 Dr. Christine Jenner will be opening up with her infamous or famous presentation on economic segregation and housing and equitability. She'll go through that and you will love it if you haven't seen it. This will be my fourth time seeing it. If you haven't seen it yet, I'm sure you've heard from others about how great it is. After that we'll go into, we'll have a Q&A with Christine and then we'll have a panel. Panel will be composed of Pedro Martinez, our superintendent of SAISD. We'll have a state rep Diego Bernal, Victoria Vanzales from the mayor's office. Steve Vindum is here from east of chair of ULI and I have got my fifth, got my fifth here? Okay we'll get to the panel after Christine's presentation. We'll go ahead and let Christine start and Christine's gonna look for a note. Yeah, how many of you live in the area? How many of you live in Diego Woody Hill? How many of you live on the east side? Awesome, good, east side reference. How many of you live kind of in the urban, inside of 410, outside of 410, outside of 1604? Awesome. Alright, I'm gonna let Christine go ahead and do our thing and then I'll be back. Alright, do we need mics, wait, there, do we need mics? Yeah, what's that? Okay, sort of signal to me if I drop it and then cuz I don't pay attention. So, you're here for the long haul, so this is great. I figured a lot of people would come to see, to see the panel, but like skip the first part, so thank you for being here. This is, let me guess my words, let's just start. That's just a screenshot because when Martin Luther King wrote the call for the Social and Economic Justice, it was never officially published, I don't think. It was part of his Poor People's Campaign, which followed his civil rights work. The civil rights work, I didn't know, was written in 1968, show me before he died. In his civil rights work, he actually came to realize, along with his opposition to the Vietnam War, that, and I'm not going to quote it, he says, what, let's see, for his, for the Poor People's Campaign, he said, what does it profit a man to be able to eat it and if he doesn't earn enough money to buy him a cup of coffee? And this is where he started, really, what he called the People's, the Poor People's Campaign, and what's become to be known also as the Social and Economic, and I wish I could make that bigger, but the Social and Economic Bill of Rights, and so it's this document that's on file, it's all written career font, and I really wanted to show it to you because it's just a really beautiful document. But, basically, he said, he said that the civil rights, the civil rights kind of conversation has taken off, and we've had some legislative victories and some policy victories with it, but really we're not, we're still not going to get anywhere without social and economic equality, and he wrote this, and he says, and it's a much longer document than this, and he says, we need a right to a job, every single person, and this was poor people, so it included everyone, right? Everyone needs a right to a job, right to an income, right to a decent house, to an adequate education, in the decision-making process, really, in voting, and full benefits of modern science and healthcare, and he wrote, without those, these rights, neither the black and white poor, and even some who are not poor, can really possess the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So this is where it's going, and again, his opposition to the Vietnam War is actually the legacy that he's better known for than this. And the thing I want to draw everybody's attention to is all of these rights. These rights that he talks about are, the job, income, decent house neighborhood, education, participation through voting and healthcare are all very, very related to where we live. We get most of those rights, which then become opportunities through where we live. And so when we talk about economic and social rights in San Antonio, we also have to talk about our neighborhoods and where we actually live. He knew that this was going to cost billions of dollars, but he also said that the investment from that would pay off, and we know that, and I'll get to that in a little bit. I want to talk about where we live, so that's what I want to do here. He's talking about where we live, that's where we live, right? All of those, and I'm going to zoom in, because all that gray on there is individual little pieces of property. That one is mine, the little pink dot, if you can see, is mine, little tiny bit piece of property. That one is mine. Zoom it in, there it is, right? So just a little tiny piece of property in a big county of a million and a half people. Well what's interesting about where we live is it dictates our ability or our opportunities that are available to us through all of that list that he said. So first of all, what school do my kids go to? It's determined by where I live. I'm in District 1, there's my little house, but I'm in District 1, and you know, our council rep is sitting there, and it's like dogged, and I don't know all my numbers, but how I participate is very much depending on where I live. And for most of us, that's the story, there are some of us who actually fulfill a lot of those needs through the market. So it's not as dependent, but for most of us in the middle and working classes, very much depends on where we live, right? So there's the little house, a little tiny piece of property, right? So the degree to which those rights depend on where we live is very much a function of income. For the higher income, not so much. We can go to school where they want, they can get healthcare where they want, right? They don't vote where they want, we hope, we don't know. But education, healthcare, the job, you know, you can work where you like, but for a lot of us we're very dependent on that. So we need to think, as we think about the dream of social and the economic and social bill of rights, and that dream, we need to think about our neighborhoods and where everybody lives. And finally, just as far as prologue to what I want to really get at, where we live in the city of San Antonio is highly segregated. And we know that, and I'm not racially and ethically yes, but even more so economically. We've been identified, I think right here, we've been identified as one of the most economically segregated cities in the country, right? So the Economic Innovation Group wrote last year, and they got their own metric and statistic that says that we've got the highest score for spatial inequality. Pew Research Center, one of the greatest research centers in the United States, says we indeed in shares of lower income households reside in lower income census tracts. Again, they say, then they want to say that the more economically segregated a metro area is, the less economically mobile its residents are. And so there we go with the opportunity, right? So what's going to be interesting is how are all of these things tied together, right? And finally, amazing, San Antonio designated the fifth least literate city in the United States. And the point that I would make, and I think that will be followed up with the panel, is that these things are tightly tied. Social economic bill rights is tightly tied, or our ability to build on that is tightly tied to the economic segregation, which again is tightly tied to the illiteracy rate in our city. The San Antonio Press News picked up on this last year, they said, if