 All right, welcome back. We have, we've been joined today by Stephanie Seguino, who's here talk about S-232. It kind of fits hand and glove a little bit with the noted differences between what we just heard about H-273. So I would just go right ahead and say Stephanie, welcome to General Housing and Military Affairs. Just introduce yourself and who you're affiliated with and the microphone is yours. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm Stephanie Seguino, I'm a professor of economics at the University of Vermont. I teach macroeconomics, which is a lot related to national economic policy. And I also teach on race and gender inequality. The bill I know is about not only limited access to land ownership, but also housing. And so I'm going to talk about the housing component of this, although there certainly is a lot to say nationally with regard to exclusion of people of color from land ownership as well as expropriation of land. I wanna just preface it by saying that I'll provide some national data and some Vermont data, but the Vermont data has been more limited. My experience, many of you may know that I do research on racial profiling by the police in Vermont and what we see nationally exists here in Vermont. And so although it would be great to have Vermont specific data in reality, many of the national trends are likely to exist here as well. I wanna just start out by talking why I think that the issue of home ownership is fundamental. And quite frankly, that relates to land ownership as well. And that is for most families in the United States, housing equity is one of the most important components of their wealth portfolio. It's a vehicle for getting loans. So to generate the collateral to get loans for sending your kids to college, just starting a new business and also to transmit wealth to intergenerationally. And it is especially important for folks of color to have access to housing because that is one of the more important mechanisms for wealth generation as compared to, let's say white families and specifically. And so I have some statistics here for you. For blacks in the United States, housing is 63% of their net worth compared to 38.5% for whites. And one of the reasons for that is for many whites, we have very unequal distribution of wealth and income in the United States. And for many people, their wealth comes not just from home equity, but ownership of stocks and bonds and other financial assets. And the inequality that we see in the United States, we look at the top 10, 20% is predominantly white. And that's why you see this difference in the role of house of home equity in terms of the wealth portfolio. Looking at Vermont, what you can see is that Vermont has, that whites in Vermont are actually very similar to the national average of roughly 72% own their homes and therefore build equity, build a wealth portfolio through their homes compared to only 24% of blacks in Vermont. And this is significantly below the national average where black home ownership rates are roughly 42%. So in that sense, Vermont actually fares much worse than other states. Some recent data from Mayor Weinberger when he did his state of the city address a few days ago was to note that out of 6,000 owner-occupied homes in Burlington, only 17 are black dome. Now, just for those of you not aware of the statistics, blacks are roughly 7% to 8% of Burlington's population. So we would expect absent the impact of race that blacks would also own 7% to 6%, I'm sorry, roughly 7% to 8% of homes in Burlington. But in fact, they are just 0.3% of home owners. And this is just some data for you on wealth and why one of the issues around home ownership and wealth inequality is that wealth in the United States is very unequally distributed as is income. So although blacks have roughly 60% of the income of whites, their wealth relative to white median family wealth is roughly 7%. And I have a note here that you can see that this gap is large in part due to federal policy practices in the 20th century. And I will talk much more about that as I go through these data. So I'm going to talk about a brief history, if you will, of what has led to housing discrimination and ultimately wealth inequality in the United States. And in particular, I'm going to talk about several vehicles through which this occurred. And I'm going to just say a few things here and I'll go through some of these in a bit more detail. Much of what we see in terms of housing discrimination in the United States is largely a function of government policy. There is personal discrimination, if you will, institutional discrimination, but the role of government in the United States has been pivotal in leading us to the wealth inequality and exclusion of blacks and Hispanics in particular from land ownership as well as housing ownership. And I'm going to talk for a few minutes about the FHA, the Federal Housing Authority and its role in redlining. The GI Bill, which was a major component of lack of access to housing, urban renewal and highways, I'm not going to say too much about, but I'll answer a question if you have about it as well as exclusionary zoning. So those four are actually housing inequality and discrimination driven by government policy. And then there are other components of that, which is restrictive covenants and steering, block busting. And mob violence as well in the United States. And so we think of that as more happening at a personal level, if you will, or in these institutions other than government. And I'll talk briefly about those. So with regard to redlining, the FHA began a process of, which was established in 1934, began a process of regulating the terms interest rates and mortgage terms after the banking crisis of the 1930s. And what the FHA did was