every home prohibiting resale to African-Americans or rental to African-Americans. This was a federal government requirement. The Federal Housing Administration had a manual, a written manual. This wasn't the action just of rogue bureaucrats acting out their own bigoted ideas. The Federal Housing Administration had a written manual that was distributed to appraisers all over the country, whose job it was to evaluate the applications of builders for federal bank guarantees for their projects. The manual said explicitly, you couldn't recommend for a federal bank guarantee, a developer who was going to sell homes to black people in their white developments. The manual went so far as to say that you couldn't even recommend for a federal bank guarantee alone to an all-white project if it was going to be located near where African-Americans were living. Because in the words of the Federal Policy Manual, that would run the risk of infiltration by inharmonious racial elements. Again, written federal policy, the notion of de facto segregation is other nonsense. And there were many other policies at the federal, state and local level when you add them all up. You can see why we have a segregated society today. Well, using that example, excuse me, using that example, let me describe for a minute why that particular policy had such an enormous impact in what we face today in this country. Those homes, Levittown for example, or anywhere in the country, sold at the time inexpensively. They were for factory workers, lower level bank employees. Those homes were inexpensive. They sold for about $8,000 a piece in single family homes, $9,000 in some cases. In today's money inflation adjusted, that's about $100,000, these $100,000 homes. Today, not in Levittown and not in any suburb in this country. Can you buy those homes for $100,000? They sell now for $200, $300, $400, $500,000. In some places, a million dollars or more. In some places, $2 million or more. The white families who bought those homes subsidized by the federal government with FHA or VA mortgages didn't expect to get rich by moving to these suburbs. That wasn't their idea. It was a housing shortage. They needed a place to live. Nobody expected the homes to appreciate in that way. But in fact, they did appreciate. And the white families who bought those homes with federal subsidies used the wealth that they gained from the equity in those homes. They used it to send their children to college. They used it to take care of perhaps temporary emergencies, maybe a short-term unemployment or a medical emergency. They used it to subsidize their own retirements. And they used it to bequeath wealth to their children and grandchildren, who then had down payments for their own homes. African-Americans were prohibited by explicit federal policy from participating in that wealth-generating exercise. The result is that today, African-American incomes on average are about 60%, 6-0% of white incomes, on average family incomes. There's a whole story behind that. That's a different lecture. I'm not going to go into it, but African-Americans on average have lower incomes than whites. You would think, though, that if the income ratio is about 60%, the wealth ratio would also be about 60%. People can save the same amount of money from the same incomes. But in truth, while African-American incomes today are about 60% of white incomes, African-American wealth is about 5% of white wealth, some estimates even less. The entire reason for that enormous disparity between the 5% wealth ratio and the 60% wealth ratio is unconstitutional federal housing policy that was practiced in the mid-20th century. And that's never been remedied. That we, all of us, have never accepted a responsibility and obligation to remedy. It's a constitutional violation. If we take our responsibilities as Americans seriously, we should have an obligation to remedy that. But instead, we think, well, it's too bad, but it'll take care of itself if we weigh the century or two. That wealth gap in particular perpetuates the housing crisis that we have in this country today. Clearly, we passed the Fair Housing Act. As you know, in April of a year, some time ago, 1968, we passed the Fair Housing Act. It said, in effect, okay, African-Americans, yeah, we excluded you from these suburbs when they were developed, but you're free to move there now. Nobody's going to stop you. It's a free country, and we have non-discrimination laws. But those homes are no longer affordable. They're not affordable to most middle-class families of either race, much less to the African-American families who have less wealth and no inherited wealth from their parents. Levittown, the example I used in the book today, because of the Fair Housing Act, has about a 2% African-American population in a broader area around it, Nassau County, New York, which has about a 13% African-American population. So the difference between that 2% and 13% that you would expect if African-Americans and whites had been treated similarly is the unremedied consequence of that particular federal policy. And that policy, that wealth gap and the exclusion of African-Americans from healthier neighborhoods, places with clean air, places with supermarkets that sell fresh food, places with schools that aren't overcrowded and under-resourced, places that have less disruption and turmoil and crime, places that have less dilapidated buildings. The African-Americans who are excluded from those neighborhoods suffer from lack of all of those advantages, and you can understand many of the disparities that we have in the races today because of their exclusion from healthier neighborhoods, health disparities. As you all know, African-Americans have short-life expectancies on average, greater rates of cardiovascular disease, largely attributable to living in less healthy neighborhoods, less healthy air, places where certainly sometimes by requirement of local zoning laws, places where polluting industries are located, African-Americans send their children to school with disabilities, health disabilities, health challenges that impede their ability to learn. I used to be an education columnist, that's how I really got into this field, was thinking about public education. And I remember writing one column about asthma. You may not know this, but asthma, children, African-American children in urban neighborhoods have asthma at about four times the rate of middle-class children and middle-class suburban neighborhoods, four times the rate. It's enormous difference. It's not true in every case of a child who has asthma, but if a child does have asthma, that child is more likely, not in every case, but more likely than a child who doesn't, to be up at night wheezing, especially if they live in an area without access to the kind of primary healthcare that would provide inhalators and other symptomatic treatments. So a child's more likely to be up at night wheezing, and then the child comes to school the next day drowsy. Well, if you have two groups of children who are identical in every respect, except one group is drowsier than the other, that group is not going to achieve in school as well as the group that comes to school well rested. And you go through example after example of these kinds of challenges. Lead poisoning, something I'm sure you've read about, has a measurable impact on IQ, much more prevalent in neighborhoods where buildings have dilapidated, where there's dust in the environment, where diesel trucks are driving past children's homes. Lead poisoning, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise, impedes cognitive development, causes the achievement gap in part. Begin to add all of these up and pretty much you've explained what we call the achievement gap in education, all because African Americans are concentrated in neighborhoods that were disadvantaged. We spent a lot of time in the last few years talking about the police abuse of African Americans. How could it be otherwise? If we concentrate the most disadvantaged young men in single neighborhoods where they have no access to good jobs, no access to transportation to get to those jobs, no access to schools that aren't overwhelmed