 Go ahead and get started. Welcome to New America and our event today, the Color of Money, Race, Wealth, and Communities on the Frontlines of Economic Justice. My name is Rachel Black. I co-direct our Family Center Social Policy Program here at New America, where we are working to investigate the role of identity in shaping social policy and develop the tools to make it more representative of and responsive to the families it serves. As Marisa Bereteran details in her new book, The Topic of Today's Conversation, identity has played a definitional role in determining who has wealth in this country and who doesn't. The Color of Money has been and continues to be white. As a consequence, black Americans own about the same amount of our nation's wealth as they did after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Importantly, the story we tell about why this gap continues more than 150 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation is really critical to shaping the kind of solutions that we craft. Unfortunately, these narratives that we use to understand the differences in wealth by race are actually the ones that we use to justify the government actions that created these differences to begin with. One of the narrative throughlines going from then to now is the idea of black criminality as described by Ibron Kendi and stamped from the beginning the definitive history of racist ideas in America from their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery, they had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminal. And this brand helped support the institution of slavery then as a practice serving public safety and then the enactment of black codes that states adopted throughout the post-Civil War South which criminalized everything from being an idle and dissipated person to misspending what they earn. In this way, the narrative of criminality is deeply enmeshed with the narratives of laziness and irresponsibility or shorthand lack of thrift that continues to frame our understanding of racial differences and wealth as a product of moral failings instead of systemic exclusion. Today the legacy of black criminality as a tool of economic exclusion is clear in our current criminal justice system which has defined what acts are criminal and against whom the law is enforced in ways that disproportionately impact people of color and the practice of municipal fees and fines that profits from the system. This practice was brought to national attention by a Department of Justice investigation after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri neighboring Tashari Jones's home of St. Louis, Missouri and efforts to reform this practice are being led by Anstuel Dreyer's work with the financial justice program project in San Francisco. I'm thrilled that both of you can be here to talk about your work. In her book, Marisa also introduces us to the narrative of black capitalism as a modern rationalization for the persistence of wealth and equality. This narrative tells us that it's the invisible hand of capitalism that has placed a lower value on black homes, credit and labor rather than the deliberate and intentional choices policymakers have made to preserve the material benefit of being white. As a result, a suite of government programs have sought to address the lack of black wealth by building the economic self-reliance of black communities. Unfortunately, these efforts have amounted to little more than a band-aid to fix a fundamentally broken system. As she explains, black capitalism delegated the responsibility to solve the racial wealth gap to the black community without the help of the white political establishment who had always held power and the purse strings and who continued to do so. So I think nestled in this problem statement is where we go to look for solutions beyond challenging these false narratives. We have to change the government structures that translate these narratives into public policy. So the people who will hear from this afternoon are leading this work to create more equitable policy for their communities they serve. And I hope this conversation will broaden our imagination of what's possible. So to start, Jillian White, who will be orchestrating our conversation today from the Atlantic, will be talking to Marisa Baradaran about her book, establishing some of this history and the way that issues of lack of black wealth play out at the community level. And then we're gonna bring in a suite of economic justice warriors starting with Richard Berry with the Office of Community Wealth Building in Richmond, Virginia, and Stooldraer, who's the director of financial justice with the city and county of San Francisco, and Tishara Jones, who is the treasurer for the city of St. Louis. You can all follow us along, people in our online viewing audience using hashtag color of money, and at New America FCSP. So with that, turn it over to you, Jillian. Thanks. Thank you, thanks so much to Rachel and thank you to New America for having us all here. Let me know if you guys can not hear me at any point in time, okay? So I have to say I'm feeling especially lucky to be leading this conversation, not just because I'm super interested in this topic, but because there was a point last year where Meersa and I found ourselves in the back of a million different events having this conversation, and I knew she was working on this book and every time I would see her, I would tell her how excited I was for it, and it did not disappoint. So I do encourage you guys all to pick up the book. Obviously this is something you're interested in, you're all here. So I want to start out by asking, you wrote about postal banking before, this is something you've been working on for quite some time, why black wealth and black banking of all the things you could write about? Good question. So I actually, this is like eight years ago, I was sitting in my office and I was doing this history, I write about the history of credit unions and drifts and all of these other interesting banks, and I started, I stumbled upon this history of black banks, and so I told the librarian, hey, will you go get me the book about black banks? And he's like, no one's ever written about black banks. I'm like, what? I mean, this is this phenomenal history and no one had ever written about it. And so at that time I was like, I gotta write this book. And so that was eight years ago and I thought I would just write, and then I had to write another book first because that one was more pressing, but as I started writing about this book, I thought I would just write a history of black banks, start with the Friedman Bank and then on down, just look at these interesting banks. But what it ended up becoming, as you know, was this history of injustice and of politics and I was just really surprised by the story that I found in these black banks. It's not just the story of like, these Horatio Algers, these great black banks, look at these heroes in these communities that despite Jim Crow and segregation, they were able to build these black banks. What I saw as I studied their balance sheets and as I studied the politics is, oh my gosh, it's impossible to overcome this wealth gap with the black banks and so I end up using them as a way to shine a spotlight onto the injustices that created the wealth gap and how it self-perpetuates with black banks included. So I wanna set a little bit of context when we're talking about black wealth, kind of roughly estimated, a number that's cited often is that median black wealth is 13 times lower than median white wealth. I wanna talk a little bit about what we're talking about when we talk about wealth in general and then how those things are racialized. So what types of assets, what are we talking about when we talk about wealth and what on earth does it have to do with the color of your skin versus just the amount of money you have in the bank or as you said, balance sheets. So in this century, in the 20th century, wealth, intergenerational wealth for the majority of the population was created through home ownership and it was through the FHA, post-New Deal era, GI bill, VA bill, FHA bill that created intergenerational wealth. All of that wealth excluded the black population. That's this century. In the previous century, it was land. So you cannot gain wealth without land, a home, all of which is provided by government subsidized credit or has been in our century. So that's what I talk about when I talk about wealth is how it's not about a savings account. The savings account is a product of that intergenerational wealth. It is not the cause of it. So that's one of the myths I think was, oh wealth is you save your money and that creates wealth. No, you have a home and then you're able to save your money and that creates wealth. And so that I think is a myth I'm trying to dispel. So until you have that home that can by the way build, grow and historically black homes have not been able to appreciate then you cannot build wealth that you pass down to your children. Yeah, so I want to stand the home thing for a second because as somebody who says this obviously if everyone works in this, I think before I started researching this a lot I had no idea