essentially say that it would begin to ensure mortgages to qualified lenders. And this protected mortgage lenders from default. So it incentivizes lenders to loan to particular households. And when government guarantees these loans, it means that they also come at a lower interest rate because that lowers the risk to banks to lend to those households, knowing that the government will cover that risk. And of course, that was what I just said the slide here that if the borrower fails to make their payment, the FHA would cover the unpaid balance. And so what happened as a result of the establishment of the FHA and these guidelines is that the FHA surveyed various neighborhoods, especially in larger cities, but smaller as well, and graded the neighborhoods based on a color coding system in which green was best, that is higher income, for example, and white. There were neighborhoods that were designated blue for still desirable, yellow for definitely declining. And what that meant was that those neighborhoods were neighborhoods that were integrating. And finally, red line neighborhoods were those that were considered hazardous and they were the neighborhoods that were predominantly people of color. And so what happened, as you can see this map on the left is from Macon, Georgia, and it was an example of the FHA maps that banks used in order to allocate mortgage lending. And you can see the predominantly the red areas were largely neighborhoods of color. And those are the neighborhoods that were excluded from loans. And it is interesting today that this residential segregation of this kind that we see still persists. So the FHA, I wanna continue to emphasize this because I think it is fundamentally related to the bill that you're taking testimony on. And that is the role of government in creating the inequality that we see today in terms of wealth inequality and lack of access to land and housing. Another component of this historically was what we know euphemistically as the GI Bill. It was called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act. When servicemen were coming back from World War II, there was a concern that they would face a lack of housing. And so the GI Bill funded higher education. It also funded unemployment benefits and housing. And in many cases, black servicemembers were either met with resistance in accessing these benefits or denied altogether. So this was a major moment in US history. There have been several moments, but this was another major moment in which the government leveraged access to housing for a particular racial group. And that is white people and excluded people of color, but in particular, black members of our society. So those are some of the, I mentioned urban renewal and highways. Those projects were often designed to further segregate neighborhoods of color from white neighborhoods. So you go to New Orleans or other places, you will see that the highways divide these neighborhoods from white neighborhoods where the employment is, where the amenities are and so forth. And if any of you familiar with Biden's infrastructure bill, one of the components of his infrastructure bill is to reconnect these neighborhoods that had been divided by urban renewal in particular. So in addition to the role of government, there was also of course the role of the real estate industry during that period of time or community groups, white community groups in particular, which developed racially restrictive covenants that were covenants that were part of the deed that owners would sign in which it would prohibit them from selling their home, leasing their home or renting their property to particular groups of people, including African-Americans. And so what this was one of the mechanisms of residential segregation, people of color who wanted access to amenities and good schools and so forth were prohibited from moving into their neighborhoods. And for many years, these were legally enforceable contracts. And it was not the terribly distant future in which these were ruled as unconstitutional or a violation of equal protection. And the racial covenants that, sorry, the restrictive covenants really began in the 1920s with the Great Migration Northwards North. And so we often in this state think of racism as being a Southern phenomenon, but this was deeply a Northern phenomenon to create these racial covenants, which is not to say that they don't exist, did not exist in the South. They certainly did. Another mechanism that was used, and quite frankly is still used today, is steering by real estate agents and developers. And the mechanism for this is fairly straightforward. And that is that they guide prospective buyers to certain neighborhoods based on their race. This is illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but it still happens. And I'll just share with you that when I was first on the job market in 1995 looking for a home, I was offered an academic position in North Carolina. And when I was looking for housing, in fact, the chair of the economics department took me to a neighborhood and assured me that people of color would not be shown homes in that neighborhood. So this is prevalent today. I don't have any information on its occurrence in Vermont, but I will provide you some Vermont data which will help you understand some things about Vermont. Blockbusting was a method that had been used in the past as well. And it was often engaged in by real estate brokers who would manipulate white homeowners from selling their homes at a lower price by convincing them that racial minorities were about to move into their neighborhood. And why would they leave? It wasn't necessarily that they didn't want to live with people of color, but because home values would decline as the neighborhood became more