with the social and economic problems of their children, it's inevitable that the police and they are going to engage in confrontations leading to the kinds of tragedies as well as the more routine excess imprisonment of that young African American face. That's also attributable to the concentration of black people in neighborhoods where they are in effect locked in and were prohibited at a time when they could have left to leave. Well, I'll give one other example of a federal policy that imposed segregation in this society. Public housing, something we all I think we understand, but don't, we think public housing is a place where poor people live. That's what I thought before I began to do this research. It's not how public housing began in this country. There was no civilian public housing before the 1930s, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression. Public housing was started during the New Deal by the federal government, not for the poor, but for working families who could pay full rent. It wasn't subsidized. We had public housing for people paying full rent. The reason we built it was because we had an enormous housing shortage in the Depression. No construction was going on. But everywhere that the federal government built public housing, it segregated it. Separate projects for whites, separate projects for African Americans, frequently creating segregation in those downtown neighborhoods that I was talking about before where blacks and whites were living in reasonably the same areas. In the color of law, I refer to the autobiography of the great African American poet, novelist, playwright, Langston Hughes, some of you, I hope all of you have heard of him, some of you may have read him. He wrote in his autobiography how he grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood, Cleveland, Ohio. We don't think of downtown Cleveland, Ohio as being an integrated place. He said his best friend in high school was Polish. He said he dated a Jewish girl in high school. This was an integrated neighborhood, an integrated school he went to, an integrated neighborhood. Well, the Public Works Administration, the first New Deal agency went into that neighborhood, demolished housing, and built two separate projects. One for whites, one for African Americans, creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed, and then reinforcing it with other segregated projects that created the segregated Cleveland that we know today. When I was a young man in the mid 1960s, I was a research assistant, rather, for the Chicago Urban League. I worked on a lawsuit that civil rights advocates had filed against the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago City Council for the fact that they were placing public housing projects for whites in white neighborhoods and public housing projects for African Americans in black neighborhoods. This was in the 1960s. This is what the federal government and local public housing authorities were doing. Reinforcing whatever segregated patterns had otherwise grown up at that time in those cities. This was in Chicago. So when I began to work on this book, The Color of Law, perhaps 10 years ago, 10 or 15 years ago, that came back to my mind. This experience I had 50 years earlier of working on this lawsuit and for those of you who know housing policy, you'll know it was, oh, come on, you can walk. I was talking about the patrocute is what it's called, G-A-U-T-R-E-A-U-X, some of you may be familiar with it. All right, I gave talks like this all over the country after this book came out. I think I gave one over Zoom during COVID here in Vermont. The people read the book, they came to my talks, they were shocked. As I was when I did the research, I didn't think there was anything wrong with them. And they frequently asked me, well, okay, what can we do about it now? And although I plan to retire after that book was written, I realized that I had an obligation to try to answer their question. I couldn't leave them hanging after telling them this story. But I didn't have the ability to answer that question by myself because I knew the history and I knew the education policy, I knew the history of housing. I didn't know much about current housing policy. So I started to learn some and realized I still couldn't learn enough. So I had to hire somebody to collaborate with me in writing a new book to answer this question about what we could do. And I looked around and I found the most qualified person I could possibly imagine. Leah Rothstein, my daughter, who was a housing expert, been involved in affordable housing development and consulting. And I asked her to collaborate with me in writing a new book. So we did. I will say it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life was this collaboration. I'm very grateful to her. And I want now to ask her to go up and give some of the answers that we developed about what we could do about it. Hi, good evening. All right, thank you all for being here. It's great to see such a good crowd on a Monday night. So I'm gonna pick up where my dad left off and hopefully get to a little bit more of the hopeful action oriented. Where do we go from here? How can we make an impact on these issues? I hope to leave you feeling hopeful and activated and excited. So that's where we're going. So as my dad mentioned in his talk, once we sort of reckon with the true history of how we came to be a segregated country, that it was government policy intentionally separating blacks from whites and neighborhoods all over, communities all over the country, we can start to see that we have an obligation to do something about it. When our government violates the Constitution, once we reckon with that fact, we have an obligation to remedy it. But nobody has really stepped up to that obligation on this issue to remedy segregation nationwide. And we believe that one of the reasons might be because we don't really know what to do. It's not obvious, it's not easy, it feels like a overwhelming, intractable problem, sort of just the way things are, how can we ever change it? So that's one of the reasons why we wrote this book to show that there's actually a lot that can be done in all sorts of communities all over the country. And what we argue in just action is that to live up to that obligation, we need to build a reactivated civil rights movement that is formed by local groups in our own communities that are educated about how we got here, educated about the history of segregation and then activated and ready to take on some advocacy work in their own communities. And we might think that we're maybe on our way towards reactivating the civil rights movement. We had a racial reckoning in 2020. More people came out to march for Black lives and have ever marched in racial justice demonstrations before. It felt like maybe a new day was dawning, we were turning the tide, we were gonna make some change. But then what happened after those demonstrations is a lot of people went home, they maybe put lawn signs on their front lawns, they maybe started book clubs, maybe they went back to their corporations and hired DEI officers, they maybe issued letters to their shareholders denouncing racism and promising to do better. Now all of these actions, they're important to build awareness, lawn signs, book clubs, letters to shareholders, but in and of themselves, they don't change anything. So we have to go beyond those performative acts and actually make some change in our own communities. Now what we argue in just action also is that to do this, we should start locally. Because even though the federal government had a large role to play in creating segregation, once a neighborhood, a community is segregated, to a large extent local policy, local government maintains and perpetuates that segregation. So if we wanna challenge and remedy the ongoing consequences of that segregation, there's a lot that we can do locally and a lot of policies that we can change or enact that can go a long way towards challenging the segregation of our communities. So how do we start to build this activated civil rights movement? Well, we argue that to start, we need to build biracial, multi-ethnic