how much A, home ownership played into wealth accumulation and B, the vast discrepancies in home value appreciation between black and white Americans. I think when you talk to people about housing segregation they think about it as something that happened in the past and something that has since ended. So it's unclear what the link is between housing segregation that a lot of people think ended in the civil rights era with the passage of lots of acts including fair housing and what we see today up to and including and through the subprime mortgage crisis. So can you give us a little update on why we are talking about home ownership and home appreciation and kind of what the legacy of discrimination is there. I mean the ugly truth of it is that we still have a population that doesn't want to have black neighbors. The second a community is over 10% black homes, the property values decline. We still have a segregated society and largely that's because of home ownership. The last policy maker to try to integrate was Nixon's HUD secretary George Romney who got pushed out after two integration efforts and he was a zealot. He was, we have this, he says a noose around the black ghetto. So he was very much a racial warrior and Nixon pushes him out and as soon as George Romney leaves HUD we have not had a single integration effort. And so why is integration necessary? We don't need to integrate, we just need black communities to have capital and capital in home ownership or some other way that they can grow that wealth and so it doesn't have to be through integration but historically that's been the only route that communities have been able to increase their home ownership. And so we still live essentially in the shadow of Jim Crow. We just don't call it that anymore. And while we're talking about capital this stuff tells nicely into kind of the overarching theme of the book which was black banks. And I think the idea that really stuck out to me and the reason that I really love talking about black banks is because this is an idea that still exists today. As recently as last year I was writing about the black bank, the bank black movement and this idea that economic self-sufficiency is the thing that will ultimately help the black community overcome these gaps. If they won't give it to us we will take it, we will create it in our own communities and by ourselves. So talk to me a little bit about the legacy of black banking and where it stands today. Yeah, I mean so the first black leader to suggest black banking was Frederick Douglas and it makes sense after you've got heavy Jim Crow post civil war he says we need to save our money, have our own institutions because by nature of Jim Crow they weren't allowed to get credit from and or deposit in white owned banks. So we have this system of segregated banking that develops in tandem with Jim Crow and that makes sense in a way because the white community say no. Post Jim Crow black banking became this way of white policy makers saying this starts with Nixon but starts saying we're not gonna integrate and we're not gonna provide reparations. Those were the two options on the table. Why don't you all have your own system of banks and your own system of credit? And so that's where this shift in the way we talk about black capitalism starts to turn a little bit of I call it into a policy decoy. At first it was sort of this is necessary. We have to have black banks because we're not allowed to be in white banks but then it becomes no to everything else go have your own banks and this idea of self-sufficiency is putting the burden of the racial wealth gap on the black community to sort of self finance their way out of it. I talk about this myth that a beleaguered community that is segregated from the main sort of avenues of commerce they can just sort of self finance. You lend yourselves money. You guys pull your own resources and you can lend to yourself. That's never worked. That's never how community banking ever worked. We had this myth of like the George Bailey bank and people putting their money in and you can fund your neighbor's home and that's how communities build wealth. George Bailey's bank was always a myth. It was always through FHA credit that these banks, these thrifts were able to allow for home ownership and that was never available to the black community. So we kind of had this myth that you can segregate a community, they can all be poor and then they'll just like self finance their way out of poverty. It just doesn't work. So the chapter that you're talking about where you talk about Nixon in black capitalism, chapter six I believe it is, I think that's right, was one of my favorite chapters. And as I said, I think this is something that we come back to again and again. Anyone who has heard Jay-Z's recent album, he spends an entire song talking about the benefits of capitalism and how you can kind of harness the power of wealth to take care of your own essentially. And he's talking about how he went from being really, really poor to now being basically almost a billionaire, not quite a billionaire, somewhere around there. So I wanna talk a little bit more about what happened between kind of the genesis of this idea that if they won't help us, we will help ourselves. And when Nixon kind of co-opted that idea and said, actually what we're gonna do is call it black capitalism and make it look like we're helping but actually what we're doing is taking away all of the actual things that could help you guys and we're gonna leave you over here to flounder on your own. Yeah, so I mean, I think we're far enough away from the civil rights era where it's time to really look at that history again and figure out exactly what happened. Cause I think we've also been talking about this wrong. I mean, we have this sense that like 1965 and 1964 we passed the civil rights era and you know, like fed up complete, we're done. That was never the case. Every principle from civil rights leader understood that that was just the beginning. So between 1968 and 1970, the world completely shift. And by 1970, it's over. In 1968, there's a lot of possibility. So what's happening in 1968, right? All the principles are gone. Malcolm X has been killed. Martin Luther King has been killed. Robert Kennedy, you know, Johnson's out of office and John F. Kennedy has also been killed. And so you have this new movement coming out of the civil rights movement which is this black power movement, right? We understand that integration is not gonna happen. The white, there's already a white backlash happening during this time. And then there's a lot of rioting, right? In these black ghettos where there's this pent up economic frustration and I talk about this in the book it's because all of these communities because they've been segregated from the mainstream credit. So suburbs have credit cards. You're able to buy now with credit cards. In ghetto, you still have installment credit. So if you want a refrigerator, you want to go to the hospital, you're paying by installment credit which is really, really expensive. So these rioters, they're not like random, like we're just gonna loot. They go and they're targeting these lenders and they're saying burn the books, right? It's not just random property. They're feeling this exploitation. So you have this conversation happening that's saying, look there's this problem. The poor are paying more, especially the black poor in these segregated black communities. What can we do about it? And so there's these conversation about, well maybe we can do more black businesses and then the black community comes back and says, we want ownership of the ghetto, right? If we're gonna be segregated and you're not gonna do anything about that, let us at least own these areas. So there's just black power, black enterprise, black control of the ghetto. So Nixon comes into power and he's very clear that he's using the Sutherland strategy. He's not about to give reparations or control of the ghetto to black. So he shifts the conversation, pushes integration aside, rejects reparations and comes up with this idea of black capitalism. And I've gone through his archives and there's all these speeches that you see and he's like there's one speech that was phenomenal to find. So I looked at the original speech, said forget civil rights, right? We're now onto black capitalism. Then he crosses out forget and it says go beyond civil rights, right? So but essentially it was the same idea, right? Forget civil rights. We're now onto this other thing. And so what black capitalism is, is we're gonna give deposits to black owned banks in the ghetto and we're gonna have these voluntary donations by these big corporations like GE. Why don't you guys do an internship program in the ghetto? This is when affirmative action comes in, right? So it kind of takes the sting out of the black power movement but really neutralizes these calls for actual power and turns it into capitalism. And then after that, this is not just Nixon, right? Reagan follows along, Clinton, Obama, Trump's new deal with America. No one's ever, new deal with black America. No one really talks about it because there's so many other things to talk about but Trump's new deal for black