you're born into a more prosperous part of the community of a significantly better chance of achieving professional education, if you grow up in our more distressed neighborhoods, you're destined for life and poverty. And so again, getting at the dream of social mobility. Can I tell my kids that you can grow up to be anything that you like, or really is it much more a function of where you live? Again, they follow up and they say for the past 50 years, 78207, that census check on the west side, just west of downtown, has been defined by poverty, inequality, and a sheer lack of opportunity, 50 years, right? So this is intergenerational. It's not just that a neighborhood deteriorates. This has been going on for a really long time and continues. Just as far as vocabulary, the vocabulary on this is really important. We're not poor city in the country. Actually, we're number 26, right? That's what we're counting. We're not the most unequal, meaning from the highest and the very highest income levels to the very lowest. That's Miami. We're actually number 54, but we're the most segregated. So say that you make a lot of money, and I make a little tiny bit of money, and we live really, really far apart. So that's our distinction, not so much the others. And you can see it when we start to map it. Let me see if my little dot. No, it's not going to work on this. But when we start to map income levels, we can start to see it. We don't appreciate it yet, but we can start to see how separated by distance we are from the lower income, and I used color to signal quantities. So a lot of color means low quantities of income. Dark colors mean high quantities of income. And they're spatially separated from one another. And that's kind of the story that I wanted to get into here. So my goal is going to demonstrate that there's a link between our current segregation and our inequities, and our inability to fulfill the dream of social and economic rights. So that's where we're going. So I've got a presentation. The first part of it is how do we get into this situation of such tremendous economic segregation that we've been identified by national think tanks as the most segregated place in the country. And then if we can get to that, if we get through that and I can convince you, then we want to think about how did that create then? Just economic segregation does not mean that we have to have inequities, right? But it does. That's how here, how it's very much materialized. So that's the next step. And then finally, what are we going to do about it? And that's the panel. That's where the panel is going to come in. So this is background, right? There's lots and lots of ideas about this. I'm going to present you one idea based on research. But it's one of the ideas about how did we end up? How do we create the situation that we live right now? There's lots. We like to live with our own kind, right? We hear that all the time. Racism, classism, exploitation, corruption, deindustrialization. The really big one right now out there is individual choice, where if you pay attention to the common understanding of how we became so segregated and so unequal, is that some people make bad choices. And we hear that a lot. A lot of different kinds of language, but we hear that a lot. The reason that I even do that as I start with that is because the policy implications are very different. How do we understand the situation would actually lead us to very different kinds of policy, right? So if we think people are making bad decisions then we need to teach them to make good decisions and everything will be fine. And that's actually not the story that I'm going to tell. The story that I'm going to tell is based on property. So again, another explanation out of the hundreds of explanations, this one's based on a story about property and property rights that then have turned into inequalities and inequities and the inability for some of us to get ahead socially and economically. In the United States, everything really does go back to private property. Private property was protected long before civil rights were protected. Private property is what was originally written into the Constitution as life, liberty, and the protection of property. And that was changed later. But my argument is that a lot of this is going to go back really to private property. So we need to talk about the creation of this. And this gets deeply historic. So hold on and have patience. So we're going to go back. We're going to look at tons of maps because I'm a geographer and I map everything. That's how I make sense of stuff. Tons of maps, right? So the late 19th century map, you can see that the six by six month square pointer doesn't work on the fancy collection of the old city from a distance. You can see the great iron pattern of the streets. So the streets are going in around some of the old Spanish land grants and they're often long and thin so that everybody's got a little bit of the river and can then irrigate the rest of their property. It's a fascinating map. But I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to zoom into the inner city and this is an inner city story. So here we go. That's just of the old six by six mile square. And my very good friend right here, David Haynes, and I do this for fun. We map neighborhoods and we go to the county courthouse and we look for when those neighborhoods are planted. From when they were originally planted and it's a similar process to what a developer does today. They buy a feasible agricultural land or a land that they want to repurpose. They have to go down to the very county courthouse into the city and they plant it and they get the regulations and they do this similar process to what's going on today. All the way back there. And so what he and I have done is to go back into that, back into those old documents and find out when those neighborhoods have built. What did it look like when it was first built? Who's building it? How big is it? What do the houses look like and all of that kind of stuff. So this is what we do for fun. You wouldn't want to see us on an off day. This is what we do for fun. This is again David's work, but VG Irish was one of the really big land developers back in the turn of the last century. And it's just like if you open these persons today and sit really home, just got a new development out past 1604. Same stuff, right? So VG Irish is putting in all these through subdivisions, islands on the southeast. There's Lorraine Place, and where Myrtle Vaughn and Brackridge and Beacon Hill, all of these, these are some of his developments, right? Just saying some of these, right? Let's look at these. And these are our neighborhoods. These are our neighborhoods that are just getting developed. And so that's almost part. Yeah, it's in the county, not the city, but almost part. Really beautiful, right? When these were done, they were done by hand in this real beautiful kind of depictions of the neighborhood. Well, almost part is right up here, right? It's right up here. Where it is today, right? Just a map of it. Beautiful housing if you're already in there. All the limestone, really pretty, pretty housing. And there's the original deed, right? Everybody's got a deed to their house. And the deed for, I don't have to trust me because I can't read this, but for the houses in almost part, it said that the exterior, they constructed out of a particular kind of