committees in our own communities that are ready to take on this issue. These committees, these groups should have leadership that's both black and white. And these committees need to be built on some social relationships and social connections. And we understand that that in itself might seem daunting. We live in very segregated communities. We don't necessarily have social contact with people of other races outside of the workplace. Going about our day-to-day lives, we tend to see people who look like us. So we wanted to show that it might seem daunting, but it's not impossible. There's a lot of examples out there that we wrote about and that are continuing to happen of communities, groups that have taken some intentional steps to bring people together from segregated neighborhoods in their own cities and start to build these social connections and social relationships. So one example we wrote about is from Chicago. This project was started by an artist named Tanika Johnson. She's a photographer. And she took the unique layout of Chicago, which is laid out in a perfect grid. So when you fold the map in half, the north side and the south side of the same street and the houses with the same house numbers sit perfectly on top of each other. The north side of Chicago is almost all white, the south side, mostly African-American. So she folded the map in half. It's called the Folded Map Project and called the houses that sit perfectly on top of each other map twins. And she went and photographed the houses, the map twin houses, and she did an exhibit to show these houses aren't that different, but they exist in a very different context because of the ongoing consequences of the segregation of Chicago. And then she went a step further and she introduced herself. She knocked on the doors of the map twin houses and introduced herself to the residents and asked if they wanted to take part in her project. And many of them said yes. And to be a part of the map twin project, they agreed to meet their map twin and tour each other's neighborhoods and get together over a certain amount of time. And many people who participated in this project, they had lived in Chicago their whole lives and had never known someone from the other side of town or been to the other side of town. They started to develop relationships, learned that they weren't all that different, learned a little bit about how different their neighborhoods were. And then they went on to form block twin groups and do some neighborhood beautification efforts. And this program is just sort of the relationships are expanding and ongoing. Now, Tanika is a, she's a photographer. She's also sort of an organizer, but mostly a photographer. But the next step would be for an organizer to come into these block twin groups and then get these groups organized to start to advocate for changes in Chicago that can affect some of the consequences of segregation that they're learning about by being connected with their map twins. So we tell that story to show that, it does take some intentional steps to build these cross race relationships, but it's not impossible. It doesn't take a perfect grid map to do this. There's a lot of communities that are doing it other ways. You know, and it doesn't have to be a map twin project, but can bring people together from segregated parts of the same city to start to build relationships and social networks that can then be used to enact change locally. So once these groups are formed, we describe in just action dozens of policies, strategies, programs that these groups can advocate for adopting or changing locally. And the policies and strategies that we describe, we also give for all of them an example of some community somewhere in the country that successfully enacted that strategy to show, again, it's not impossible, it's happening all around the country. People are taking on these issues in their own communities. And then the strategies and policies that we discussed, they do two things. They look to the future to ensure that we don't continue to perpetuate and maintain segregation going forward. So changing the policies we have to change to ensure that we don't do that. And they look to the past because we can't truly redress and remedy segregation if we ignore all of the racial disparities that exist as a consequence of segregation. So the wealth gap, for example, we can't just look to the future and ignore the fact that we have this huge wealth gap between blacks and whites. So we need policies and strategies that can address that wealth gap as well. So then we group these policies and strategies into two main categories. The first category are what are called place-based strategies. And these are strategies and policies that are concerned with increasing investments in lower income segregated, predominantly African American communities where the concentration of poverty is a direct result of government sponsored segregation. So if we want to remedy the consequences of that segregation, we want to make those neighborhoods what are called areas of higher opportunity. We want residents there to have access to opportunity, to jobs, to clean air, grocery stores, well-resourced public schools. So we want to increase investments there. Now we also understand when you increase investments in lower income communities, oftentimes what happens, gentrification occurs. People with higher incomes want to move in, they drive up the housing costs, and the long-time residents are displaced. I'm running out of breath, I'm gonna just take a breath. So we want to couple these increased investment strategies with anti-displacement strategies to prevent some of the displacement that can occur when gentrification happens. So some strategies that fall into this category include, like was mentioned earlier, just cause eviction ordinances that protect renters from unjust evictions, rent regulations to protect renters from rapidly increasing rents, because oftentimes when a community is gentrifying, landlords will find reasons, you know, unfound reasons to, or unjust reasons to evict tenants, or they'll jack up rents to get their lower income tenants out to bring higher paying tenants in. So we want to prevent some of that from occurring. We can also adopt inclusionary zoning ordinances. These are ordinances that require that when new housing is built in a neighborhood, a certain percentage of the units have to be affordable to lower moderate income households. So in gentrifying communities, there's often a lot of market rate housing being built. So by ensuring that a certain percent, 10, 15% of those new units are affordable, that can create some housing opportunity for the long-time residents of those neighborhoods, and prevent some of their displacement. So that's one category, these place-based and anti-displacement strategies. The other category we talk about are what are called mobility strategies. And these are policies and programs that aim to open up exclusive, expensive, usually predominantly white, usually suburban communities to more diverse residents. So we need to do both of these things if we're truly to challenge segregation. Some of these strategies and policies include reforming our zoning codes. We have to ensure that we can build a range of housing types and sizes and affordabilities in communities, including suburban communities, to ensure that people with a range of incomes and wealth levels can move into those areas. Inclusionary zoning is another policy that works well in suburban communities, again, requiring that new housing that's built maintain some units that are affordable. We can also provide subsidies for families who've historically been excluded from these communities, rental subsidies, home ownership subsidies. Also, by building mixed income developments in these communities, we can ensure that we can build and not only desegregate the whole neighborhood, but desegregate buildings as well, and ensure that in each development, we have units that are affordable for lower income, middle income, and higher income families. So then we also discuss strategies that kind of fall into any kind of neighborhood, and these include strategies