America is loans to black businesses. It's the same script that we've been following since Nixon started and it really shifts the focus away from real structural reforms and says, okay, we're gonna keep the black and white segregated and we're gonna give you some deposits for your banks. So if the bank black movement in 2017 was going to succeed, if there was going to be some level of economic self-sufficiency or even if black Americans were just trying to keep their black banks alive, what would be needed from the government to make that happen? I mean, deposits don't work. This is what I talk about. Deposits are bank liabilities. Deposits aren't money for the bank. It's costly for banks to get these government deposits usually. We need to understand how banks work in order to understand how to help these communities and a lot of these programs just misunderstand what banks do. Banks can create money so long as they're part of a network that multiplies the money. If you have a bank in a segregated community, that bank needs capital. That community needs capital. Banks can't create capital. They can circulate it. So we need capital into these communities, not just deposits. Capital allows them to lend. We need capital and we need credit. And so far we haven't had a structure that has allowed these banks to do that. So I wanna open the conversation up to the wider panel now if I can. Risha, I wanna start with you. You are, I wanna get this right. You're in the Office of Community Wealth Building in Richmond, which is a name of an office that I have never heard of. So can you talk to me a little bit more about what you guys are doing? I mean, it's an innovation in and of itself, right? It's the only one of its kind that exists. Absolutely. The Office of Community Wealth Building was really established in government. It's the first office of its kind. It was created in 2003. At that particular time there was, Mayor Dwight Jones was really focused on tasking a task force with looking at ways to really solve poverty within the city. And not really from a standpoint where we just sort of study and study again and make recommendations, but to have some fundamental change in the way that we do things within city government. And so at that particular time, there was a big push around really institutionalizing the office so that there's a systematic way to become a hub and catalyst for action related to poverty reduction in the city. And so that's how we got in our start. There are high levels of expectation as a result of the creation of the office. It was really started by a professor, Thad Williamson, he's from Harvard, and he works at University of Richmond, but his idea was really thinking about an out of the box strategy of if we were really able to focus on this and get this right, what would it take? And one of the things that he did with the mayor was really to identify what is that number? What is that sweet spot? What's that number where we could really move the needle? Our office is charged with reducing poverty by 40% by 2030. At the time, he said, well, the mathematical number is 1,500 people. And really given attrition, moving 1,000 people a year. And so people were really galvanized around that, like, wow, it's just 1,000 people, get 1,000 people a job, and we'll solve poverty done and done. Yeah, but what we found, it's intricate, right? It's structural. And what we're really dealing with, and poverty is an outgrowth of some structural conditions that have been created that have already been identified. One of the major factors is really redlining, where there were areas that were identified and coded as A to D-rated communities. And so in the city of Richmond, we have concentrated poverty, large percentage of concentrated poverty. We have probably in our big six, concentrated public housing is just, we are the leader in that across the country. And that's not something that we sort of wave the banner of, but it is something to really be reflective about. So what's germane to us in this conversation was Maggie Walker is from Richmond. And so being a first woman-owned banker and a black woman banker is really central to sort of our core and how do you sort of have this momentum to happen within the community around entrepreneurism and really going into the community for solutions rather than sort of looking at it from a census tract proximity, but going into the communities because that's where the problems can be solved. I wanna talk to you a little bit. We talked about this before, but St. Louis, the areas around St. Louis have kind of become a central focal point for kind of all of the various inequalities that happened between blacks and whites, especially over the past few years. I'm wondering how you are tackling the economic and financial aspect of that amid so much else that's going on and I guess so much focus in that area. Right, so the treasurer's office in the city of St. Louis is probably the most unique elected official you'll ever meet in the country because not only am I responsible for typical treasury functions, payroll, investments, cash management, I'm also the parking supervisor for the city of St. Louis. So all parking revenue also comes into my office and so I have chosen to use that power for good and not evil. And when I got elected to this position in 2012, I looked at our community and found that a third of African Americans in the region were unbanked or underbanked and I thought that that was an epidemic that needed to be addressed, not only from people who were in nonprofits and other organizations were working on it, but there was no grass-top leader who was saying I'm going to address this and I'm going to help use my influence with the banking community to help reduce the number of unbanked and underbanked population in the city or in the region. So I ran on that as a policy platform in one and started the Office of Financial Empowerment in City Hall after I talked to Jose Cisneros about how he started his work in Financial Empowerment and started to address this in 2012 before the murder of Mike Brown. Now, the murder of Mike Brown actually brought a lot of the issues that were already blowing under the surface to the forefront like our municipal court system and like our fines and fees and how they're very predatory. And that was a good thing because black people have been living with that for years, we would drive to North County and say, oh, wait a minute, you're in North County, you got to slow down, you don't want to get stopped for any reason other than driving wild black. So fast forward to now where we now have the Ferguson Commission Report and has a whole host of 189 recommendations and some of which are tied to financial empowerment and economic mobility. And myself in the Treasurer's Office, I've been able to implement most of the things in the Ferguson Commission Report around economic mobility. We have a universal children's savings program for every kindergartner in the city of St. Louis. We're in our third year and hopefully this year we will be able to get almost 10,000 children in the program. They get $50 just by enrolling in kindergarten and that comes directly from parking funds. So if you know people in St. Louis, tell them to park illegally and get a parking ticket. We also open again an Office of Financial Empowerment where our mission is to help people save and make better choices with their money. We use our children's savings program as an entry point to families to help them learn the basic lessons of budgeting and saving and credit. We've also just published a alternative to Payday Lending Guide because in Missouri Payday Lending runs rampant. We have more Payday Lenders than Walmart, Starbucks and McDonald's combined in the state of Missouri. So we just published a guide not only to let people know that there are alternatives that are available either locally or online but we're also looking at the root causes of why people use Payday Lending. So we also put resources related to rent and utility assistance if they need to clean up their credit. We put resources related to that as well it's a front and back page document. So and now we just passed a law in St. Louis that now every Payday Lender not only has to pay $5,000 every year to exist for their business license but they also have to give out this alternative to Payday Lending Guide every time someone comes in their door to take out a Payday loan. So that's a thought process that they have to go through. And then also we've been able to also address the transportation issue. Transportation is a huge issue in the city of St. Louis as in most urban communities. So we funded the update of our public transit study so we can expand public transit in the city of St. Louis because what's desperately needed is a line that goes from North St. Louis which is concentrated where most African Americans live to South St. Louis which is where all of the jobs are. So we have to use public transportation in order to connect people to jobs in a shorter amount of time that it currently takes on the bus because a two hour commute on the bus could take 30 minutes by car. So we see ourselves in the treasurer's office not only just as a typical treasurer but we