exterior material. This is about the buildings also. This is about the garages and surface entrances. Nothing to be worth less than $7,600. And now they sell for about over a million. You see, third, these are all the restrictions. No part of the almost part of the states should be the only rented any person other than of the Caucasian race. So this is, our neighborhoods are developing. That's in almost part, you know, it's highly elite. It's very, very beautiful. But let's look at some other neighborhoods. Bacon Hill. Bacon Hill, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood today. Sweet as can be, right? Bacon Hill is right. There's no people in here, right in this area here. Right there it is today. Great housing stock. They have old Texas bungalow housing stock. And it's deeds, right? Tency. And a lot of people live out of tency either, right? Stream, it's expressly understood and agreed that any sale release of the said premises or any portion there of any person who may go but it will immediately cause the title here to revert to the grand tour his heirs and the signs. And these, the houses couldn't cost more than $1,500. Dignore Hill, they're sitting in it, right? Dignore Hill also, right? East of downtown also is de-restricted, right? And there's some of the original, some of the housing is again really beautiful. By 19, it also was de-restricted. And by 1940s census, it's been released where you can go house by house to know who lived in each house. Fascinating. Dignore Hill, that neighborhood and development ends at the wrongfuls, right? And the court in 1940s census, and I coded this in this tan color. Wow, look at the leaves, I don't know if it was ever. Well, de-restrictions were working, right? Because this area to the west, which is Dignore Hill, and this de-restriction is all Anglo-American. It's just across the street, right? On the other side of the wrongfuls, and we don't know what the leaves are, are African-American and Mexican-American and there's some Chinese shop owners as well. So these de-restrictions are working. Prospect Hills, so we went northeast, Prospect Hills on the west side, right? And the west side we think of as historically Hispanic, but it also had areas of it that were de-restricted. Prospect Hill is a little bit further west over right there, right? But there it is today, and again, the traditional great kind of Texas bungalow, housing stock. Harlandale on the south side, same story, right? There's the original advertisements for Harlandale, which were like in the light, there's restaurants or wherever. And this one, this one is amazing. This one says nobody with TB or any other infectious diseases, you can't sell wine, hotels are open-air structured, and no part of the described property should be sold based on rent into any girls or Mexicans. And so this is a heavily, heavily restricted property. There's a Harlandale. All of these neighborhoods that we look at, and then we try to understand the history of when they're built are de-restricted. All of these that we've coded in this red. And so the question is, what's going on in here? Right? What's going on in here? A lot of this is gone through to our renewal and the railroad and a lot of industrial. This is some here. What's going on there? People live there. And that's exactly the question we asked ourselves. So look at these neighborhoods, and then there's a couple of things that I want to really draw your attention to. One of them is scale. I haven't shown you before. Those are significant neighborhoods. These are going to be smaller. This is Gardendale, right? Over by where the creeks converge where some of the big creek projects are going to go out in the next couple of years. This is Gardendale, right? There's the housing stock. Much more humble. And here's the deed. And these deeds are really hard to trace for some reason. They're just harder to trace than others. No slow restrictions here. No sign of restrictions. And when I go do the 1940 census thing, I find that it's actually quite integrated. And this is fun. So there's African-American, Mexican-American, Chinese-English, Italian, people from Louisiana and Oklahoma. That's a great question. Yeah. So a lot of people are living in that neighborhood. Right? Here's some more. Right? So this one is, I don't even know what that one's called. Columbia, sunny Macio is here. Right? There it is today. Little developments. There's the housing stock. Right? There's the deed. No restrictions. Right? The big five block. There it is. There it is. There's the housing. Sitting on the street. Right? There's some room for infrastructure here. There's some drainage. There's some room for sidewalks. When this thing floods, this gets into the houses. Right? That's how close those houses are. That's how troubled the infrastructure is. Right? There's no deed restrictions here on these. There's another one. Right? There's a street. That's not an alley. That's a west side street. Right? That could be an east side street. These houses and these are not deed restricted. There's the housing. Right? So this is interesting. Yeah. This is helpful. This is an area on the west side. One of those deed restricted neighborhoods bumps into an area that wasn't deed restricted. So for those of you who can see this, this is zoom in. This is today. This isn't like a hundred years. This is today. Zoom in all the way to the parcel level on a map. And can you see, especially if you're closer and maybe help me, the difference between the area that was deed restricted and the area that was not? Yeah. What is it? What is it? Yeah. And just imagine the houses that are, that those pieces of property can handle. Right? These are bigger and bigger. They're much more regular. Right? These are smaller. Density and there's density and there's a, and they're irregular. Right? In a lot of these cases, families actually went in and subdivided themselves. They subdivided their property themselves. And then hooked in to the utilities and to different kinds of infrastructure. And I know that SAWS and CPS goes through this stuff still today is that they find this stuff. The housing on this, I showed you some pictures of it, is very, very different than the housing on this. Right? This was white. This was not. And housing, for most of us, and I've got statistics coming up, I think, our housing is our bank account. That is how we accumulate wealth. And if you start out that story here, your ability to accumulate wealth is going to be very different than someone's starting a story up there. Just kind of, again, just looking at where those neighborhoods went. Oh! Right? Again, I was thinking the story was done. That's the 1920s, 1930s. By the 1930s, 1940s, just one additional thing. What I was just showing you, that was between you and your developer. It was perfectly legal. It was a nationwide practice. But it was very much between you and your developer. By the 1930s, 1940s, in order to try to get us out of the great depression, the federal government gets involved in this whole thing. And how they got involved was that the United States government does not build housing. Insignificant amount of housing that they build. But what they did do is they said, banks, you need to start loading money again. Banks said, no way. We're in the great depression. Everybody's going to default. And the government says, no, they won't. Because if they default, we will back you up. We