diverse. And so this is an example of what a real estate agent would do. They might hire a black woman to walk through the neighborhood with a carriage perhaps, and then the agent would place a real estate agent's card in mailbox and encourage that folks to contact him if they would like to sell. And so again, this was a mechanism. This was actually a profit-driven mechanism. These real estate brokers would buy low and sell high. So in many cases, when black families and Hispanic families gained access to these neighborhoods, they actually paid a significant premium as a result of these practices. So what I was describing to you in many ways is 20th century housing discrimination, which was the attempt was to address that through the Fair Housing Act in the United States in 1968. But many communities have responded to this in a variety of ways. And so we see what I would say as slightly more disguised mechanisms of discrimination. They nevertheless continue to exist. One of those is zoning and in particular exclusionary zoning. So in the post-1917 period, many communities hired planning professionals that would develop zoning laws that were legally defensible, but were exclusionary, that were meant to exclude various sorts of people. In particular, what was often used was to require that neighborhoods consist exclusively of single family units, or that there'd be a minimum lot size, for example. So this was really not only a racial mechanism to include people, but also socioeconomic. And I live here in Burlington and I live in the Hill section, which is largely zoned for single family houses. And it's not surprising that it's one of the least diverse neighborhoods in Burlington. And I might add that exclusionary zoning was in particular used in the northeast of the United States. Well, one of the things that this is sort of a byproduct. When I talk about the segregation tax, it is a byproduct of housing discrimination. And it is a factor that has led to wealth disparity in the United States. So it's not so much a policy, but a result of the other policies. The segregation tax that people of color pay is related to the fact that homes appreciate more slowly in segregated or racially changing neighborhoods. And in particular, once more than 10% of a neighbor, once neighbors are black, the evidence has shown us that home values decline. And this is largely because of the unwillingness of white people to live in diverse neighborhoods. And so we can see that is often why blockbusting worked was that the anticipation that if people of color moved into the neighborhood, that home values would plummet. And so white families would sign on to, we'd call real estate agent to sell their homes if they thought the neighborhood was changing for fear of the value of their home declining. But so what this means is that houses that are identical in quality in white neighborhoods versus diverse neighborhoods are actually have very different values because of white prejudice with regard to integration. And so we call this gap in values, the segregation tax that is paid for by black homeowners and Hispanic homeowners. This doesn't really give you the full array of the impact of the racialized housing practices that we've had in the United States. For example, there's been a great deal of exclusion of people of color from owning a home for a variety of different reasons, discriminatory reasons. And because of that, they fail to get the benefit, for example, of the mortgage interest rate tax deduction or the property interest rate tax deduction. So if we were to calculate the full breadth of the segregation tax, it would actually be much higher than what it is. Something that has come to my attention more recently that I had not been aware of and is getting increasing attention. This is an article in the New York Times but you will see that there are actually numerous articles and a lot more research on this later. And that is the role of home appraisals in devaluing the homes that are owned by people of color. In this particular example, the homeowner's house was appraised and because its value was too low, he conducted an experiment in which he had his white neighbor welcome the appraisal agent and removed any evidence that there was a black family living there, such as photographs and so forth. And the value of the home increased by roughly 25%. I shouldn't say the value, the appraised value increased by roughly 25%. So again, this is another mechanism by which we get wealth inequality in the United States. Another aspect of assessing, if you will, the impact of racism on access to housing and home ownership is through housing audits. And so I wanna just tell you about these because I do have some data for you with regard to Vermont. Housing audits oftentimes, it can depend on whether you're looking at actual owning a home or rental housing. But what housing audits are, and I will just add that we do this in jobs as well now, in which you match pairs of people, a person of color and a white person. The pair is equally qualified for the housing in terms of their credit scores and so forth. And they're also trained to have wear the same kind of clothing, speak the same way, have many of the same characteristics. So they're matched pairs and the only difference is meant to be their race when they go to acquire about an advertised housing unit. So they each apply either for rental housing or wanna be shown a house or make a bid for a house. And what they find is that minority auditors are given significantly less favorable treatment than their equally qualified teammates. What is I think striking about this is that this is one of the few pieces of data that we do have Vermont. This is a study that came out in 2011 by Vermont Legal Aid in which they