see ourselves as an office that helps also with economic mobility of the citizens so we take our mission and we expand it to make sure that we are addressing people's needs in more ways than one. And your work focuses on financial justice, economic justice. I want you to talk a little bit about that but I also want you to define that term for me. How do you define it? Ooh, when we think about and in my office the financial justice project, we are looking at how can we really assess and reform these fines, fees, tickets and financial penalties that are growing at a time when people can least afford them and really relieve the kind of inequitable burden of these fines and fees in ways that work better both for government and for people. You know, I sit also in a treasurer's office and we've learned a lot from what Cheshara is doing in St. Louis and I think when, you know, we saw the Ferguson report and the type of cash register justice that was happening there, you know, we also have an office of financial empowerment that aims to build up the economic reserves of people who are really at the kind of hardest edge is I'd say kind of of our community and these fines, fees, financial penalties were really decimating and depleting people's financial reserves and we quickly learned in California that this is not just a Ferguson problem. In California, about 17% of adults in our state, 4 million people, have had their driver's license suspended because they can't pay traffic court fines and fees. You know, we often see that when these tickets, et cetera, exceed people's ability to pay them, this kind of spiral of despair can set in motion. The ticket can grow through late fees, your credit can be impacted, you can lose your driver's license, which frequently causes you to lose your job, you can even be jailed for non-payment. So in about 48 states, criminal and court fees are increasing and in 80% of states, you now need to, defendants need to pay for things that were once free and are often constitutionally required. So in four-fifths of our state, if you want a public defender, you're charged a fee, you pay kind of room and board, a nightly fee, if you go to jail or prison. If your child is locked up in juvenile hall, you get a bill for every night that they're there, you're charged to rent their ankle monitor, you're charged for their alcohol and drug tests, money bail, stripping resources from people in non-refundable fees. The list goes on and just, in 30 states, if you can't pay these fees, your voting rights are restricted. So what we've been doing in San Francisco and California is realizing that this is a lose-lose. This doesn't work for government and it certainly doesn't work for people. So we've been able to enact a number of reforms that I'm happy to talk more about. But just to name a few, I'm really proud that the San Francisco Superior Court was the first court in California to stop suspending people's driver's licenses if they couldn't afford to pay traffic tickets. Several other courts followed suit and our governor, Jerry Brown, just eliminated this practice statewide. So we believe we're the first state in the country to do that. There is also a bill right now sitting on governor Brown's desk to eliminate fees in the juvenile justice system so that parents will not be charged these fees if they're locked up. If the governor signs that, we will also be the first and hopefully not the last state to eliminate these fees. And just one last thing I wanna mention is that we've been on such a learning curve about these and one thing that we're really seeing is that often these fines and fees or what we're seeing is they're kind of high-paying and low-gain. They can really hurt families but they actually bring in very little revenue because we know people just don't have the money to pay these things. So I had written an article about a young man in Sacramento named Michael Rizzo who when he got out of juvenile hall, his grandmother, who was his guardian, got a bill for $25,000. So she had to, he said, declare bankruptcy. And you know, the purpose of juvenile hall is rehabilitative. And this excessive fine and fees really drove a wedge into the most important relationship in his life. Well, the good news is that a few weeks later, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors voted to get rid of these juvenile fees and write off $23 million in debt that was just hanging over these families. And at the Board of Supervisors meeting, someone on the Board of Supervisors asked the juvenile justice chief, like, gosh, aren't you, how are you gonna fill that revenue gap? Like, aren't you worried? Where are you gonna find that $23 million? And he said, oh no, we only project that we're going to collect $385,000 of that $23 million. So that's, you know, less than 1%. So again, I think a lot of these things are high-paying, low-gain and are just really crying out for reform. So to that, and we recently saw a story about how bankruptcy hit black families and white families differently. Black families, particularly in the South, more often file for a type of bankruptcy that in theory would allow them to catch up on their debts over time. But then when they don't, I mean, it's similar to payday loans. Then when they don't, they are back in trouble with their debtors and it goes on and on and on and on. And we see that a lot less when it comes to white families who file for bankruptcy. So I kind of wanna take this conversation back and talk about, so a lot of the things we just brought up, a lot of people could say, well, that's a problem if you're poor, period. That has nothing to do with race. And I think this is something that we hear a lot, whether or not the conversation about poverty should be separated from that about racial inequality. So I wanna talk a little bit about why some of these issues affect black Americans so much more harshly. I'm sure you're nodding your head. I'll just jump in there. I'm just sort of like, where do we go from here? Just really looking at the outcomes. So oftentimes people say, well, all you have to do is get a job, right? And so it's sort of like, when you look at the disparities along income and you talk about low-wage jobs and racialized jobs on top of that, then that creates a vast inequity within opportunity structures. And so one of the things that we've been really looking at is to the points that have been made is really looking at the HUD self-sufficiency matrix. So there are like 15 indicators along that matrix that deal with housing and employment and income and really beginning to have a conversation, a courageous conversation about what opportunity looks like within our city. And beginning to rank those interventions from one, those that are in crisis to thriving. And so each service provider would come to network meetings where we begin to organize providers comprehensively to say, here's where you go if you find yourself in crisis and need to pay a fine. And so really beginning to organize the community in a systematic way so that we can begin to have these courageous conversations. And another idea that we've been working on is to have these database discussions around meritocracy. And what does that mean? Sometimes we always hear, all you have to do is pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But someone in our community talked about how just by virtue of having a pair of boots with straps costs more than boots without straps. And so kind of really wrestling with all of these things that we constantly hear that is the common chatter but really looking at the disparities along a racial lens. And so just starting to have those courageous conversations. Marguerita King once said that we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. And that's the kind of environment that we live in. Black people started off, if this is a race and you're talking about a hundred yard dash, by the time the gun goes off, white persons are already at the 50 yard line and we're still at one. So what do we need to do to, what things need to be filled in in order for us to at least get to 50 and get up to the point where we can at least have a fair race. And a lot of things are being tossed out nowadays like CSAs and reparations and universal basic income as a way to sort of even the playing field. And then we talked about earlier how our communities are redlined and our homes aren't worth as much as our white counterparts. Case in point in my neighborhood, I live across the street from my father and years ago he built a great home. It's insulated concrete foam and solar panels and he's real futuristic. And but his home because of where it sits in St. Louis because it is north of Delmar and you've seen the documentary on St. Louis called The Delmar Divide. We are three blocks north of Delmar and you move his home four blocks to the south and it's instantly worth a million dollars. But because it's north of Delmar it's only worth $300,000. So those are the kind of stark disparities that exist that don't allow us to catch up on wealth building in our own cities and in our own neighborhoods. There are neighborhoods in north St. Louis that haven't been invested in in decades and because there's no investment there