 And they'd have to be changed. We'd have to integrate. So what I'm going to talk to you about a bit this evening is the fact that the de facto segregation story is a complete myth. It hobbles our ability to do anything about segregation because as long as we believe it, we never mobilize the support to undo it. But the fact that the residential segregation of every metropolitan area in this country was created explicitly, not the unintended consequence of benign or neutral actions or economic policies that weren't really directed at race, but created explicitly by the federal, state, and local governments designed to create segregated areas of every metropolitan area in the country. Now a big one, I'll talk about a few of these policies, but there's so many of them I can't talk about them all this evening, and I'll try to illustrate them in East Bay examples, but I want to again emphasize this is a national story, and the myth has to be demolished nationally in order to permit us to really address it because the Congress and the Supreme Court, which are going to be necessary, to enact the really massive policies to undo residential segregation going to be responsive to public opinion nationally, not to just local opinion. So it's a national story. The biggest program, one of the, I say, two biggest programs that the federal government pursued to be aimless and not really prepared for the real economy, for the formal economy. But that's not how public housing began. Public housing began in this country in the 1930s. The depression measure by the New Deal as a program for working-class families, primarily white working-class and middle-class families, providing some housing for African Americans was an afterthought. And some housing was provided for African Americans with always on a segregated basis. And I'll give you one example from the Midwest to show you that this is not a Southern phenomena, and then I'll talk a little bit about the East Bay. Some of you, I imagine, have read the autobiography of Langston Hughes, a great poet, a playwright, novelist. He writes, and this is hard to imagine, but he writes about how in the early 20th century he grew up in an integrated neighborhood in downtown Cleveland. We don't think of Cleveland, urban Cleveland as being an integrated place, but he grew up in an integrated neighborhood in downtown Cleveland. He says his best friend was Polish in high school. He dated a Jewish girl. This is not our image of Cleveland, it was an integrated society. And yet, there were many, many areas like that in this country. Some of them, because factories were downtown where most people worked. Most employment was downtown, and workers didn't have all the bills to get to work, so they had to live close enough to work, to be able to walk or to take short street car rides. And so if you had a factory or a workplace where there were African-Americans and Irish and Italian and Jewish, there were whites coming all to work in the same places they had to live in the St. Neighborhoods. Here in the East Bay, West Oakland was an integrated neighborhood. It was an integrated neighborhood, curiously, because the Pullman Company hired only African-Americans as state car porters. And this open was the end of the transcontinental railroad. So all the sleeping car porters had to live close enough to be able to walk to work in Oakland, near the railroad terminal, and whiten in what was otherwise a white neighborhood who became integrated because of the sleeping car porters. And in fact, every city in the country that had a railroad station, and that was the major form of intercity transportation in those days, every city in the country had integrated neighborhoods in the railroad station because the baggage handlers were also all African-Americans. And they had to live close enough to work in order to be able to walk there. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of, oh, I'm sorry. I thought about Langston News. I meant to tell you was that during the New Deal after the Depression, the Public Works Administration of the very first agencies of the New Deal demolished that integrated neighborhood to build segregated public housing. Separate projects for African-Americans and whites creating segregation in an urban area which had to be known before. And in many cases, in other places where there had been some segregation of reinforcing and structuring it to create a permanent pattern in those communities. And the same thing happened in many, many cities around the country. So say the neighborhood where Langston News grew up in Cleveland was about half black and half white. There was a neighborhood in St. Louis, half black and half white, where the Public Works Administration also demolished housing to build segregated public housing. In Atlanta, the neighborhood called the flats near downtown Atlanta, half black and half white. The Public Works Administration demolished housing there to build housing for white families only, excluding African-Americans from housing in a neighborhood where they had always traditionally lived. In addition to East Bay, I like to talk about the Cambridge, Massachusetts, because that's another place that you could think of as being liberal and figurative of people that understand it happened there, probably happened everywhere. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the area near Central Square was an integrated neighborhood where the Public Works Administration built segregated housing, separate projects for African-Americans and whites, creating a pattern that helped to structure the entire segregation of the Boston area. This was not the fact of segregation. It's not that African-Americans happened to apply to some projects and whites happened to apply to other projects. So it was the jury segregation, segregation by public policy, explicit public policy. Well during World War II, as I say, hundreds of thousands of workers flocked to centers of defense production, wherever they would defense plants in the country to take jobs that were on the palatable during the Depression. A big center of that was here in the East Bay in Richmond, where the Kaisership Yards eventually employed 100,000 workers in the street that didn't exist before World War II. Richmond itself had a population of a little bit more than 20,000 at the beginning of the war, by the end of the war it was 100,000. It's unimaginable, I don't know if you can imagine how a community grows from 20,000 to 100,000 in a period of just four years. But workers were flocking to the shipyards to take these jobs. The government was consistent that the shipyards and Kaisership continued to turn out the ships for the war effort, but it had to find somewhere for these people to live who were flocking to Richmond. And so the government built housing. Now Richmond before World War II was a predominantly, well predominantly it was a white community. There was some 200 out of the 20,000 people living in Richmond. There was some 200 out of the Americans and they were domestic, working as domestic and white families. This was a white community. But when workers flocked to Richmond to take jobs in the shipyards, the federal government built segregated housing for the first time in Richmond. Creative segregation really never previously existed. It built temporary housing for African Americans along the railroad tracks near the shipyards and the industrial area of Richmond. And it built sturdier housing for white workers further inland than the neighborhoods where whites lived. Creating a segregated pattern of community that never known segregation before. These were not workers who were too poor to live with one another. They all had jobs in the shipyards so this was not for people to talk about. And this went on everywhere in the country. In San Francisco, the Hunter's Point drive-off also needed housing for workers. It was built on a segregated basis for the city of San Francisco along with the federal government to build housing projects during World War II throughout the city. Three of them were located in white neighborhoods. There were very few African Americans in San Francisco before World War II. Three of them were built in white neighborhoods and restricted to whites only. African Americans who were flocking to work in more industries and shipyards couldn't live there. There was one project that was built for African Americans in San Francisco in the western edition in the Fillmore District. And the reason it was built there was because there were vacant apartments in the Fillmore District because Japanese Americans had been evicted and placed in the term of camps further inland so there were lots of vacancies. A few African Americans were moving into that neighborhood. And so the federal government decided that should be an African American neighborhood and it built the housing project for African Americans only. This went on, as I say, all over the country. Sometimes reinforcing segregation where there had already existed and sometimes creating segregation where it never previously been known. And the latter experiences that mostly at East Bay because in this area there weren't many African Americans here before World War II. After World War II there was still this big civilian housing shortage and the President Truman who succeeded Roosevelt proposed a massive expansion of the public housing program. There was very little civilian housing available. We had millions of returning war veterans coming and demanding housing, having babies, baby food for a generation, no housing, housing program. And remember, we're talking about housing for white workers primarily. Certainly for people, public housing at that time, the housing, the local housing agencies frequently sent social workers to the homes of public housing applicants to make sure that their children were well-behaved. They had good enough furniture to meet the high standards of public housing. This was not the public housing unit today. Well, he proposed a massive expansion of the public housing program. Conservatives in Congress wanted to defeat the public housing program, not for racial reasons. But again, this was not primarily a program for African Americans that was segregated. They wanted to feed it because they were opposed to any government involvement, excuse me, any government involvement in the housing industry. They voted to socialistic and they wanted to defeat public housing. So they came up with a device which a political scientist called a poison pillar member, which is something that's not, this is not the only, is amendment to the opponents of the bill put onto a bill to try to defeat the bill because they think that if they get the amendment passed, then it will make the entire bill unpalatable. So Conservatives in Congress proposed an amendment to the 1949 Housing Act. To me, 1949 is pretty much a history. It proposed an amendment to the 1949 Housing Act that said from now on, all public housing had to be integrated. It was a pretty straightforward amendment. Clearly it had no meaning except in fact that everybody understood that public housing everywhere that actually was segregated at that point in times where I