did two types of housing audits. They did telephone response audits so they would call in response to an ad and they also did in-person visits. And the study is in the notes to this PowerPoint which I'll share with you all. And it looks not only at race, but also native language and some other things like disabilities. So it's I think well worth looking at. And what they find is basically 30 to 40% of the, in these 30 to 40% of paired tests that there was discrimination against the tester of color and there was preference shown towards white testers. So Vermont is not immune to some of these practices. I would say that one of the areas that I have looked for, I'm on the racial equity advisory panel and have brought this issue up. And I think it's one that Vermont should monitor more heavily and that is lending discrimination. Their banks are required to keep data on their loan applications. And nationally the data tell us that when you look at equally qualified white and black applicants, black applicants tend to be turned down for loans at a much higher rate than white applicants. And they're much more likely not to be given a reason for which their loan is denied. This in the 2011 study, I did find however, that Vermont is one of the few states in the country in which black applicants actually have a higher approval rating for loans than do white applicants. And as you can see here, that's 96% of Vermont black applicants have their loans approved compared to 90% for whites. Idaho, Hawaii and Manhattan also have higher black rates. This was 10 years ago. I think that the great recession may have had an impact. I do not think we monitor this and I think this is fundamentally important, especially in this bill for the work of this entity. I think this is important work for them to undertake as a part of the process of ensuring equitable access to land and housing. We also know however, that even if blacks have maybe as likely to get approval loans, that they also pay higher interest rates. And I might just add, this is on car loans as well as housing loans and so forth. But in any case, 20% of loans to blacks are considered higher priced as defined by government as compared to 7% of loans to non-Hispanic whites. And the definition of higher price I've shown here, which means that annual percentage rates are significantly higher than the average prime rate. So what that does is of course, is it discourages black home ownership. And lastly, I wanna just refer to what happened during the Great Recession as a more recent event of housing discrimination. Prior to the Great Recession, from what I've just said, you can understand that blacks and Hispanics were super excluded from access to quality housing and home ownership. But in the run-up to the period prior to the Great Recession, they were super included as people who were targeted for predatory lending. And by that, I mean deceptive lending practices such as undisclosed balloon payments, adjustable mortgage interest rates that jumped dramatically after a year or two and so forth. And there is, I think it's widely accepted amongst economists that not only financial institutions, but in particular government board responsibility for the decimation, in fact, of home ownership amongst families of color because of their failure to regulate the financial institutions that were doing the lending. So all of this comes to my last point, which is that government policies not necessarily individuals with personal racial animus, but government policies were instrumental in leading to the inequality in land and home ownership that we experienced today in the United States and certainly as well as Vermont. And so I think that the bills that have been addressed, both H-232 and H-273 are bills that could move us from harm of government policies where there has been a pattern in practice of racially discriminatory policies to one of repair. And I very much in support of both of these bills, I would like to make just a few brief comments on them, which is that I appreciate their attention to diverse membership in terms of representation of BIPOC folks on the boards. But I have been doing this work a long time and I wanna just say that that can easily turn into tokenism if there are not also commitments to actual impact. And that may be goals in terms of percentages of lending or set-asides, but that ultimately if these bills are to be effective in the goals that you've articulated, what is important is not simply representation of BIPOC folks, but actually creating goals that these entities will be responsible for accountable for achieving in the work that they do. Thank you, I'll stop sharing my screen. On your last point, thank you, Stephanie. On your last point regarding tokenism, it's kind of an important word in a lot of what we do. We don't usually use it, but that idea of, I guess I would ask you to talk a little bit more about that because when we're talking about changes in the way we do things, we're being asked to center BIPOC in the work that we're doing and much of the work that we're doing, if we do it right, really won't be known for some time, because you're changing a culture as long, you're not just assigning people to a task force or to a committee to hand out grants or anything like that. It is an attempt to start a cultural change. Which requires sustainability and everything else. But can you just return to that word again and just, because it's jarring, it's a jarring word. And it makes an impact on how we think about our work like we can't just say, oh, look what we did. Isn't that great? Yeah. I'm gonna just share with you my experience from being an administration at UVM in trying to advance issues around equity and inclusion and a number of organizations that I've been