and programs that can increase home ownership opportunities for African Americans. As we heard from my dad earlier, we have a wealth gap in this country between blacks and whites, a resulting home ownership gap between blacks and whites that's as large as it was when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. So let that sink in for a minute. We passed this Fair Housing Act in 1968, and we still have the same, if not a little bit larger gap in home ownership rates between blacks and whites today as we did then. One big reason is because of that wealth gap that we've been talking about. We understand we cannot redress the harms of segregation without addressing this home ownership gap. We can't close the wealth gap without closing this home ownership gap. And so increasing home ownership opportunities, access to home ownership for African American households is essential, and there's a lot of ways that we can do that. We discuss one main way is providing down payment assistance for African American families. This will address some of that lack of intergenerational wealth because of past government policies. And so it can be a remedy for the harms created by past government policies. We argue in just action that programs like down payment assistance should be race specific and targeted to African Americans specifically to address the race specific harms that they have suffered as a result of government policy. Now we know that many are hesitant to enact these kinds of race specific policies. We have a Supreme Court today who believes that we're a colorblind society. And so we shouldn't have any government policies or programs that acknowledge race, let alone target benefits by race. Now we argue that we can't remedy these race specific harms of the government without race specific programs. There are down payment assistance programs that they provide benefits to first time home buyers or first generation home buyers. And those are some ways of trying to reach more African American home buyers. But in every case, there will be more whites who qualify for those programs and African Americans. So the only way to enact a program that truly redresses this race specific harm is to have down payment assistance programs that are targeted specifically to African American home buyers. So we describe in just action, excuse me, some private down payment assistance programs started by real estate agents, other people in the real estate field who saw what the consequences of their industry has been on the home ownership rate for African Americans and have started down payment assistance funds to provide grants to African American home buyers in their own cities. We can all support these kinds of efforts, start them ourselves. But there's also ways to create these types of programs through government agencies, through banks, that is allowed by the federal government under federal law that was passed in 1976. And it's called the Special Purpose Credit Program, or SPCPs. So Special Purpose Credit Programs, it's a law that authorizes banks and public agencies to enact a race specific financial benefit. If it can do a study that shows that that race has been disadvantaged by that financial industry or by the government in the past. That's not impossible to show in these studies. But this has been on the books for as long as I've been alive and banks have only just started adopting SPCPs in the last few years. And they're not really hitting the mark quite yet in reaching African American home buyers. But there's a long way to go and there's a lot of sort of learning and technical assistance being provided to banks and public agencies to adopt these kinds of programs. And there's one that is, I think, very promising for us all to keep an eye on. And it was enacted in Washington State after we finished writing the book, so it's not included in the book. But the state, Washington there, they first enacted or underwent a research inventory project through their university that inventoried all of the racially restrictive covenants around the state. These were the covenants written into the deeds of homes in the mid 20th century that said that the home could only ever be owned or occupied by whites, no longer legally enforceable, but still on the deeds of homes forever. So a group of volunteers at the university there started to research these and found 50,000 restrictive covenants all across the state. And based on that research, the legislature passed and the governor signed the Washington Covenant Home Ownership Act. And this act, it applies a $100 fee to every real estate transaction in the state going forward. And that fee goes into a fund that will then be a special purpose credit program that will provide down payment assistance to families who either lived in Washington and were excluded from home ownership when those restrictive covenants were being enforced or who are descended from those who were restricted from home ownership at the time through those restrictive covenants. So again, a race specific solution and program specifically tied to the harm that was enacted by government and private institutions through restricting home ownership to whites only. So this is a great example. We should all be following. This is the first public agency that's adopted a special purpose credit program and more should follow its lead. So that's one example of something we can do locally or statewide to help address and redress the harms of segregation. Another important strategy for opening up exclusive, expensive, predominantly white communities to more diverse residents, like I mentioned, is zoning changes. So changing zoning is getting a lot of attention, a lot of traction all around the country. Burlington here just enacted a big rezoning effort. So a lot of, yeah, that deserves applause. Yeah. So zoning, single family only zoning is used in 75% of residentially zoned land around the country and most suburban communities are zoned completely for single family only homes. So that means every lot allows only one home. So when you do that, when you restrict how many homes can be built in a community, you're ensuring that the homes will remain unaffordable, will remain expensive and keep getting more expensive as demand increases because the supply cannot increase. The single family only zoning became prominent in this country when racialized zoning became unconstitutional. So it used to be that cities would zone their residential areas by race, saying who could live where based on their race. When the Supreme Court said that cities could no longer do that, they started using single family only zoning to accomplish the same thing. So if we want to challenge the segregation created by that zoning and address the housing crisis we're in as a country, we have to allow housing supply to increase and we have to do that by changing our zoning codes. So changing zoning to allow more than one home per lot, duplexes, triplexes, to allow more dense housing near transit or commercial corridors, for example, to allow ADUs or granny flats to be built on single family lots. These are all things that communities across the country and Burlington have been adopting to address the housing affordability crisis and they can also be a good strategy for addressing segregation but we have to be intentional about that because on their own, they may not actually impact segregation if we're not also intentionally looking at zoning in terms of its segregative impacts. We also know that even when a community like Burlington re-zones its zoning code, which is a great first step, that that's not the end of it, right? You might have the zoning code allow a multi-family building in a neighborhood and then when one is proposed, residents will oppose it. Now, this happens all over the country when denser housing is proposed in a neighborhood. You know, we usually call those who oppose this kind of housing nimbies, not in my backyard. These are often people who say that they support affordable housing until affordable housing is proposed in their own neighborhood. Now, they often use arguments that say, you know, we're trying to protect our community's character. We don't