will guarantee those mortgages. Right? We will pay if that happens. FHA mortgages. Federal housing administration mortgages. Brilliant. Right? And it did get the banks lending money again. But banks said, we still can't take the risk. And so what they did was they said, FHA goes, fine. We'll tell you where to invest. And they went to every city in the country. And they said, this is where the suburbs were built. Right? This is FHA housing. Downs where the suburbs were built. So we're talking about a little bit later. They said, four-year-old neighborhoods. Right? And they literally came. They came and they did an inventory of our housing. And they said, in your old neighborhoods, if the housing stock is good, right, and sound, and there's no room for infill, because infill's risky. We don't know what's going to happen. And the population is white. We, federal government, will code it green. And that's the signal to the bank. This is good. You know, you can make an investment there. It's not going to be a risky investment. And there it is. That's those areas of town. Right? If your area was way in the decent housing stock, infill, unpredictable, but it was still an annual population, we'll code it blue. Right? And so there's our blue areas. That includes Beacon Hill. Includes parts of Highlands down on the south side. There is that housing stock. Right? This is the housing stock that's jet-refined today. It also had some infill, and you'll see in these neighborhoods that there was always some infill, some all littler houses, sometimes the duplexes, that don't fit in, but they look fine. They've aged well and they look fine. And it keeps it a little bit mixed income. We love that. Third category, if the neighborhood was beginning to deteriorate and it was possibly small, but a non-white presence, it was coded yellow. And this is the signal to the bank that, yeah, this is going to be a little bit of a risk. Watch out and think twice. Right? And here's our yellow areas. Right? There's a heart and nail house. And finally, it was, in Redwood, this was a non-white population. The United States government told the banks, that's a risk. And you may want to think twice. Some still did, but that was the official word. And there's our red-line neighborhoods. Right? And what is it with those of those neighborhoods that we're not interested in? So they were denied investment by the developers. And now it's the federal government itself saying, no, that's too risky. You can't invest there. You need a new roof and somebody wants to take out a home equity loan. Not a good idea. Right? They need to do it on their own. And we know that that housing continues to deteriorate. And so this is what that looks like. Sometimes, sometimes I actually do some really nice housing, got caught up in this, because they exaggerated all the boundaries or they had been a part of a neighborhood that had deteriorated, including Pignone Hill. Pignone Hill in this area was red-lined. And you can see that on each side. Here's the original legend that said, best still desirable, definitely declining in the hazardous. And that was to banks. Right? And so when we start to put all of this stuff together, we realize that a lot of this was those areas that had not been restricted, that had been built by a different set of developers. And sometimes by hand, very small, often in a little bit more happy hazard fashion, and then some divided at times, especially in the inner city. Then we build the highways on top of that. And the highway structure itself is incredibly deliberate. In order to cut some of those red-lined neighborhoods off from the economic generators that at that time were in the inner city. Now they move to the north, but at that point, which is to separate the jobs from the people, very much so. Then we got really smart, right? Because we've created that thing, right? And then we did this. Original school districts. There were about 68 school districts. It comes up in the paper like every other day. Why do we have so many school districts? Don't complain. We used to have 68. And there was a nationwide movement to consolidate school districts, because these were rural, right? They were rural and there wasn't transportation. And those were the old common school districts. And they have names that you would recognize. It was like the Rockhill of Selma district. And I'll show you in a second, there was the W.W. White district and the Hotwells district and all of these, the Matthew district, all of these. But there's a nationwide movement. And it's following from industrialization, knowing that children need to be able to read and write. And when these were common districts, they answered to the county. So the county would meet and do county business and then they would break for five minutes and come back. And then they would do school district business. But they had no idea about anything in education. And especially in the professionalization of education that was needed in industrializing the economy. So it's a nationwide movement to start to consolidate these districts. And literally they do this, right? It was sanctioned by the state. You just do it on your own, right? And so they start, and this is in the school board minutes, they start making phone calls to one another. And so, yeah, they start making phone calls. So here's Northside, right? All of these districts start making phone calls to one another. And they say, do you want to consolidate? And they said, and they literally say, well, show us your balance sheet. What do you worth? What, how much debt do you have? How many assets do you have? How many kids do you have, right? How much is your property worth? And how much debt do you have against it? And all of these, all of these consolidate into what we know is Northside today, right? The successful school district. All of these into Northeast. Here's East Central, right? And Southside and South West. But notice the inner city. And here's SISD. SISD's got, it used to be just the six by six mile square, but then it consolidated. Consolidated, that was Los Angeles Heights. That was WWY. That was Hot Wheels. They did the same thing, right? They made the phone call and they said, sure, we'll consolidate that one. Edgewood. Edgewood. Also, Edgewood called Northside. And they said, can we consolidate? And Northside said, show us your balance sheet. And then they said, no way. No way. You're not worth anything. Your property's not worth anything, right? If you insolidated, then we're taking on debt. Just to be, just because it's funny, SISD called Admiral Heights. You know, Admiral Heights said, show us your balance sheet. And they said, no. No, thank you. And Admiral Heights is a small, small district. And Edgewood is a small, small district. They said, fine. If nobody would consolidate, then we will become an independent school district of our own so that we can raise money through taxation. And they did. That's locked in place now. They changed the laws. It's become much, much more difficult to consolidate. We need a general referendum for what I understand to consolidate, whereas these were really done at an administrative level. These were done through a series of phone calls. So the thing to remember, though, is that this is based on those old deed restrictions, which then were regulated. And why is that property not worth anything? Because those are those inner city places that were not