part of in watching this work. What I find is that if you appoint one or two people of color to a large body, that small number of people bears an inordinate burden of changing the climate and culture and it can be intimidating. So I think that you need a critical mass of people of color in any group in order to protect those who might speak up or who might feel intimidated from not speaking up. And I'm wondering if I should have used that word. I think when I use that word, I'm really reflecting my experience at the University of Vermont, which has commissions on racial equity, a whole bunch of diversity stuff, but it actually is tokenistic. I would say that UVM has made virtually zero progress in the 25 years that I've been there, but they have a diversity and equity, vice provost and so on and so forth. So I see that in other organizations in which by virtue of having selected a person of color or two to be on their boards or whatever, that they feel that they've done the work, but it is very hard for a person of color and I'll just say somebody who's African-American and what is otherwise an all white board to withstand the resistance within the group. And so you either need to have a critical mass of people, you need to have a critical mass of people for those voices to actually be heard. But also, I think it also takes, one of the issues with that is also that people tend to look therefore at the people of color who are on these boards to carry the water for the group. And the reality is that everybody has to be all in on these goals. And so that's why I say that what you really, the way you have to measure your success is not representation around who's making decisions, but what's the impact of those decisions? I hear you on the fact that some of this work is long term and that impacts are not easy to measure in the short period of time, but there do need to be measured, you do need to be able in some way to say that your board or your entity is making progress. And it can't be simply that you have greater diverse representation in terms of decision-making. No, it's a, there's more to that too. I mean, just the support of boards for, I mean, if you hire executive director, a person of color, and then don't support them when they tell you from their perspective where the organization needs to change, there's all of that too, just from, you hire somebody and then not support them is that worse than not hiring them in the first place, I think, is a constant worry at least institutionally. A couple of questions here, Representative Murphy, then Kalaki. Thank you, Chair Stevens. I really appreciated this presentation and just would ask Stephanie, if this is something you could offer your slide group to our committee assistant so that we can have it on our document page to refer back to. There was a lot in it and it was really of great value because you referenced Burlington, you brought it closer to home than some of what we get the opportunity to review. So thank you. I'd be happy to, sure. Representative Kalaki. Thank you, Chair, and hello, Stephanie. Hi. I've followed you and loved your work for a long time and you've done a great work. So thank you for all of this. I'm interested that your work has really been centered about the disparities for African-Americans in our communities and in a number of different ways, the traffic stop study and all the different things you've done, which I appreciate. Are there similar studies that we can also look at to see about the Latinx experience or the Asian experience or the indigenous experience so that we understand throughout the state what the systemic issues are? You know, that's a great question. And so first of all, I wanted to just say that I think that's important to do. And there are several challenges. So let me just say a couple of things. I think that the Vermont Legal Aid Study that I referenced includes other racial groups. Okay, great. And that's worth looking at. Thank you. Nationally, a number of scholars have been working on wealth inequality and have done some major studies of cities like Boston and LA and so forth. And I think they're microcosms of the rest of the country. And most of the stuff I've seen on wealth inequality is both Hispanics as well as blacks. So I'm just gonna say a few things here about the complexity of the data. I'm teaching a course right now on the political economy of race. And so we've literally just talked about it as uppermost in my mind. When you look at Asians, sometimes they refer to the data as bipolar data in the sense or it's actually bimodal is the correct term. And that is because you have a number of Asians who are very poor and low income. So Nepalese, Bhutanese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians. And then you have Asians who are very wealthy relatively speaking, Japanese, South Koreans to some extent Chinese and Indians. And so grouping Asians is deeply problematic. And I think if we were to do that for Vermont, we would, you know, the numbers we would get would belie the diversity within the Asian group. And so it's just something to be careful of. I would just say, you know, we need to keep that in mind. And then the problem in Vermont is the small numbers of, you know, racial, you know, non-white racial groups. So even if we wanted to disaggregate in Vermont among stations, we would have a small sample size problem. So I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but just to kind of, so we're all beginning to be educated around the data. The other thing I would say about this is that we know in the United States and certainly in most of the United States, not all, but most anti-black racism is the most severe form of racism that we see. So I've done some, I was an expert witness in a murder