want dense housing because it'll threaten the character of our community. So this argument is not new. It's been around for a long time when we talk about changing housing, particularly in suburban communities. And I think it's important that we all remember and that we talk to our neighbors about this when these issues come up to think about what this means and what character are we trying to protect? So when single family only zoning is used to maintain white communities as whites and we're trying to protect that character, is that really what we want to be protecting? I would argue no. And so when these, when those folks, NIMBY folks come out to oppose multifamily housing developments or denser housing or rezoning changes, that we have to organize supporters for those changes to be just as vocal and just as impactful as the opposition is. Those who oppose these kinds of changes have been very vocal and very successful all around the country in blocking housing development because they feel so personally impacted. They feel like their property values will go down, which they don't. They are worried about the character of their communities so they come out to meetings to oppose these developments. City council meetings, planning commission meetings, they're very vocal, they're very consistent and they often win. They either block the development or delay it so long that it's essentially blocked. Now we write about examples of communities that have organized supporters to be just as vocal and just as consistent to support housing development and that's what we need if we're going to advance these changes and actually have an impact on our communities. It's one thing to change a zoning code but then we have to also turn out to support the new housing that's proposed under those changes. So to do that we need to again be organized, talking to our neighbors and coming out to be vocal in our support for protecting the character of our community as one that is accessible, that is inclusive and diverse and that allows a diverse population to be able to live in our communities. So I'll give just a bit of data on what these kinds of zoning changes do. You know, many of them are very new so they haven't been in place long enough to really know what their impacts have been but Minneapolis is the first city that underwent one of these citywide rezoning efforts several years ago and there've been some studies recently that came out about what the effects of those efforts have been. Now their most impactful rezoning has been to allow multifamily apartment buildings near transit stops and commercial corridors and that has produced a lot of housing. They have actually increased their housing supply while most cities around the country in the last few years have not. They've seen a flat level of housing supply and in most cities around the country rents have gone up a lot. Minneapolis' have gone down. Also in Minneapolis, their homeless rate has decreased while the rest of the state and the rest of the country, the rate of those suffering homelessness has increased. As well in Minneapolis, their African-American population has increased while in most other large cities that has not increased its housing supply where rents are rising, the African-American population has been displaced and they've left those cities. So we don't yet have evidence from Minneapolis on how these zoning changes have changed or impacted segregation on a neighborhood level but on a city-wide level, it does seem to be having some positive impacts. So that's something to sort of carry forward as we continue to advocate for these changes that they can be impactful. Increasing housing supply is the first step towards addressing all of these issues, housing unaffordability, segregation, homelessness, all of the issues that we care about. I'll give one more example from Just Action of a strategy that we can enact locally or participate in and that has to do with the Section 8 program. So the Section 8 program is the largest rental subsidy in the country that provides a rental voucher to low-income families and over two million families receive a Section 8 housing choice voucher and what the housing choice voucher, Section 8 program, what's considered a mobile benefit. So unlike a public housing resident whose benefit comes connected to a unit in a building, when you have a Section 8 housing choice voucher benefit, you can use that voucher to rent anywhere in the private market in the jurisdiction of your public housing authority. So when the Section 8 program was adopted, it had the potential, the promise, the intention to allow lower-income families the opportunity to use that voucher to live in higher-opportunity neighborhoods if they wished to because it was mobile. But only 5% of Section 8 families use their vouchers or able to use their vouchers to rent units in high-opportunity communities. 5% is a very low number and white voucher holders are far more likely to be able to rent in a high-opportunity community than African Americans. So there's one main reason for this and that is discrimination. Discrimination against tenants who use Section 8 to pay their rent is an allowed form of discrimination on the federal level, but on the local level, many cities and states have adopted what are called source of income discrimination ordinances and Vermont has a statewide ordinance, I believe. And so here in this state, it is not legal to discriminate against a tenant who uses Section 8 to pay their rent. But as many of us in this room know, just saying that it's not allowed doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I'm sure just like every other community that has a source of income discrimination law, I'm sure here as well, discrimination still occurs. And so the best way, the really only way to really know where discrimination is happening so that we can enforce the law and stop that discrimination is through what are called paired testing programs. And that is when a Fair Housing Center, local civil rights agency here in Vermont, I believe it's Vermont Legal Aid that does this work and the Human Rights Commission may start too soon. They run these paired testing programs where they send potential tenants to inquire about a unit that's listed as for rent. Some say they use Section 8 to pay their rent. Some say they don't if you're testing for Section 8 discrimination. And you can see how the people are treated and if they're treated differently, that's the only way we can really know where discrimination is happening. Now these programs, they often need volunteers or participants to be testers. So that's a way individually we can participate in solutions that can really impact the opportunity for those on Section 8 to be able to live in any community that they want to live in. So I would encourage you to look into opportunities to do that if you're interested in doing that. And there's also other ways, if you know people who own units who are landlords, talk to them about how they feel about renting to Section 8 tenants and maybe help dispel some of the myths that are out there about what it's like to rent to Section 8 tenants. We talked to a lot of landlords who prefer their tenants to have Section 8 because those tenants are more stable, they take better care of their property. So there's a lot of things we can do to help open up opportunity for these folks to live in higher opportunity communities and that's something that can go a long way towards desegregating those communities as well. So those are a few examples that are from just action and beyond because things are always constantly changing in these issues and new changes are being adopted, new groups are having victories. We're continuing to write about those issues in a sub-stack column that you can subscribe to for free. It's justaction.substack.com. And I hope that what comes across from the few examples I've given and from our book and from our sub-stack column is that there's, segregation might feel overwhelming, might feel intractable, but there's actually so much that we can do that can have an impact. And we're mistaken if we think that there's one perfect answer, one action we can