restricted in the very beginning, that then were regulated and were prohibited from just any kind of investment whatsoever. So what have we done? By the 1950s, we created a highly differentiated social geography under incredibly exploitative circumstances and processes. And then it's the 1960s. And we got enlightened. And we said, no, that was all wrong. We need to do away with that. We need to bring equality and civil rights. We're going to bring equality to everyone. And how did we do that? So this is why we're the second part of this. We're moving into a period of equality, but I'm going to argue that it actually creates more inequity. Because how do we do that equality? We brought global standards. What global standards we decided we're not going to treat everybody different anymore. We're not different. We're going to treat everybody the same. And that was brilliant. Brilliant. So how did we do that in the educational system? Browner support, first of all. But then Robin Hood in Texas. And then, so that's in finance. But then in the curriculum itself and expectations, it was TEEX, the last tax spend star. Let's treat every single child the same. Same expectations. In the public investment system rough proportionality here in the city. 10 city council districts. Let's divide your budget by 10 and spread it out evenly. Even in political engagement with direct democracy. Supposedly every vote is the same. What does it do? What does the cumulative impact of that decision do? Totally maintains the status quo. It just locked it in place. It locked in place the inequalities that we had inherited. Because of the difference in the starting line. Where people are going to be able to start. And that's what created the inequities that we talked about today. So now we look at a map of the average income levels in the city of San Antonio. We noticed that. The inner city is very poor compared to the outer area. And then you realize they were red-lined and before that they weren't restricted like a lot of the outer neighborhoods were de-restricted. People were able to then accumulate wealth through their own houses. Then borrow against their house and send their kid to college or even invest more in their house. So of course those areas are worth more and they continue to accumulate wealth. So this is just bear with me. This is really interesting. An area on the west side that had just one a map of just a zoom in of part of the west side. The southern part had red-lined and then just notice that you can see the yellow. There's a little bit of blue. And then there's areas that were green-lined and the little rectangles on top of that are individual pieces of residential property. So what this does is that it's coded brown. That means between 2010 and 2015 the appreciation of that piece of property is two and a half standard deviations below the mean for the county. If it's coded blue it's up to two and a half standard deviations above the mean for the county. So what we're looking at is those areas that had been red-lined a long time ago that were not de-restricted. Those properties are actually falling in value. They're not appreciating like the rest of the county is appreciating. The areas that had been green-lined and that's up around Woodland Lake they're appreciating at a rate higher than the rest of the county. That's what equality has done is it's just maintained the status quo. If you were lucky if you do own a house in one of these red-lined areas it's not appreciating. And how do Americans save money for their future, for their kids is through our houses. But in these areas of town we've been unsuccessful. 75% of Ayrwich Households wealth in the United States is in our homes. That's where our savings accounts are. And in our old red-yellow-lined neighborhoods our housing is not appreciating as well as it's not accumulating. And those neighborhoods have always been non-white. So yes, we're segregated and our segregation is heavily racialized. Just to go up in any comparison when you look at income just paycheck, how much people make and it's a horribly unequal. And we know that. But wealth wealth is how many what's your assets? How many assets do you have? Stocks and bonds and all that for some of us but for most of us it's our house. And then subtract out the debt. But it's wealth. Income gets me through the day and gets me through the month. It doesn't buy me a car and it doesn't buy me a house. Wealth gets me through the year and it allows me to give something to my kids and personally send my daughter to college I'm proud against the house. Now if we look at wealth with the Hispanic population about $8,000 the African American population about $7,000. For the European and Anglo American population $111,000 right? And notice the difference between incomes and wealth. Any American or European American the average income is much less than their wealth they're accumulating in a very different way versus the Latin American and African American populations their income. That's what they've got. They don't have that safety now of a house to fall back on. Well why not? Is it because they made poor decisions? No. They were unable to access this incredible ability for Americans to accumulate wealth and become secure through their house right? That's the story. So this is out there. These are just graphs that I pulled out of reputable places just to make the point of these wealth and income differences so there's just the income gap but the wealth gap that's the story that we're talking about here in San Antonio. So just to see the amount of wealth that a family has right? You see a headline like this one for the past 50 years, 7-8-2-0-7 it's been defined by poverty inequality in a sheer lack of opportunity and we should go duh! It was created like that. That was intentional. It was created as labor reserve that we never meant to accumulate wealth. So of course it's still poor. That shouldn't be a mystery. Now the mystery is what are we and what can we do about it that connects all of us. So this is the situation of inequity. And that's why we have this fantastic panel that's been assembled. So equality, this is exactly what we did. We decided first we created this really this is with little kids but a landscape that's highly differentiated and then we said okay let's treat everybody the same but all it did was just create it just kept everything in place and now what we need to move toward is to recognize that people have different needs in order to fulfill the social and economic rights that Martin Luther King begged for in the months before he died we can't just treat everybody the same we have to think much more deeply about this and that's not easy so he wrote he wrote without those rights we can never really possess an amenable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness we did this we have done this in the past and this is going to be my transition into the other folks that are here but we have done these heavy lifts in the past as a country we've done it how social security in 1935 before the Social Security Act in 1935 as a senior here you were almost guaranteed unless you were in the very, very wealthy of life and poverty if you were no longer working because there was no social safety net and now there is and it increased life expectancy because just that redistribution of funds and our ability to save turned into more years because we were healthy we