case in Houston and was asked to analyze their traffic stop data there. And I thought that I would see really bad numbers for Hispanics. And in fact, even in Texas, the anti-black racism is much worse than Hispanic racism. So for me, that's why using blacks and whites kind of bookends the degree of racism here. Vermont is complex as well in Hispanics because of the, the percentage is actually very small. So the small numbers problem is really substantial. So I would just say that that's my spiel on the data. And I think we have to find our way around that, John, in terms of getting more granularity. So when we talk about Asians in Burlington, we're really talking about Boudinese and Nepalese. That's what I was wondering because at the refugee resettlement and the concentration of the folks who came from the refugee camps in Nepal, coming here from Bhutan and Nepal. Exactly. Concentrated effort. And so I was surprised in the mayor's home ownership thing if we didn't have any data looking at those specific communities. But I hear what you're saying and I appreciate that. That's why I asked the question. Sure. Representative Bloomly. Yes. Hello, constituents, Sigrino. Hi there. Nice to see you. Nice to see you and thanks so much for, I mean, this is very tight to you packed a lot into that and it's very helpful in understanding kind of the 2021 century experience. I think, I really agree with the point that you made about tokenism and for that reason, there's a part of 232 at the end that requires reporting on what VHCB is learning, about the barriers to land and home ownership and what it is doing. And then representatives from VHCB came to talk with us. I don't even know when I have no sense of time anymore, but and talked about the fact that that is going to be a part of their reporting from here on in, which was great to hear whether the bill went through or not, so it's a point well taken and I wanted to let you know that there was a willing embrace of that by VHCB, not to say that that, I mean, doesn't indicate that we've set any particular benchmarks, but my sense is that that should evolve as things move forward. So anyway, thank you. If I could just respond to that, I was really pleased to see that. I did read that at the, I think it was at the very end of the bill and I thought that that was very good. I think if you can add any specificity to that language, it might be helpful, but it certainly is a start. I really appreciated that that was included there. Representative Murphy. Thank you. I neglected to just bring forward a point that had struck me when you were speaking of some of the exclusive zoning restrictions. I was on our development review board for a dozen years and here in Fairfax, we do have different densities depending on the part of the community. We have a village center and then expanding out. And so I never looked at it as being with an intent to restrict ownership. That was really trying to build larger property sizes for what we prefer that we like to see the land and Vermont. But I think it is really important when you just get a different perspective of, can that goal be achieved a different way or is that being restrictive for, but just making us think. So I would argue that it's minimum lot size in that sense isn't necessarily restrictive through intention. And in some ways has to exist to maintain the goal of having open land if that's the desire of the body. But it's interesting to keep that in the back of your mind though. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I would say this in Burlington, I don't know much about other cities, but I do know Burlington has inclusionary zoning. And it's been interesting to me, I've seen a map of where the inclusionary zoning housing has been built and it's largely not been in the Hill section of Burlington. But it is a great tool. It's actually, I think a very important tool to use. And so I would just say one thing, Representative Murphy, if I can in response to what you said. There's a person who you may have seen in the news lately, he's written a book called How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibrahim Kendi. And he gave a talk last year, and it's one that I repeat to my students, which is that the issue of racism and racial inequality is not, it should not be limited to intent. It has to be to impact. So most people, you know, most people carrying out, you know, various policies of their organizations have no intent to discriminate. But we, I think, I guess if there's anything I feel that it is incumbent upon our institutions to take responsibility for the impact of our policies. And so I, you know, I was in the school board in Burlington, we developed this mechanism in which we look through everything through our equity lens. So we were in advance evaluating the impact of the policies we had. And so that means you have to have some goals with regard to impact, and you can assess that way. And that I think helps us leave aside the issue of intent because there are many good people who don't have racist intentions, but because of past practices and cultural norms and so forth, the results have negative effects that we can overcome. Yeah. No, I think that's really important. And I think that goes to the perspective and really trying to look at it from a different viewpoint and the equity lens is a wonderful tool for that. So thank you. And I want to point out too, when it comes to exclusionary zoning, sometimes it's the plus one, right? It's not the zoning and it's on the face of it. It's the loans and the mortgages that, you know, and I think I mentioned this book much earlier on and I think Stephanie took some of her, I noticed, I recognized the picture of Macon from the color of law of this idea that, you know, Levittown, which