it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's no investment there therefore the housing market and the housing values aren't going to increase. So something has to be done to even the playing field. I think another Martin Luther King quote he says when there is a depression in the white community when there's mass unemployment we call it a depression, an economic problem but when there's mass unemployment and poverty in the black community we call it like a socialist view. And it's a different conversation we have and these fines on the criminality I think we have this conversation about black poverty and it's a blaming conversation. Well what, we blame the criminals for their plight. We throw these fines at them because there's this moral judgment about criminality and especially black criminality and black poverty. So the way we talk about black poverty is very different than the way we talk about white poverty. And this is post-New Deal, post-Great Depression we have poverty and FDR says this is a major issue. We need to fix poverty because it's not, we don't say well the dust bowl like they should have not planted there and it was their fault that you know and it turns out it was, right? Like they should not have planted in there. But we say this is a structural issue and so we need to have a structural general reform but when there's black poverty and by the way black poverty is the only kind of structural poverty that the federal government created. So yes there is white poverty but and some of that also has structural causes but we have systematically segregated black communities and systematically excluded them from all these avenues of wealth. And so it's gotta be a different conversation because it has a different root causes. Yeah and I mean I would just say that you know as we've been and again we've been on such a learning curve about this but whenever we look at these financial penalties and the impacts we always see that they hit the African American community so much harder when we looked at licensed suspensions. There were some neighborhoods in San Francisco where African American residents were like five times more likely to have their driver's license suspended for inability to pay. We did an analysis of who's paying bail in San Francisco and who's posting these nonrefundable fees. And you know although African Americans are I think 6% of the population in San Francisco they make up about half of people in the jail and it is most often a African American woman of color who is bailing someone out. Bail in California averages $50,000. So we did an analysis that showed that this strips $15 million a year largely from African American women in our city. So you know one of the solutions that we've been looking at and our courts are starting to take some steps on and we're making some headway with folks in San Francisco and in California is the idea of basing these fines and fees on people's ability to pay. You know like as a treasurer and treasurer says Narros who I work with is always, he's the tax guy. So he's always saying like taxes are a portion to people's incomes and these flat rate fines and fees hit people so differently. And what's interesting is you think about there's a stop sign in my neighborhood where a lot of people get tickets. You know say a tech executive doesn't come to a complete stop at that stop sign. There's a few tech executives in San Francisco. You know if he gets a ticket it's kind of an annoyance. If a woman who works at the daycare center in my neighborhood gets that ticket you know it can be half of her take home pay. Do we really want to be meeting out consequences that hit people that differently? There have been some court experiments and pilot programs in our country where they made fines and fees bearable and apportioned them to people's income. People were more likely to pay and actually the overall revenue that came in went up and the disproportionate impact went down. So those are some of the types of reforms that we're hoping to advance and are advancing in San Francisco and California. So every time I talk to people about this there seem to be two fronts on which people are trying to make progress and sometimes it seems like there's two heavier lines on one or the other. So one is a look at educating consumers, educating people in the community. You mentioned payday loans. As people go in to get a payday loan handing them something that tells them what their other options are or that tells them kind of what the potential dangers are. And then there's the structural issue which you guys have also addressed which is that okay if I'm not gonna take out a payday loan what really are my other options? Are there other options in this community? So I'm wondering what you guys think the balance is in general and both in the communities that you work with between trying to educate people so that they can be proactive when it comes to their own behavior and their own decisions and the point at which it's not about their education it's not about their behavior they just don't have any good decisions to choose from and trying to kind of change that structurally. So that talks about the absence of banks in low income and black communities. We don't have any black banks in St. Louis that we had one that closed several years ago, Gateway and actually the founder's daughter now works in my office. But there are payday lenders everywhere. So and we found and studies have shown that people will trust that person in the payday loan shop because they know their family they are very familiar with them they know what their situation is and if you change that brick and mortar place with actual banks which of course African Americans we don't trust banks to begin with but you have to change the environment and if you want to change the behavior you change the environment. So you know it's fascinating we have a citizens advisory board where a good majority of the members are from high poverty communities and that has really informed our strategy. One of the things that we found was that with every rise in income there's a subsidy that is lost and that's called the cliff effect and we've heard of that and so it's challenging when you live in a community that is subsidized and your income continues to grow up your subsidies get cut and so that could be a way that we were talking about not having your funds within banks that could immediately be flagged or you know identify because that could have a disparate impact on families and so what we've been doing is having a conversation around a ladder and really beginning to look at what does my income if I'm at a low wage or at poverty wage what is out there for me? What's accessible for me? And then as I move up the ladder what does that next rung tell me about what the opportunities are but then also preparing me for some adverse effects? So if your income increases then you might lose a subsidy and then how do you account for that? So what we've been finding is that people sort of don't have that buffer or don't have that savings so you go into a high interest loan or those types of things and so really beginning to wrestle with this with the community because we have a certain perspective given our proximity to the issue but going into the community they can begin to highlight that and help us develop strategies that are the most specific to mitigate their needs. Although on the subsidy aspect I would say the higher income rises up to a certain extent you get way more subsidies at the top because your mortgage interest credit the rich actually get way more subsidies than the poor and so I think that's a conversation I have the luxury of looking at everything structurally because I don't have to deal in the community I can just write about it but I think for a lot of these things it is it's you know we keep telling people to save your money and I've heard people say you know just skip the latte and don't have the avocado toast and but that fine yes you can do that and still not have wealth you know wealth isn't created through savings every wealthy person knows that it's created through leverage, credit through land, through property yes I mean once you have a lot of savings and then you can talk about investments like stock market or property but on the lower end you can't build wealth by squirreling away and not eating latte you should definitely still do that and by the way blacks save more than whites generally proportional to income so yes I think focus on individual choices but also and I'm curious what the payday lender alternatives are because in my research there aren't that many payday lending alternatives if you're low income you really have one source of credit and it's very costly like the lower income you are the more you pay for everything especially credit so this is an area where I think really we have to look at it structurally because credit the rest of us who are middle class get credit through a federally subsidized programs through our banks and so we do get subsidized credit the poor are the only ones left to the market on credit I can actually address that question in a second before that I want to let the audience know then about two or three questions