called the subtitle not focused on it, but forgotten history. There was nothing different about this. Because their theory was that they would vote for this amendment, for this integration amendment. Northern Liberals in Congress would join them in voting for the amendment. The amendment would then get passed. And when the full housing bill came up for a vote, they would then flip and vote against the full housing bill. Southern Democrats who were in favor of public housing so long as it was segregated would then join them in voting against the full bill. And the full bill would go down to defeat. So Liberals in Congress campaigned against the integration amendment. Civil Rights Advocates campaigned against the integration amendment in order to preserve public housing. I'm not sure they'd write the choice that they made. It was a difficult decision. But as a result, the integration amendment was defeated. And the federal government then used the defeat of that amendment as its excuse, not only for segregating public housing, but for segregating all of its housing programs for the next decade. Because Congress had clearly repudiated the idea of integrating housing. Well, under this 1949 Housing Act, projects were built across the country. Some of the high-rise towers that you're familiar with, Pruitt, Igo, and St. Louis, or Carini Green in Chicago, all across the country, these projects were built. Separate projects for African-Americans and whites. The Pruitt, Igo projects in St. Louis were two separate projects. Pruitt was for African-Americans. Igo was for whites. It was not a single project. And throughout the country, segregated projects were built. Here in Oakland, there was a project for African-Americans at West Oakland, which had been an integrated neighborhood that's gradually becoming more and more African-American. And a project for whites was built in East Oakland, which at that point was an all-white community. Two separate projects clearly distinguishable by race. Well, shortly after this happened, after these projects were built, large numbers of vacancies developed in the white projects. And there were long waiting lists in the black projects. Soon, at the same time, roughly the same time, industry left the cities. And there were fewer and fewer jobs in the neighborhoods of the public housing projects. The situation became so conspicuous of these large numbers of vacancies in the white projects and long waiting lists in the black projects so that all the projects were opened up to African-Americans. They gradually became all African-American in areas where there were no jobs, people became poorer and poorer. And the government began to subsidize public housing. Previously, the residents of public housing paid the full cost of the housing in their rent room. They were not subsidized projects. The government wasn't losing any money on these projects. It was simply providing housing for people who needed it. And so the projects became mostly African-American and eventually virtually all African-American as white stuff. Well, the question is, why did white sleep? And to understand that, we need to understand a second major program of the federal government. And that was that the federal government had part done a program to subsidize the suburbanization of the entire white population to get whites out of urban areas into single-family homes of the suburbs. And before this time, and I'm talking now about the World War II, the post-World War II period, even into the 1950s, before this time, single-family homes were built on a one-by-one basis. You buy a plot of land and hire a builder to build a home. If a builder was particularly risk-taking, he might build two or three or four homes and hope he could sell them. But nobody had the capital to build thousands and thousands of homes at once. The only way they could do it, builders was to go to the federal government and get a federal government guarantee of bank loans for construction purposes. And if the federal government guaranteed bank loans, they could then get loans to build giant subdivisions. Well, here in this area, a builder named David Mulhannon wanted to build the San Lorenzo Village. And so he went to the federal government and got a guarantee of a loan that she could use for construction. In order to get that guarantee, he had to submit his plans to the federal government and the federal housing administration, the architectural design of the homes the building materials he was going to use, the layout of the streets and the subdivision and a promise never to sell off home to an African-American. Indeed, the federal housing administration required that every home in the development include a clause that prohibited resale to African-Americans or rental to African-Americans outside near the border of Richmond. The main brawling wood was built in this way, as I mentioned, San Lorenzo Village. Provincially, San Leandro was developed in this way. Wall with federal housing administration guarantees on condition that a promise be made never to sell a home to an African-American. And that the needs in these homes include a clause prohibiting resale to African-Americans and these needs still exist today. They're still in them, they're no longer enforceable. But if you go to homes and enter these large subdivisions and go to the Alameda Catholic Clerk and ask for the CCNR, covenants, conditions and restrictions, you'll see the racial restrictions still in the needs of these homes all required by the federal government. So you had these two enormous policies. One, the public housing program