take, one policy we can adopt that will fix this or have the biggest impact. It's really gonna take a lot of smaller changes just like a lot of smaller policies and actions went into creating segregation that's gonna take a lot to undo it. And so we don't lack for ideas or opportunities and we just need to get started on working on them. So thank you so much for listening and I believe we will take some questions now. Thank you so much, Leigh Ann Richard that was inspiring. And a quick plug before we move to the questions, if you wanna get more involved on a local or statewide level, I really encourage you to connect with the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont. So the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, HHAV, is at the merger of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition and the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness. And on the welcome table, HHAV has brought some fact sheets and policy statements so you can learn a little more about what's happening in the state legislature right now and there are a lot of ways that you can get involved and try and get some of these important changes past so that we can move towards more housing justice here in Vermont. So are we ready for questions? Ready? Good. We'll go to Bruce first. I will stand up by my knees, bother me. So thank you, Leigh Ann, last time I sat here was in Denver at the HUD conference with my incredible Humorize team. And so I appreciate you coming to Vermont. So I'm Bruce Wilson, Humorize Commissioner and the question is, and I'm from Chicago actually. And so the question is, I know a lot of organizations in the HUD and places like that are doing the down payments you know, helping with the down payments for housing. So the thing is, you know, me living in Vermont since 89 and me living in Chicago, the demographics is different and the individuals of African-Americans or people who look like POC or BIPOC people, it's hard to, you know, you might get the loan we might get the free voucher or whatever it is, but we still couldn't live out of the area that we are living. The economically challenges is that's what it is the economic challenge. Because we're still making the same amount of money that we've been making under other people, you know, white people, especially. And so the problem is still like, you know, we get some assistance, but we only can move in an area that we live in. And so some of those areas could be, you know, also economically challenged, high risk, blighted. And so, you know, how are we really getting better? Well, there's a lot of, the down payment assistance is one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of pieces that go into sort of addressing all of the obstacles to home ownership in all kinds of communities. So down payment assistance to bring down the cost of the house so that, you know, your income is enough to cover a mortgage. There's also building housing that is smaller, you know, allowing more dense housing can provide, you know, houses that aren't one home on a huge lot that tend to be very, very expensive by rezoning to allow a more diverse housing type to exist in the community. There's a more, a larger range of affordability. So bringing down the cost of housing by increasing supply. There's also, and I didn't have time to get into many examples, but reforming the credit scoring system is another piece of the puzzle that would allow African-Americans sort of access to better mortgages by, so the credit scoring system is, you know, we think of it as an objective rating of our future likelihood of being able to repay a debt. It's based on your financial history. If you've not defaulted in the past, they think you're a good candidate for a mortgage, you have a higher credit score, you're then qualified for a mortgage, and if it's high enough, you can get a good interest rate. But how the credit scoring system works is it only factors in a certain type of financial history, and it's a type of financial history that whites are far more likely to have than African-Americans. Not because they're worse candidates for a mortgage, but because African-Americans tend to live in neighborhoods that don't have bank branches. And so they may rely on non-traditional financial institutions like payday lenders. Even if you pay back alone from a payday lender in full on time, that financial history isn't factored into a credit score. If you've been a renter your whole life, you never missed a rent payment, that financial history isn't factored into a credit score. So by reforming the credit scoring system to count rental payment history or utility bill payment history, these are all things that have a paper trail that we can start using in the credit scoring algorithm. That goes a long way towards opening up credit access for African-Americans, and that can help open up mortgage access and bring down the cost of a mortgage by bringing down the interest rate. So there's a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but I appreciate that question because it's complicated and it's a puzzle, but there's a lot that can be done. And for the credit scoring issue, it's a national system, the credit scoring agencies, and there's some changes being enacted on the national level to allow to opt in to having your rental payment history counted, but it's a slow change, it's been a long time coming, it's still an opt in. While we're waiting for that to become the law of the land, we can advocate that our local financial institutions start factoring rental payment history into their own credit scoring algorithms for calculating mortgage eligibility, and many do that. Local bank branches, credit unions have adjusted their own credit scoring rating system to count rental payment history, so that's something we can do, advocate locally for those changes. More questions. Oh, and I forgot to mention too, when you ask a question, could you please direct it to either Leah or Richard, so they know, or both? Thank you. So here in Burlington, we do have inclusionary zoning, and there are some other communities across Vermont that have since enacted inclusionary zoning. It's great, it's amazing. Something that we do see is that larger developments, when they're developed, the affordable housing is separate from market rate housing, and it's something you specifically talked about in the book. So I was wondering if you have any insights in how we can, you know, kind of warm up our developers to see this other, to consider developing mixed income housing. And then one thing I do wanna say is, as we've mentioned multiple times, we have a really extreme housing shortage, and so there's some fear around pushing back against that because there is, the fear is that it's putting in another barrier to developing the housing that we need. Is that a question? Yeah, well, it all starts with the way Leah started, and that is without a popular movement that's going to demand change, it won't happen just from policymakers and public policy institutes and public agencies. It won't start there unless there's a popular movement, people getting together the way that Leah talked about at the very beginning of her talk, blacks and whites and others together, demanding these kinds of policies, they won't happen. And I think that's the way we do it. It's the only way to do it. And some things they can demand around this is ensuring that the inclusionary policy doesn't have too many loopholes or sort of opt-outs, like building the affordable units off-site or paying a fee instead of building the units. So having a strong inclusionary ordinance that's based on a study that can show what level of inclusionary requirement would make a developer not build that development. And that is a doable economic feasibility study. And so developers when facing an inclusionary ordinance will always say, well, this will stop, we won't build, it's too expensive. And you can do the numbers and calculate at what point it will be too expensive and ensure you don't set the inclusionary requirements too high and then they'll still build if they can make some money off of it. So having sort of a smartly crafted inclusionary