we're going to come to you guys so if you have questions or if you have thoughts go ahead and start thinking about them condense them down and we'll come to you in a second so I do want to move now to talk a little bit about what some of the solutions you guys are seeing we're thinking about are both in terms of private sector and in terms of what governments need to be doing to address some of these issues as I mentioned before we started a children's savings initiative in St. Louis where every kindergartner no matter where they come from as long as they're in a public school they get $50 and a children's savings account in the local credit union and then there's an incentive program attached to that for math savings perfect or near perfect attendance and parents participation in financial education initiatives either in person, online, or via a phone app so trying to meet parents where they are so far we are about to enroll our 10,000 kids hopefully this year and we've seen that families have saved about $20,000 of their own money in two years we also have 16 families that have saved more than $500 in the program and then also we've seen that families are starting to change their habits and change their lifestyles by accessing services through the Office of Financial Empowerment but that's just the start there are things that we do all along a child's life cycle and all along a family's life cycle that just so we do children's savings we may do early scholarships to middle school to give kids a bump to let them know that there's a future ahead we may do last dollar scholarships as they get to junior or senior year and then also there's this crazy idea out there circling around called Universal Basic Income that says that you can get $500 to $2,000 per month with no strings attached and it's up to you to either squander it all or you can still work or you can save it do whatever you want to but knowing that there's still a gap that needs to be in my opinion filled in order for people to have some sort of economic mobility in order to thrive so I think that if I had to wave a magic wand we'd be doing all of those things all along the life cycle of people from birth all the way to when they're in their careers So our new mayor, Mayor Lovar Stoney and our new director, Reginald Gordon was really focused on this idea of innovation and really beginning to think outside of the box one of the things that we're looking at are equality indicators because Lovar Stoney has done a tremendous job at really looking at inequities within society and so if we can begin to look at that in a systematic way city-wide then we can begin to move the needle because all of these parts and pieces sort of overlap and if we don't really do this in a systematic way we're coming up with solutions that are organic and coming from the community to help inform policy and we're gonna keep hitting and missing so I think the beauty of our office is really beginning to galvanize and become a hub and catalyst for change so beginning to look at the child savings accounts and how does that impact people that are in poverty incubating like micro enterprises and social enterprises and really having listening sessions where individuals from the community can come in every Friday into our office to begin to think about the strategies that they have to solve their own problems and what we're finding is that it just might need a little bit more baking and that's all that happens and you add the capital to that and then that can continue to grow but really lowering those dismantling the silos that we have within our community so that it does become a reflexive conversation and not just sort of navel gazing in a sense. Yeah, I mean it's interesting talking about payday lending and I think there's been a lot written about predatory lending and how lenders can be predatory. I think one of the things that has been surprising to me and us as we've been entering into this work is that the realization that government can also be predatory, right? This looks sometimes like payday lending like again fines and fees that exceed people's ability to pay them and then again this kind of spiral of despair is set in motion. So we've really been thinking a lot about we are not advocating to get rid of consequences but we just wanna make sure that the consequence fits the offense and doesn't hit people with low incomes, people of color, harder than it hits other folks. So I mentioned some of the solutions that are advancing, basing these fines and fees, tickets on people's ability to pay. Sometimes thinking about can we give people options besides paying money to resolve some of these things? So looking a lot at community service, can people perform community service to pay some of these things off? Looking at the payment plan structure, how can we make those more accessible? And again, if there are penalties that again just dig people into holes like driver's license suspensions, holding people's car registrations, can we really just stop doing that? I do wanna give a shout out. I just saw somebody from City Community Development in the back and I just wanna thank them. They have been supporting this work and these types of reforms around the country. A huge undercurrent of the book was that it would be difficult if not impossible to bridge this wealth gap without massive political will, empowerment, and government changes in support. In 2017, one, do you think that's feasible? Two, what would it look like to get on track when it comes to the political will and the government changes that would take to build and bridge the gap? Yeah, so I want to be positive here. So look, I think the racial myth of the post-civil rights era fell apart with this election. I think we thought that we had one story and now we realize that that's over and so I think we really need to come up with another view of what happened and that's why I think we're still kind of in the throes of what is going on but I think we have to really understand that we have a racial divide and a lot of that is rooted in history, a history that we have yet to confront. We need to confront that history and on the policy aspect, the way to close the wealth gap, we know how to do it because we've done it for white Americans. We did it after the Great Depression. We know how to do it. The mixed economy, banks, government, you secure mortgages, you make them risk-free. We did it. It didn't cost very much money. It actually increased money. We just have refused to do it for black communities and so if we're going to talk about it, we've got to talk about it in a way that is federal, large and that targets the problem which is segregation, concentrated poverty, all of that stuff but it takes looking at the history in an honest way instead of saying oh well Martin Luther King gave the speech and now we aren't gonna judge people by the color of their skin and so good, we're over and it's like the John Roberts rewriting. He says the way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race and what he meant was we are now colorblind and what we realized is we're actually not colorblind. We've never been colorblind. We have to see color again and look at it in a way that is recognized as a history of color. All right, I'm gonna take some audience questions. I see one, two, three. I hear a lot of negative. It's hurting, forcing people out but then Ms. Jones mentioned the house your grandfather or your father. Your dad has. If he could just, if gentrification moved three blocks up he would triple the value of his home. So do you write about that and what do you think? I think Lewis is a really good example of gentrification in one way. A lot of these communities get re-segregated so it's not as that, so once the white people move into one community the black people go to another place but it still remains segregated. So Ferguson is one of the phenomenon of re-segregation. There was all these urban renewal programs in a lot of these cities that James Walden called Negro Removal, right? So you, you know, one neighborhood blossoms but they still get pushed to another. They're generating blacks. It hasn't so far. Yeah, it hasn't so far because the people don't own the property. If the blacks own the property in Harlem once the whites came then they could get the windfall but it hasn't been the case. There isn't property ownership, there's rentals. And so they just move to somewhere else to rent. And also they get squeezed out. This is something I look at dad on a lot. They rent as white homeowners come in and kind of purchase up land and renovate things. What was for years, a $800 rental is now all of a sudden a $1,600 rental is a $2,000 rental. So people just get slowly, slowly eat out. Also when we look at the subprime mortgage crisis the people who bore the brunt of those bad loans and who got kicked out of their homes and who had homes that were underwater were black Americans. So then even when you look at places that are perhaps doing well now black Americans who own those homes more likely had bad mortgages, more likely got kicked out or more likely even if they get the money cannot really reap the true benefit. So if they're getting $800,000 for a home they bought for