which created segregation where it hadn't produced the existing. And the other, the federal housing administration subsidization of the movement of white families out of cities into single family homes in suburban areas combining to create a segregated pattern across the country. Now as I said, these are not the only two policies though many, many others that the federal government employed and state and local governments employed in order to create segregation which would just give you the highlights of the main policies. But because we forgot all this history, as I said, in light of this history the notion of de facto segregation is laughable. And yet it's commonplace in our discourse. And if we don't understand this history we're never going to be able to mobilize the kind of political understanding that's necessary to reverse it. Of course we could do some tinkering around the edges of programs or subsidies for poor people. I'm not saying those are unimportant but it's not just poor people who are segregated middle class and working class after the Americans are segregated as well. Let me give you an example of what and I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting this is realistic, I'm going to give you an example of the kind of policy that's constitutionally required even though it is completely particularly unrealistic, under realistic. Take the suburbs that were built in the mid 20th century by people like David Bohana or Henry Dolder who built the famous one, I guess many of you know, Westlake and Daly City boxes on the hillside and they would diggy tag gave them all up the same. Right, so take these developers who got FHA guarantees on condition that no homes be sold after the Americans. They sold these homes to white families, white working class families, returning war veterans around the terms of the century for about $10,000 a piece. This was one of the modest homes, less than a thousand square feet, $10,000 a piece in those days is about $90,000 today. White working class families who bought those homes saw over the next few generations in appreciation so the homes are now worth $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 or more. More. More. More. Those families gained wealth. They used it to send their children to college. They equated to their children and to their grandchildren who then had down payments for homes in many cases. African Americans who were required to live in rented apartments because they were not permitted to live in a single family home to these suburbs gained no wealth. Today, African American incomes on average are about 60%, 60% of white incomes. African American wealth is about 10% of white wealth and you would expect that 60% income ratio would translate to a 60% wealth ratio. People with the same incomes could save the same amount. But that enormous disparity between a 60% income ratio and a 10% wealth ratio is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal policy. So if we had a national understanding of this history, what would we do? Well, the federal government perhaps would buy the next homes that came up for sale in places like San Lorenzo and the daily city for $304,000, $500,000, and you'd say, whatever, and resell them to qualify African Americans for $100,000. That would be a constitutionally required policy if we understood this history. But we don't. We don't. We're not going to do it. And it would be foolish to try and propose something like that. So the first thing we need to do, I think, and this is my church, but the first thing we need to do is educate the public. And that's a precondition for taking even much more modest action than what I just described. In the course of writing this book, I'll conclude this way for now. In the course of writing this book, I examined the most commonly used American history textbooks in high schools across the country. And I found that every one of them lie about this history. It's just that's a sign of the term. They lie about this history. The most commonly used American history textbook that I looked at when I was doing this research and had this, you know, three or four years ago, something called the Americans. I'm sure it's still being used today. It's a 1,200 page textbook. And it has one paragraph that's sub-headed. It's like, discrimination in the North. Within that one series, go look at it. Go to your local high school, and that's actually what the next group will do. Go to one paragraph called discrimination in the North. One sentence within that paragraph about housing the sentence reads as follows. In the North, African Americans found themselves forced into segregated housing. These textbook publishers, they pay a lot of money for copy others, which is supposed to be on the lookout to pass it for a sentence in there. They fell asleep when they came across that sentence. But, you know, this is a very serious point. Because if the next generation is misthought this history and understands as little as we understand, they are going to be in as poor a position to rectify it as we can. So the first thing I always ask people I'm speaking about to do is, every one of you lives in the school district, and one of you has either children or grandchildren or sisters or brothers or nieces or nephews who attend school and you know principals and superintendents and teachers. And you can object to the vestiging of this history and insist on an accurate history of how our segregation happened to be taught. Because if you do that, and if we start to teach the younger generation an accurate history, it's not only the younger