ordinances is really important. Hi, I'm with the city of Burlington. My name is Pikkio Manivan and I do have a focus in housing. So I really appreciate you both coming here and really sharing the ideas that you have in policy and both action. My question is, have you seen any municipalities use abatement, like tax abatement for programs and also in addition, I believe there's some mortgages that still deter people from renting to low income. Is that something that you've seen across other mortgages? And is that something that we should be considering to really fight against? Well, I'll give you one example. In just action, we actually focus, and this is a weird coincidence, we focus on two banks that were issued, there was a community action against them. People were organizing, there were demonstrations in front of them. We have photographs of the demonstrations in front of these banks. Members of these community organizations went to the stockholders meetings of the banks and protested their policies. The policy they were protesting was both of these banks were issuing mortgages to multi-unit building owners whose mortgages penciled out only if they pushed out existing residents and rented higher income residents at higher prices. So the banks, in effect, were creating a financial requirement that gentrification take place and that existing residents would have to be pushed out. Well, I don't know if every bank is doing this. Oh, I said it was a weird coincidence. We didn't notice when we wrote the book, nobody did, but the two banks that we featured were Republic Bank and Signature Bank. And some of you may recognize those names, those are the two banks that almost collapsed the entire financial system about a year and a half ago. But a community organization should be monitoring the kinds of mortgages that every bank in their community is issuing. And whether it's doing that kind of thing to issue mortgages to landlords who can only pay back their mortgages if they have an income stream with higher paying tenants. Hi, thank you so much. My name is Julia. I'm a community planner at a local firm here, and I often work with Vermont communities on rezoning efforts, efforts to increase missing middle housing and just generally expand housing opportunity. And something I run into frequently is planning commissions and community members are really hesitant to accept changes that would allow taller building heights. And to them, tall is three or four stories. And it's something that I've always struggled to understand because there's actually this wonderful mural that's in the Echo Museum just around the corner here. And there's one, a similar one at City Market, the grocery store here that shows a vista landscape. If you looked at it and asked anyone here, what is that supposed to depict? They would say, oh, that's Vermont. That's a cute little town of Vermont. And guess how many stories are in that little town there? Four stories. So I'm just always struggled to understand when I hear from folks that they are really hesitant to accept something with four stories. I'm wondering if either of you have come across anything in your research about where that fear or hesitancy around taller buildings has come from. And I've looked into it a little bit, but haven't really found anything. And I'm curious if there's any relationship between the negative association that we've been taught to have with public housing, if there's any relationship there. So just wondering if you've come across anything about that and any talking points that you might suggest to talk with folks about building heights because personally, I think people get scared of the number, but they don't actually know the exact height that they're talking about. And something that's four stories can still be human-scaled and neighborhood-scale. Well, one of the problems that we have, and I'm coming back to the same point again, is that opponents of greater density, not exorbitant density, but the kind that you're talking about, are much more vocal and organized than supporters. Leah mentioned that we have a sub-stack column, and we write about things that we've learned about since the book was published. Well, Leah wrote a column a month or two ago, maybe a couple of months now, about a while ago. I can't count that high anymore, but it was a while ago. But all these columns are available, they're for free, we don't charge for the column. And if you just sign up for it, you can find the column, I'll describe it to you. It was a suburban community in South of San Francisco, very wealthy community, all white, which couldn't retain its education staff, its teachers, its education staff, because nobody could afford to live near the community where they worked. And so they had a 30% teacher turnover every year. So the school district which had empty land proposed to build a multi-unit housing. I don't know how many stories it was, but it was more than the single family zoning that the entire community was zoned for. And there was a group that educated itself about the history of segregation, and decided they were going to do something about it. They called them, the name of the community was Menlo Park. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the San Francisco, a very wealthy community, and they called themselves Menlo Together. And when the silk school district proposed to build this development on vacant land that it had, a group of people who lived in the community put an initiative on the ballot. They would prohibit any change in the single family zoning of the community without a referendum vote. In effect, expecting that this would end the desire to build this housing. And Menlo Together organized, and they went door to door in the community, knocking on doors, educating people about do they really want to live in a community that excludes people the way it does? Wouldn't they prefer to live in a more interesting diverse community? They went door to door, and in this community of all white single family, home, very, very rich people, they defeated the referendum. And we're gonna be reporting on this as it develops. The builder is now going ahead, getting approval for the designs of the project to do it. So that's what it takes. The opposition to four stories is just an excuse. If that weren't an excuse to come, the character of the community would change. There's another one that you hear all the time, as well as the blatantly racial ones, like this will bring crime to our community. Or we can't afford to house all the additional students that will result. There'll be one excuse after another. But the only way to resist it is to organize your neighbors. And Leah mentioned this before. There were 20 million people who participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, 20 million. It was the largest outpouring of racial justice for racial justice in this country's history. And they were both black and white. They were middle class and lower income. They were suburban and urban. There's an enormous potential, there's enormous untapped support for solving this problem. If only people get off their doffs and start to do it. And it has to be at a local, wasn't I allowed to say that? Oh, okay, all right. You know, it can't be done just by local officials. They've got to have pressure from below in order to make these kinds of things happen. I just wanna add, you know, an important piece of the story from Menlo Park and from other communities that have accomplished similar things is connecting where we are today with the history of how we got here. I think it's a really dangerous piece of this, you know, the opposition to four stories, for example. People look around, they see these large single family homes. They see, you know, a community of mostly homeowners. And they think that this is just the natural way this community has developed. And it's just, you know, sort of natural that the home prices here will be high and that we can afford it. Those of us who live here and connecting it to the policies that created that community to not allow four stories until now and what the motivations of those policies were. And that's how we can start to