much less they're still not reaping that full equity. Or even if we own the homes at the time that gentrification happened somebody, we don't take care of those end of life decisions where somebody died and then it gets caught up and probate and then somebody else buys a house for taxes and then the whole host of things also happened and they... Just to add to that just really quickly and one of the tools that we're using is a market value analysis to begin to identify nodes of strength within communities so that you can sort of have a proactive approach to gentrification and how do we sort of use our affordable housing trust fund and other mechanisms to hold on to the land so that everyone has a fair share. Right over there. Hello. Oh, hello. Hello everyone. My name is Sheena Foster and I'm with NCRC, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition here in the same building. Pardon me? Oh yeah, we're the landlord. I'm not, but my organization is. So I haven't gotten an opportunity to read your book but one of the things that I was a little distressed about is that you never mentioned the Community Reinvestment Act, also known as CRA, which is one of those tools that could be used to drive capital and credit to low and moderate income communities. Shameless plug NCRC like negotiated over $62 billion to help low and moderate income communities gain access to capital and credit. And when you mentioned that like the deposits were liabilities and that there was no structure or tool in place, that's CRA is kind of like the tool. And so you mentioned how we need to get like the federal government on board and there's all these subsidies available. But what about private capital and what about organizing to hold banks accountable? I do have one CRA, that's chapter seven of the book. And you know, I think I'm a fan of the CRA, it's by my favorite Senator William Proxmire, who if you don't know William Proxmire, he's like one of my favorite reformers ever. I think the CRA was well intentioned. I think it hasn't had, I think it hasn't had the benefits that it was meant to have. And I, you know, it's a larger conversation I think than this panel is. And I think yes, that definitely need to have capital from mainstream banks. The CRA requires banks to lend into these communities. I think it's a good reverse redlining effect, but I'm a little bit less optimistic about the CRA being the sort of silver bullet here. All right, look at the St. Louis, Missouri.gov website and look up our annual HMDA report where we overlap like 10 banks that we do business with and you'll see where they lend and all of it, most of it, 90% of it is South and Del Mar. So there's a stark disparity there even with CRA. And we try to hold banks accountable for CRA, but you know, they're still not lending in low income neighborhoods. So let's go right back here and then around. Hi, my name's Stephanie and I was just curious, Marce, you talk about a lot of things that the government is doing that has hurt vulnerable communities as well as things that they can do to help. And so like if we think of a spectrum, like some of the programs that we're being talked about as far as the banking ideas for students, I think are really an example of government doing more helpful programs. But if you were gonna think of on the spectrum, things that government is still doing that is harmful, like you talk about redlining, and I admit I don't know a ton about what exactly that means. And maybe some of the other things where government is affirmatively hurting these vulnerable groups, what would you say are some of the highest priority things that government should just stop doing? Like we don't have to even start spending more money on this program, they just need to stop doing this really bad thing. And I admit I haven't read your book yet, so I'm interested in your thoughts about that. Before I answer, this is Stephanie Barclay, one of my former students who blew my curve in administrative law, she's one of the smartest students I've had. So thank you for your question. I think these, I mean I think what they've said about the fines and fees is a big example that the way our tax code is structured, I think is incredibly harmful to poor communities. This is, it's regressive, yes. So we think that we have this progressive tax system, but really I get this boost because I have a mortgage, right? I get tax credits for it and that benefits the middle class or the upper middle class. These 501T3s where we put away money for our children's college, you know they're all of these ways that the government gives the middle class these benefits that don't go to the poor. So I think one of those things, just stop doing that, right? These fees, fines, bail, all of that stuff providing public defendants, all of that stuff I think would be ways to just stop finding. And you probably have better answers to that than I do. What did he say? Yeah, all right, let's go right here. I mean, thank you for the conversation. I'm just wondering, it appears that inheriting all of these discussions is the whole difficult discussion around race. And how do we move the needle? Because it appears in order to be able to get a bold kind of action around government action to make this thing, to move the needle in this direction there has to be some discussion around race and the impact of race in terms of policy decisions. So it almost appears as we need those who are in charge of policy decisions, our leaders to almost go through all an experiential learning in terms of to be able to empathize. Because I think part of the challenge is unfortunately it's just that there's inherent racism but part of it also is just not facing the reality of what a poor person, a day in the life of a poor person what does it look like? I think most people are just completely divorced from that reality that conceptually they're not even able to comprehend it. So how do we move that discussion to be able to get our leaders to say, now we talk about education, we talk about the structure of changes, now you as an individual, you need to go through some experiential learning so you actually empathize or you have the capacity to empathize. So I don't know what your thoughts on that. Well I always say, we as politicians always tell people well you all need to have that uncomfortable conversation about race but we're not willing to have it with each other. So there are about maybe 35 or so different elected officials city-wide meaning alderman, city-wise and so forth and so on and we haven't had that discussion with each other about race and also what it's like to be poor and maybe do a poverty simulation for example. I've been poor so I know what it's like and what it's like not to have certain things and not being able to afford things and to try to make it to the end of the month. So therefore I have that experiential knowledge and how to deal with the people that I'm serving but not everybody does and not everybody wants to learn. So until we have those hard conversations and tell people what is expensive to be poor and these are the ways that our decisions and our policy-making is hurting the least among us which we're supposed to be serving we'll still be running like a hamster on a wheel, just still having these conversations years and years in the future. I wish I had a better answer to your question. I mean the only way that we knew how to start because when we started this about a year ago it was like God, how do we start? And there was this coalition of individuals and community groups called DEP-Free SF made up of groups that were made up of people who were entering their community kind of after being in jail or prison groups and that work with people who are struggling with homelessness and getting a lot of these citations or people and people who are homeless themselves, legal service providers who kind of see this problem day to day and we started a task force, a good old task force but we had people around the table from these groups and this is where I sometimes think it can be easier to have these conversations at the local level as hard as they are and then we had the heads of all these departments in the courts and we tried to start with like what are the biggest pain points in the community and where are these fines and fees and a lot of the associated penalties like just causing the most harm and to hear people who are struggling with homelessness, talk about that, people who are re-entering the community or organizations and social workers who are really on the front lines and then to have all the department folks and the courts, that changed things I feel like and we were able to think about like, okay what's workable, we can't do everything and there's this tension between revenue and equity but what can we do? Because surely we can do better than this than what's happening right now. And I think we need to have the courageous conversations. One of the unique features in our office is really looking at, a lot of times we're asked to make the economic case for poverty reduction and one of the brilliant things that we really have been, has been resonating is the tie between the city's bond rating, poverty and regional transportation. So then