were able to eat better we were warmer the GI Bill created the American middle class no question before that we didn't have a middle class we had poor and we had wealthy and the ability for those men to come back and go to college created the American middle class in the 20th century that's shrinking right now but all of those different professions are said to come out of the GI Bill income tax credit in 1975 it's lifted about six and a half million people out of poverty including three million children pre-K for SA could be one of these massive redistribution types of projects as we take that sales tax and we say that we voted on that and we say that this money is going to go for quality full time early education for these kids not for everybody but for these kids massive projects that are actually possibly really doing it but they're enormous redistributions of wealth into human capital so now what all of these different movements all of these different movements we have movements we have talk about all of these living wage fair housing mortgage interest tax reductions equity and education we have all of this going on because of why because of this I don't know who said this occasionally there's nothing more unequal than the able treatment of unequal people which is where we are today to pride ourselves today on treating one another equally where it's coming from very different places and in order to rectify that in order to try to get people caught up it's going to take a lot more than just treating everybody equally so that's kind of an historic background and I don't that's where my contribution lies so I'm looking at these others who are working in these fields right this very second and they will continue this conversation on okay if this is what we've inherited just in terms of San Antonio and this what we've inherited what will we do with it if we can agree as a larger as a larger society of population that yeah we gotta do something about it so thank you I'm proud of you you have a lot of questions questions Bill please just to speak loudly I don't have any questions there we go there we go good afternoon Christine I have a question about stated in the QA when you mentioned that the status quo continues and you know the sort of trajectory of the industry of the 1920s and before the federal government in the 1960s and you cover some of this there was a lot that was done around Fair Housing the Fair Housing Act that then led to the creation of a number of programs to invest in communities and so I'm just wondering when you say that the status quo has continued can you provide a little more detail because you know I would I have a bit of a difference of opinion on that and I think it's because you know as I look at these instruments that were created like community development PCDCs and economic development corporations it almost seems like you know the value that's what they did or what they continue to do because the status quo has continued so I just, I'm wondering what your opinion is on that yeah couple of things first of all the family that have wealth are still so heavily racialized everybody has increased in wealth but we've all gone kind of like this and we in San Antonio have a say that our middle class is Mexican-American and that we should celebrate but in general all of these income levels are still heavily racialized so I think that's part of the status quo we've started to chip away at that in the 1960s and 1970s up until the late 1970s we were actually getting some traction and then with the neoliberal years of the great presidency and since then we've slipped back so the middle class is Chilean the differential between high and low income and then kind of what the findings today really this conversation is turning from income to wealth and accumulated wealth and that's even greater so yes I think that some of those programs were impactful those programs, a lot of those programs are gone so that would take and I'm doing this at a real macro scale agreed so yet look at the impacts of some of those programs is it has been done, it's in the literature very worthwhile and to return to those is maybe that maybe that we were on to something and then we stopped because so much of it is a product of a particular administration so Obama actually had a decent urban policy program and now it's stopped and so many of those or it seems like it will be and so many of those have they have a shelf life and so from administration to administration the New Deal programs lasted they've been shipped away and then some of the Johnson stuff lasted but it's been shipped away so yes, yes and I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you are but I think that the big thing from that I think the big thing from that though is that we should be willing to learn because maybe on a short scale maybe I can't I can't show that impact now but maybe like in the 1960's 1970's if we just examined those years and we saw that there was a tech right, so something is happening here and then it got shut down in the next many years maybe we can learn from that so yeah, good point I have a question for you yeah I heard the word neoliberal and I realized some people gag when they hear the word used but from what I have done and I've done research on this it appears that the neoliberal group that is responsible for everything that you put on the board emerged in the 18 70's they were in so many words having to play a stop and go game over the years because various movements came along to stop them and then they sat back and said you know what guys, we're going to come back and get our agenda we're just going to wait for you guys to get tired now my question to you is this we seem to have a neoliberal situation and it's full blown glory with Donald Trump as president I'm wondering how many people in this room understand the historical aspect of the fact that there is a very dedicated mindset that has said that we want to yield the age because we feel that's the way things have to be and frankly if we have to wait a while to get it so be it we keep plugging it away I'm wondering if they understand the historical concept of that versus these programs that you were talking about the game of the faction yeah I did I did slip that word in and to use like that Korean language I'm sorry what I'm doing is I'm really differentiating the middle of the 20th century that was he had so many social programs really intended to provide the social safety net and actually did lift a lot of people into the class all I'm trying to say is that the me and liberals actually started out in the 1870s and frankly as I said they had to stop the go type thing and now all of a sudden as I said it was Donald Trump the neoliberals are having the field they started earlier than him yeah so I live in Beacon Hill and we have become one of those neighborhoods that people seems to want to aspire to seems right to aspire to we have become incredibly economically diverse but the problem is that keeping those neighborhoods diverse is what the issue is because it starts at an attorney point where it will no longer be diverse and as our schools as our SAISD schools are improving greatly and now people that I even know that have sent their kids to private schools or they've said homes don't want to send their kids to local schools the children that need to benefit from that the most are made when kids are going to be