generation will learn it, but it will spread and be able to have the kind of national conversation that's necessary in order to reverse it. Now, I talked about a very extreme policy that is completely, completely unrealistic. There are some policies that are more realistic and they're mostly aimed at lower income families, but I wanted to emphasize that the problem of segregation is not just the problem of lower income families. But we have programs like the Section 8 Housing Coucher Program, which you all know, which is a low income housing tax credit program, which you may be familiar with. It's a subsidy by the Treasury Department to subsidize builders of low income homes. Both of those programs reinforce segregation today, because they're structured in a way that ensures that the families who benefit from those programs use them only in segregated neighborhoods. The Section 8 voucher amounts are calculated so that they're not enough to rent in middle class neighborhoods. They're too high to rent because they're an average. They're too high to rent in segregated neighborhoods and so landlords exploit the program by charging more than the market would otherwise require. Developers of low income housing tax credits typically place their developments only in segregated neighborhoods because land is cheaper there. There's no community opposition. Of course, you can put a sign in the window and potential mentors can walk by and see it, which you can do in the middle class neighborhood. So these two programs reinforce segregation. Reforming them is also politically unrealistic at this point, but not nearly as unrealistic as the kind of thing I talked about earlier. But we're not going to be able to reform these either without the kind of national consensus that's necessary to understand that our racial boundaries are unconstitutional and that we're required to rather be in my book, a book I say, that letting bygones be bygones is not a constitutional policy. If we understood this history, we might have a chance of motivating the public to do something about it. Thank you. I've had it in a decade, and I read a lot. And so I'm trying everyone for making this happen. And I love the energy in this room because normally I'm dealing with project approval that has six angry, gray-haired people. And that's about it, right? What kind of foreign warrior saying, but yeah. So thanks for having me. I want to pick up this story as an East Bay resident of Pittsburgh, California, which is where I grew up. My Mexican grandmother was a Richmond chimp yard worker, and my Italian grandmother, Sicilian, as you would say, was a cannery worker left when the river had a lot of fish. And that's what Sicilians were there. We lived this experience, but we also lived in a Latino community that intermarried with an Anglo community. And so we didn't feel it as personally, but we knew it was there. And Pittsburgh is a pretty rough town, and it was highly polluted. And so I'm now picking up from the child of the 70s, right? Actually, more 60s, but I'll give myself a break. So in the 70s, this was one polluted mess. When we used to go to Santa Cruz, the beach, and then hop back over the hill, we would all start coughing. We all had skin rashes and asthma, and the pollution was unbelievable. So I got real motivated about environmental quality, and that's what I decided to do. And I got scholarship doubt, and my parents owned the homes. Thank God. And we made it educated and up. Environment, though, in the 70s, starting with 1970, Nixon, the president, Reagan was the governor. Think about that. Environment was about stopping real bad pollution, stopping real bad ideas, including freeways that wouldn't bisect it, not just segregated communities that have been created, but also go to gate parks, for example. And in environmental law that I know you guys know about, and I'm so grateful you're focused on, welcome to my nerd zone, the California Environmental Quality Act, the very first of these laws. And see what I know. I know I know what I'm talking about. My license plate, and it is in Tesla, because I'm at that age, and income level is secret. OK? So structurally, structurally, CWA is about taking the existing setting and deciding whether change is an impact. Now, I want you to start with this story, and then move to a law that was really intended to apply to new factories and freeways and deforestation. And instead, thanks to the wonderment of lawyers, and I'm going to show you just four slides here, but I'm going to show you this one, what lawyers can do. Over a 40-year history, lawyers can make these lawsuits anonymous. You can file a sequel lawsuit for economic gain without disclosing who you are or having anything to do with the environment. Judges are lawyers. They are cranky and critical and love-second-guessing everything and rarely get invited twice to the same dinner. That results in a win-loss rate for agencies, which is unlike anything in the country. Almost 50% of the time, opponents can win a sequel lawsuit. Think what our tax system would be like if about 50% of the time the IRS lost. Think about how weird that is. Most of the time, when sequel lawsuits are lost, you lose the project approval. We have an occupied high-rise NLA that lost its project approval, Old Spaghetti Factory. Kennett's were escorted out. The building's vacant four years later. Because of this mess, once you get sued, you can't get a loan. You can't get a loan, the project stops. And it's an incredible tool. And it's used by everyone. But the governor reviews the form to failure to reform it to labor unions. The highest percentage of sequel lawsuits is against residential projects, not factories. That's today's, we'll just skip. Almost all residential projects, these are the ones I want you to see. This is the Skag region, where most of California lives. All the L.A. counties accept San Diego. 