that's how we set the table to have the conversation and to really talk about how it affects people across all spectrums and this is what it looks like. Now we use our universities as well. So right now we're doing a study with our MPA students at Virginia Commonwealth University really looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics does sort of an analysis of what jobs look like across race and we're gonna do that for Richmond to have that conversation, to begin to set the table to look at what equity and opportunity looks like. One of the brilliant things that I've heard recently was about, do not focus on, do not focus on opportunity but focus on outcomes. Outcomes is that more tangible component that sometimes we miss and I think that that's so critical in starting to set the table to have that conversation. We have a few more, one, seated and then back there. I was not one of Merce's best students so I just would actually with due respect have a question for the community members. Short of getting tickets in St. Louis which I actually have done as a St. Louisan. I'm wondering sort of what is it, we're all members of community here so what is it that you wish you had from the community members? What support do you need from just regular citizens? Personally I need citizens to vote. Our last election we had 28% turnout so that means 72% of people decided to stay home and then we still see those same policies that are there that hurt people but you have to change the people in those offices in order to see any change that's gonna come all the way down to the local level so that's what I wish people would devote more, every time even for dog catcher to vote. Thank you for your presentation today. With respect to structural solutions there are a host of economists who have identified the systemic mechanism that causes inequality and wealth concentration being the way in which private banks control the way in which money or credit is issued as a debt. People like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, Joseph Huber and many others have talked about the way to address many of the issues that have been raised today from a macroeconomic perspective would be for governments to reclaim the power to issue the nation's money so that rather than having a credit system where the lion's share of the medium of exchange is credit and the sort of systemic problem is what's put in circulation is the principal amount of money but not the interest portion of money and because of that the society is in this sort of competitive environment of competing for insufficient economic resources that can only be sustained by more borrowing at some level and so I'm wondering whether your research has focused on monetary policy solutions, monetary reform solutions that attempt to invite the government of the people to reclaim the power to issue the medium of exchange from private banks. Yes, my first book actually talks about this exactly right because banks create money, they create money because they are in partnership with the federal government, we don't have the gold standard, so money is a figment of our collective imagination and so the amount of credit circulating in the economy is a policy decision and banks are the funnelers of this credit to the public and so we have to rethink this idea of free market capitalism which is fine and as it applies to businesses, banks are different entities, banks operate with the government, so money is a government creation and so this is sort of a macro discussion but absolutely and this is why I focus on banks and not on businesses because banks are essentially the invisible hand of the government in the market and so we have to recognize that and recognize that that's how wealth is created is through a government policy. Historically it has been as you would go over the history and we know some of the problems with that. Right now post recession, we're at the lowest home ownership rate we've had in 50 years while the stock market has had its returns. Also generationally, the younger families are forming later and they're buying homes at a lower rate so that could be a challenge if you're seeing a solution around home ownership and I'm excited to read the book too maybe you deal with this all there. I do, I think home ownership is still the root for the middle class. I think the stock market is largely fueled and I think there's a lot of foam right now in the stock market but that's the playground of the one to 10% so I think for the average American and the average has pulled away from the top lately, I think for the average American it's still home ownership and that has become much more difficult. It's not as easy as if you could have stock market wealth and by all means but not all of us can. It's only available to those of us who have excess money. And I think we want to take one more from that gentleman right there who had his hand up. Hi, my name is Robert Burns and I just wanted to at least leave on a note of a solution one that I believe has possibility to get to the home ownership notion but the notion of community land trust which is a way of promoting land ownership certainly has roots in the civil rights movement but also you're seeing more activity at the urban level in cities all around the country including here in DC, New York, Houston, other areas. I have a question on San Francisco as well. When I listen to what you're doing which I think is fascinating and really truly innovative, have you thought about the idea of a social impact bond to promote that? Cause I can see where some of your outcomes may come in the future so just the curiosity. Well, I haven't yet, but maybe we will now. Social impact bonds is something that I've been following and with some of our local CDCs trying to find the right project for them because you have to have the right project in order for them to work so we just haven't found the right project yet. One of the things, one of the policies like a micro policy that I think would work on this community ownership is a shared equity mortgage so this is where municipality teams up with a borrower to share the equity on the mortgage so the municipality or the non-profit would give the down payment, the borrower would pay the mortgage and then you'd split that equity on the point of sale. So I think that's one option that localities and non-profits can do which could really boost home ownership. Do we have one other question back there that I missed? I had two very quick questions. One, I promise. One, for Representative Jones you talked about how we all need to vote but especially for dog catcher but I think in a lot of state and municipal elections there are actually a lot of elections and we don't really, I think, fully appreciate the kind of the responsibility of voting for all of citizens so how do you think we make voting not just more beneficial, more accessible because going from your representative to your alderman to your dog catcher it becomes not just taxing but it's also difficult for people especially in low income communities and communities of color. My second quick question is we talk about the disproportionate effects needed out for people of color particularly with affected wealth building and home ownership. Maybe like to leave on a note of solutions what do you think are some ways that African Americans because we understand that black capitalism is kind of not a cure all pill, right? But we still do see a lot of innovative things happening within communities of color so maybe highlight some kind of examples that you see and things that we might do kind of in a one to one community level basis. Thank you. So on the voting question I have often asked myself that question as well. What is that golden carrot that will influence people to vote more or that shows them what the benefit of voting is because telling people especially young people nowadays that somebody died in March for your right to vote isn't resonating with young people now so you have to find another way in order to help them think that it's important and I don't know what that is. Part of me thinks that part of it is more engagement, more involvement and we as politicians don't do a good job of that. We only come around three months before the election and say hey, elections coming up, why need you to vote? But we need to be more visible and more engaged and so people know that as a result of you voting this is what happens and just educate people more. I know that we say that all the time but it really works. You have to educate and you have to increase turnout in order for people to vote. The potential solution knowing that black capitalism is not a cure-all, correct? And I think you still support black banks. I mean I think you really do. I'm not opposed to all of these issues. I mean you do it on both sides but you recognize that the solution is limited because it's not the, you know I say like use a litmus test, are we putting the burden on closing the wealth gap on the black community or are we all involved? And I think any solution that isn't all of us involved is a cop out. Well thank you guys so much for being here and for your time and for being to my panel. Double hand clap for Marissa.