displaced because their parents can no longer afford to stay in those schools or they can't afford the rent and those buildings to stay in those schools and what we do to combat that how do we continue to keep not make neighborhoods diverse but to keep neighborhoods diverse what are our tools and that is the best so we need to make them honestly we're and a lot of people here and I'm not going to take this conversation because it's going to continue with the panel is that we're in the process of trying to inventory those tools but also knowing that we don't have the right tools right so a lot of people and myself including we have a mortgage that we can handle with the income taxes or the property taxes have gone up at such a rate that I can't pay the taxes right that happens to me and and so there's a huge there's an enormous conversation right now about property taxes but there's very little we can do about it because that's a state issue and so and kind of educating ourselves on this the kind of jurisdictional problems is that what can we do and what can't we do and for those things that we can't do well then we need to be better advocates and get good people into office your disagree no not just but I don't think as we think of it only as a state issue but there are things like the city incentivizes development why can't they incentivize landlords who already have properties to keep their to keep their rents at a reasonable rate and these are the tools that I'm thinking that we are going to come up in the panel because we have a housing expert on the panel but the the mortgage that was just placed on incentives yay right and the fact that we have invested how much money and it didn't create one affordable unit and maybe there was a time for that maybe for a year but it went on for too long and this realization that okay we've got that public money who are we investing in it because it is public money and do we the public have a say in where we're investing that money it's more and more it feels like we're starting we're starting to do that and we don't rage amongst a lot of us has gotten to the point where either we're louder or they're listening better than they used to so I think I think that this conversation is going to take another minute you guys want to piggyback on what you said about trying to find the right tools where do you get those crystal law maps on which properties are going to be the market in terms of appreciation because if ordinary investors that is they usually go buy a house because they like that house and then the bank maybe has this secret crystal wall map they go oh sure we'll let you buy a house because we know that that is more than likely to beat pretty good appreciation that's a sure we'll give you but you don't know that because if you do know that you can start biting away at the red line areas that are very close to those funds that are doing well buy low start investing in your own housing stock get all your neighbors and say let's strategically invest in what needs to happen they would bring up a bunch of the housing stock and because we are in this map and we know we're so near what the bank says is oh you're cutting near that area there's no reason now that you shouldn't be able to share in that beating the market potential or property appreciation and you show them as a bunch of neighbors or community that you've done these strategic reinvestments and no reason you shouldn't be change that map next time around when you downsize or give it to your kids and start at large and be the highly appreciating and both generating neighborhoods because you have access to the information in the bank and then you can do community action you have already invested so fair housing reverse goes fair housing got great of all the red lines and no more thank you president Johnson but we know that it continues and we also know because this is an equity conversation that those families and those houses themselves are starting at a much lower point and then have not been able to appreciate what's interesting to me in what you said is especially those areas on the west side areas that were red line that were not being restricted long long ago with a little tiny parcels and little tiny houses is really and the difficulty in those titles because they've been because of Texas and Texas law they've been passed down through so many generations might be the saving grace because those neighborhoods unlike one like here those neighborhoods are very it's very difficult to do land so much so investors are so much worried are interested in those houses because the houses are deteriorating but they're very interested in the land it's close to downtown it's beautiful and now we're starting to make public investments like Martina's Creek projects right as Allison and Patrick possibly gets rebuilt also major investments property is going to be worth a lot the houses aren't depreciating but the property could and and and but it's so small and so legally tied up but it's hard so this is actually something that I think we need to think much more deeply about in order to hopefully preserve some of those neighborhoods that's the heart of the city this over here they're not doing land assemblage over here so much they're just investing in individual houses and then rehabbing them and investing in them and then sometimes selling them over there it's a very different story the different areas different kind of different situations I want to clarify that the red line and the deep restrictions all that 50 years ago went away with their houses but I mean the deep restriction the deep restriction is 1948 1948 red lining 1968 but the pieces of property are still there you know we didn't go in and rebuild those neighborhoods the little pieces of property are still there that were created under those situations I was going to ask because I know you use historical housing policies and educational policies as to where we are now but there are other systems to look at this point you're trying to do your best but there are things like mass incarceration and certain communities that have really really affected generations of families in order to be able to get ahead or to qualify for housing at all so I think that is one of the things those other systems and the houses need to be taken into consideration as far as we are now we'll see them two things I do think the conversation is starting to turn and housing commission and so forth however there's still an issue in the sense that they're focusing on this location assistance policy and so the idea is we help these people by moving them to a newer, better place and I'm working now with some people in the soap works departments who are struggling and that's along the San Pedro Creek the single mother with the three children she does not want to relocate she wants to be able to stay where she is and benefit from her money that's been used to improve the creeks so that's number one and to your point on the other creek investments one of the problems we have on the west side is number one between the Alishan and the Martinez south of Calabra all of those lots is owned for multifamily 33 not single family and then you have a city policy that says you tear down houses that have become poorly maintained or owned by some lords and are becoming public nuisance and so slowly but surely we're seeing houses come down and that then provides for