98% of the challenged housing units were in infill locations. 14,000 housing units were challenged in this three-year period that we studied. 14,000. 70% of these housing units were in transit quarters or at transit stations. They're exactly the place we say in the name of the environment we want housing. And then the California Environmental Protection Agency maps environmentally and economically distressed areas, environmental justice communities. Bingo, 78% of the challenged units were in wider, wealthier, healthier parts of that region. You put this map against the 2-thirds majority Democratic legislature. And you call it the, quote, environment. And you can't look at yourself in the mirror. This is SIGWA. This is why it's not OK. This is why what you're doing is so important. And what's happening here? Brian had it. It's my generation. You know, we still drove the bakery, right? I mean, you know, Star Trek, Rating Bunch, first run. Man, I saw the premieres. It was a smaller place. There were fewer people. We liked it. We never had to look for parking anywhere. It was wonderful. And when people get older, unfortunately, I can attest, we get even crankier and more resistant to change and more righteous about our own bias. SIGWA is biased against change. And if we didn't want change, life would be fine. The last of these slides, oh, this one I love. This is really ground-calling an African-American diaspora. I just have to show you from 2000 to 2010, we're not in the 1950s or 60s. Census data, 2000 to 2010, net loss, African-American families. Where are we moving? How far out? Oh, actually, we're moving to San Joaquin County, actually, has the biggest net in migration of African-American families. So I know having been priced out of these communities, having to endure two and three and four and five-hour commutes, in the name of climate, let's now intentionally increase road congestion and charge for every year of a mile travel, even by a car pool. I know in the name of climate, let's shrink California so we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions produced in the state. How are we shrinking? We're losing working-class families. Where are we losing them? We're losing them from Texas, Nevada, and Arizona, where per capita greenhouse gas emissions are three times higher than ours. If we think that we're on the right path now because we're so enlightened, we are repeating exactly the same pattern of self-righteous discrimination that is 100% aimed at working-class families in the name of climate. Oh, please, don't fall for any of it. Bring that skepticism. Bring that common sense. Don't buy any of the BS. And most of it now, because we only talk in these silos, we're not talking to Republicans. It's very hard to find them. But anyway, so what you're doing is so important. I want to thank you. I just want to say, again, what an honor to be next to this man, and Brian, and everybody else. This is not a USC thing, because I hate USC, but my son's there, but fight on. This is your mic. Yeah, great. I have a few questions quickly, but I want to open up all of you, because I'm sure you've got a lot of depth into presentation. I thought I would briefly share a bit about myself as it relates to this exact topic. And I've got to double-click on one of the last things we've heard today. So Ernest Brown, I remember he's being a Democrat saying he's paying for everyone. I have a job somewhere in the city, and I also live here. I can't get over it. I'm not from here. I moved here for a job. I'm actually from Atlanta, which came up a couple of times. It's an awesome presentation. And despite IRFMA as a solid legal class household, parents of the college, their parents of the college, and all that, going to college in the 30s and getting a PhD at the block first. Right? I didn't do it, but I did. Nonetheless, I grew up in a segregated community and did not have a job here until college. So just to sort of think the sort of generational things we've been making through the days. So until the mid-90s, or late, almost no, early 2000s, when I finished high school, it's still very easy to have a completely segregated big community. Despite all the classic kind of solution that's not coming along with that. I bring that up to start with a question for you all. Just how do we change this sort of particular area where progressivism and preservationism seem to be weirdly applied? Change this link to thinking back, to create progress we must preserve when you learn the history, preserving what it is, is continuing to cry. Well, so first we have to be honest in calling it out. And there's a lot of pressure within the Democratic Party to conform to some pretty severe norms. And unite against Trump, right? And I get that. But uniting against Trump doesn't excuse this divide between haves and has-nots, older, younger, white, and black. It most certainly doesn't create any excuse at all for just cutting off the half-winter middle-class home ownership. So I've spent a lot of time trying to change sequel lawsuit rules so you can't sue unless it's a real environmental issue or when you're a real environmental worker. And then, unless there's a real environmental harm that the president would cause, what you get from a lawsuit is a new traffic study, not undoing the project of approval. That