was created to be affordable housing for veterans after World War II, except African-Americans. And that was in the title of their, you know, that was in the Covenants. So that plus one, which really, you know, I think it addresses something that when you don't know about it, we just think, oh, look, this is Levittown. This was great. This was for veterans. And it becomes part of our culture without knowing why it was so exclusionary. And I, but I, Stephanie, you've used a lot of national stuff because that's what's mostly available, but what struck me today more than anything else is the minuscule number of black American homeowners in Burlington. And I don't think it's enough to say, why is that? Because I think the answer might be because of all of this, but that's shocking to me. And it really gives the picture of the work that we've done earlier this year, not specifically for black Americans, but just about different ethnicities and how they've been treated throughout the years. But that is, I mean, I don't live in Burlington. I know it's close to Vermont, but what's the reaction within Burlington to something like that? Has there been something? I mean, I know that this legislation and other things that have happened in Burlington, this is one of the reasons why this legislation is in front of us, both of these bills. What do Burlingtonians and other Vermonters, but what do Burlingtonians think about that fact? I think that Burlington is in a particular moment in its history. And it's struggling even with the race data. There is a real political divide in terms of those who think that use of force on black citizens is four times greater than their share of the city's population. I mean, the numbers are just extraordinary. And even there, I don't really see an outcry among some, and of course, some are very disturbed. So I think this city is in the process of a kind of a racial awakening and that the data are fundamentally important. And to your point, Representative Stevens, I think that this data on home ownership by blacks in Burlington is a wake-up call. So, but it's in the process of being absorbed by a community. And I will say that Burlington is no different than the rest of the state in which a lot of white people think very highly of us. And we have a hard time absorbing this information because it's not consistent with our good perception of ourselves. And so I think Representative Stevens, that some of us, that number really hit us. And for others, it's just business as usual. And we're just, as you know, there's a lot going on in Burlington around race. And we're just in that process of trying to educate a lot of people in the city and hopefully move forward. And I know I made light of the classic Burlington joke, but I bring it out only because those of us who don't live in Burlington may think that it's only a Burlington problem. And I, while the numbers may be lower in each of the different counties, I think it's important for us to acknowledge that it's not a Burlington only or Chittenden County only problem. Right, you know, I actually probably should contact the nearest office, but I think because they have property data, they are able to come up with that number, but it seems to me, so should Brattleboro be able to, so should Rutland. So some of the larger towns and that means looking not maybe only on black home ownership but Hispanics and so on and so forth. So I think it would be a great service if some entity would seek out that data from individual municipalities so that we had a picture, as you said, to show that this isn't just a Burlington phenomenon because I'm very doubtful that it is just a Burlington phenomenon. All right, thank you so much. I appreciate the presentation and certainly if you can share those slides with us so that we can keep them for our record, excuse me, that would be great. Thank you for your time. You're very welcome, thank you very much. All right, and we'll, no, I think this was really good stuff, thank you. Thank you all, it was nice to talk to you. All right, committee, I'm gonna ask you to stick around for a minute after we go off the air. And Ron, I think we can just go, well, before we go off the air, just that was pretty eye-opening stuff. And I think I just wanna give a context to the testimony that we're taking. We are spending a lot of time on these bills and much like the testimony we took this morning, it's testimony that's not necessarily specifically related to the testimony this morning wasn't specifically related to a bill as this was. And we have one more set of witnesses tomorrow on 232. But the reason I'm spending so much time with this right now is that this is clearly an element of our work that I have to admit I haven't dealt with personally in this committee. We've always treated it as a class issue. Poor people are poor people and the housing is created for poor people and people have been living in poverty wherever they are. And that's not necessarily incorrect, but there's also elements that we ignore when we don't take into account the different facets of the individual remoters who are being affected by the policies that we're promulgating and that we do. We do our, and I know that we do, when it comes to housing, we do our best and we think we do our best. And yet we end up in a situation which we just heard about in Burlington. So it's just, I'm just trying to give us a background. This is the frustration of only having two-year bienniums. This is background for work that again, even those of us who've been on the committee for a couple of terms or more, haven't done this deep a dive on this kind of information. So that's really where I'm coming from and making sure that we hear this testimony so that it informs our work moving forward.