multiple contiguous lots that are vacant and available and zone multifamily 33 the zoning of multifamily 33 also makes the property taxes more expensive so you have this combination of effects that is now looking forward and saying okay as this becomes more valuable how are we going to usurp this land so it's very timely and very important that we start addressing the issues and then suddenly so here's a lot of the issues that you touch on like redlining de-restriction building up highways property tax these are issues that happen on a federal level and we're even in some cases like redlining with family mandated so why San Antonio why is San Antonio the most segregated in the country even in the state because I understand that property tax laws differ from state to state so like why San Antonio? Great question and thank you also I don't think I have a response but thinking about that question about why San Antonio is we grew up at a different time so the city started to grow than a lot of especially northern cities northern cities a lot of the infrastructure was in place especially in the inner city by the turn of the last century ours grew up at the beginning of the 20th century and we were building a lot of these non de-restricted neighborhoods at the same time that we're building de-restricted neighborhoods to think about northern cities and African Americans from the south to the north as they moved to the north they actually moved into housing that was already on the ground the white population fled to the edge of town African American population moved in into an existing infrastructure what we were doing is building it as we went along and we were building it with very different qualities almost in mind so in those restricted areas they were built solid with decent infrastructure that now we're going back and fixing but it was solid when it was built we were actually building neighborhoods for a dispossessed population and it was built poor quality and it continues to be when we did away with the de-restrictions and the red lining and all when it was declared unconstitutional we did not go in and raise those neighborhoods and rebuild them up nice they're still there those are the lines on the earth just like these tiles are lines in this floor we would have to literally rip the floor out to change the lines and we would have to do the same thing in that in our landscape of property which is our landscape of wealth follow up and this is me just like thinking can I prove that? I don't know if I can prove it but trying to understand exactly that question and then you've got the historic races on top of that no question about that but this is just getting into just really baked, scored right into the landscape in addition to all of that stuff but I think that that is something about the way that the city was originally built and the timing of the building helps us to understand why we get that title and then there's some things about our political geography also that for example the city of San Antonio is huge so we have extreme wealth to the north and extreme poverty to the inner city but we're in the same city so we are segregated and from the city that's homogeneously poor from Rochester, New York the entire city is poor and it's surrounded by suburbs where there's a lot of wealth so the city is not segregated follow the county is segregated but the city is not so San Antonio actually yeah we're segregated but we can do something about it because we can redistribute that wealth which is what we advocate for SA Rochester can't do anything about it because you can't move money across those political boundary lines so there's something about the indicator itself that's a problem but then there's also some things about how the city grew up and that we actually really need to struggle with because we do we have some housing that's deteriorating at a quicker rate than we can do anything about it yeah Trisha before you go into the panel one thing I wanted to make is that deteriorating housing and I'm going to put up a video that he said I love you can hear myself better so I love the fact that you're talking about where I was looking for investment in homes and I like the idea of having people who would do that with a community mic that's great however the one thing that's kind of triggered is that living in one of those neighborhood which by the way my names are gone that restricted people of a certain race for my neighborhood although they're not in places they're not I'm sorry the name of one of those areas what I do see I don't want to bring over a sign it happens actually but we really want to keep people in the homes too and the existing residents there and so one of the tools that I hope we get to that big tool box that you're talking about is how do we have let's say anyone who doesn't qualify for the federal really low income loans but isn't wealthy so in street rural we have on our street regulations payment condition index and if it's too low you have to make a strike which is expensive but the city's goal is to keep everything the same thing for a housing stock which would either be a revolving loan for people who can get a loan to just keep the stock in good shape the existing stock whatever wherever it's history is that whether it's and I don't know if that would be a safety program a non-profit program or an addressment but is that something that we should consider putting in our toolbox and the last thing I'm going to say about that is that and the reason why I say this is because my personal experience buying an overhouse in an olden hood is the time after your money is taken you can get that place habitable is astronomical and in addition so in addition to having the money there to do it it's just the headache of doing it that's also a big barrier so a program like this could be I'm almost done I got a CPS energy program about five years ago the 0% interest level which is great the biggest blessing for me was the fact that it was a controlled program the five contractors that were available to do the work did the work every contractor that hired who ten years prior would come in take out the plumbing and never come back they'd come in and start the job and never come back so and these are all people that were recommended by friends so housing revolving alone with accountability that contractors do the work to keep the housing stock in an acceptable range just like we do for our streets is something I would like to see at the end yes we need to be on a lookout for a charter change possibly a city charter change because right now the charter says you cannot use public dollars in a private investment and I think that they're going to try to craft a charter change that allows us to actually possibly with bond money with public money actually maybe loaned maybe grants to individuals to invest in their house but it would have to be a highly rated area there are other cities not the city but other communities have kind of a private sector we call it the one-century but maybe besides that the thing I think that I bump into here is yes absolutely but they're going to immediately ask where's the equity in this if we're lending you money where's your equity my house is worth $20,000 and now I have to put on a $15,000 proof really so it's going to have to be a very different kind of conversation yeah I'm going to go ahead and move forward again thank you Dr. Drennan