build the support for changing the policies that have created the current context we live in because many of the motivations behind those were exclusionary, trying to keep other people out, trying to keep people with lower incomes out of our communities. And once we recognize that, and this is what the Menlo Together folks did, they went around the community doing these trainings about the history of housing policy and segregation in their region. And people, once they learned that and this referendum came up that would have blocked the teacher housing, they understood that it was connected. So it's a lot harder to fight the things being proposed now when you connect them with how we got here and don't sort of live in this idea that this is just how it is. And I deserve to live here and deserve to have it never change also. We have to sort of get rid of the fear we have of communities changing. They should change and evolve, especially when we're talking about the climate and climate change. We need denser housing if we're gonna combat climate change and have shorter commutes and less spread out development. And so I think those are some ways to start to counter that opposition. So do we have time for two more questions? Hi, good evening, everyone. My name is Brian. Thank you so much for being here tonight. This question's for both of you. For the life of me, and I've always been pondering this, and I think I may have a reason, but I want to get your opinion based on your networking and traveling. What's the reason that you've heard of even when both the House and the Senate and the president are all belong to the same party? Why source of income, public assistance isn't part of the federal protected classes for housing discrimination? Well, we're a terribly evenly divided country, polarized. And as I said before, we underestimate the half that supports these policies and only hear the noises made by the opponents. But the reason we can't enact these policies is because, well, there are several. One is there's a filibuster in the Senate, which means that even though Democrats may support, may control the Senate, they can't get anything passed unless they have a two-thirds majority. Another reason is that when you have such a deeply divided country, you tend to only advance policies that aren't going to anger people who might be on the margins and come with you. And so you don't go for all the things that you know might solve the problem because otherwise, you'll lose the entire ball game. And that's what's going on now in this country. I mean, you can see it with immigration. Biden and the Senate Democrats agreed to compromise into immigration that they knew were wrong, but it was becoming an issue that could have turned the entire country over to opponents of all immigration reform. Well, maybe Leah and Richard can pick. Maybe we can squeeze in two more questions if they're quick. Okay. Thank you so much. I want to quickly reiterate how grateful we are to have you here and to the organizers for setting this up. My question is about, I guess it's for Leah. It's about the language that you choose to use in discussing these matters. So earlier when you were presenting, you mentioned that when we were looking at things like covenants, it's really important that those things that are gonna allow access and opportunity for black people, for example, that we have to follow through on the next steps in order to make sure those things will happen. And I fully get and support all of that. I was wondering though about using words like allow, allow black people to have those access and opportunity. And I wonder if there's a reason that type of wording is chosen, only because for me it sort of feels like it brings up this notion that there's a group of people who have to have all the power and have to grant the allow, versus saying that these groups of people are finally going to get the rights that they should have had all along. Do you know what I mean, the power dynamic structures? Yeah, I think what I intended to convey was the latter, what you said. Not if I said allow, that's not exactly what I meant. I mean open up access to what they should have access to and address all of the, and redress. Talking about the language we use, we use the term redress to not only challenge the segregation that exists, but to remedy the impacts of it. So to do that, we need to take some extra steps, not just open up access, but then provide benefits and programs and subsidies and everything to address the disparities, the unequal playing field that we have now. Thank you for that question. So we have time for one more question. And I know there are more questions out there, but just know that you can talk with Leah and Richard when they're signing your books in just a few minutes. Yes, and hopefully on a hopeful note, a question regarding income disparity initiatives. Are you familiar with the initiative that Vermont State Treasurer is promoting right now of baby bonds, something that's already been implemented in DC and Connecticut? And if you are, could you talk about what your opinion is of that and how we can make that actionable in this state? Yeah, I don't know about the Vermont proposal. I do know about baby bonds. It's not my expertise or what we write about, but I think it's a great program. And it's, you know, we need the, what we say in just action is, yes, we need these income policies to address the income gap and to address income disparities. It's sort of beyond the scope of our book and many of them are federal policies. And we're really very focused on local policies around housing and residential segregation, specifically linked to the crimes that the government committed in those aspects, but baby bonds. I think the same way we advocate for changes on all of these issues is we get together, we form groups, we, you know, show up at meetings, we call our council people, we elect the people that will pass these types of programs. And yeah, I think it's great that that's being proposed here. Well, thank you both so much. And before we transition to the next part of the evening, which is book signings, some delicious snacks and bar and music, I wanted to remind everyone that we have a whole month of events coming up for Fair Housing Month. Go to fairhousingmonthvt.org and there are community events, there are art events right here in Burlington, just a few blocks away where our new mayor is being inaugurated tonight. There's an amazing art exhibit curated by art, so wonderful. And there's some beautiful art that shows what home and community means. So I encourage you to take a peek at that. And before we wrap up, I'd like to pass it to Michael Montay from Champlain Housing Trust to close out this part of the evening. And then I invite everyone to come into the lobby. Thank you. I am keenly aware that I am keeping you from snacks. And let me just say, I missed a presentation, but I've heard both of you before when you made presentations to the neighborhoods groups and various settings. I think last year or two years ago at Hudson. And so both of those presentations were great for so many of nonprofit organizations to be able to hear what's happening. Let me just say that CHT had read two books somewhere about six or seven years ago. One was evicted, which is a stunning book in terms of its impact on people. And the other one was The Color of Law. Both books opened our eyes to what really needed to be done and made us examine what we were doing in terms of our own programs and policies, made us think about what we had to do to make sure that housing stayed a human right, made us challenge ourselves and to look at the data that we produce, the information, the housing that we create to make sure that people really had full access to the housing resources that we do. So those are very two important books. Thank you for just action as a follow-up. I was disappointed in your book that you didn't tell us what to do. And I'm really glad that she followed up. So thank you and thank you for CVOEO leading this and we're very happy to be sponsoring and supporting Fair Housing. And just remember, don't mourn, organize. Housing is a human right.