defame sequel, without diluting, it's power to protect the environment for real. And that, I think, is what people had intended all along. So that's one thing. We've certainly been working a lot on housing policy. And here we've got a real dilemma, because high-rise housing and even mid-rise housing is so much more expensive than single-family homes and town homes. It's so much more expensive. If we were first to say everyone should live in a mansion for climate change, we would just laugh as we could afford to build everyone mansions. But San Francisco just did an all-affordable housing project. No quote developed for a profit, right? Non-profit developers were all affordable. Those units came in at $900,000 apiece, because we have loaded every last little cost, every last little favor on those not obtained to say no. So you guys, need housing, you pay the yard fee. You pay for the rental subsidy for the two units in your ten-year apartment that is inclusionary. We created the problem. You pay for it. Let's just keep loading pricing on housing. And so we have to stop that. So we have a sort of simple solution, which is new housing should have to pay more than 20% above what everybody else is paying. So if nobody else is paying for art, new housing doesn't either. And if you want to put an art charge in your general fund budget and spread it across the community, that's fine. Whatever that is on a per household basis, you can load it onto a new house, too. But enough already with just charging those not at the table in the fees or structure, which is to say, not that we could do there. The last idea was, much as we just did the upzoning by allowing ADUs, accessory dwelling units, as a right. I mean, it's great, right? But really, is it a future, or is it a small step toward getting people into some level of humane privacy? And out of room closets and cars? So in that same way, especially with the retail revolution underway, doing a state up zone for small retail strip malls, right? Two, three-eighth strip malls automatically without general planners' own amendments can go to six or so stories, which is software construction. You'd still have to go through sequels to get your permits. But at that point, you're not fighting the policy anymore. You couldn't be referendum. And thanks to the great work that you guys have done, any community that have reasonably denied that permit would be subject to a Housing Accountability Act law student enforcement action. So those are the practical sort of California-esque notions. Other stuff I think is completely ridiculous, like having the state housing commission to force cities to approve housing has never happened. So anyway, the article's not speaking. So I learned something today, I'm going to write in the C-speak. And the fact that public housing does not mean such a bad housing, at least historically, it does work with the same thing. Today, when we hear those, we assume that it must be. So buying it for $600,000, selling it for $100,000, letting the black families feel the difference, but we are owed, might be out of the realm of social possibility. But what buying it for $100,000 and then not necessarily subsidizing the purchase and intentionally creating an integrated community of public purchasing power, is that something that we should be considering as a way to, again, not subsidize, but heavily influence the creation of more integrated communities? Well, I really, I try to resist talking about policy because I'm very aware of the real political impossibility of doing what we should be doing. Let me ask you this, how many of you are single family homeowners and startups? I've seen three hands. So I think the work you're doing is fantastic. But this is really, yes, in their backyard, not yes, in my backyard. And I don't know the solution. I don't know how to organize politically to get into the places where these decisions are made and where we need to mobilize the kind of support and understanding that this needs to be done. That, to me, is the challenge more than coming up with policies that are not going to be enacted. It's figuring out a organizing strategy to get out from among ourselves. And I'm not, anyway, a criticizer would do. I think it's fantastic. But we need to get out to the people who are making these decisions. And that means going to churches, if you're talking to schools, like I said, not just in Berkeley and in Oakland, but in Walnut Creek. You know the names better than I do. El Cerrito, places like that. And trying to make an impact on the way people think about this in a broader group than just the people who are representing this room. So I'm a little more radical on that. I think we need to bring the civil rights policy against the California Air Resources Board, which in December is proposing to expand CEQA in the name of climate change. So I realize I have a lot of work to do. But what are some sources of funding and no possible some use as well as we think about how to effectively begin to, at least out in the path of this asset wealth government that has to happen. I mean, well, one put some ideas up there. So California specific, proposition 13. That mission-wide, the mortgage industry structure, like how should we be thinking about the flow of funds that continue to go to homeowners that as long as those funds are allocated in that way cannot be used to support those who are locked out of those same housing opportunities. Understanding that there's a lot of organizing work before there's appetite for those types of actions. Well, I don't know. I'm not a housing expert, I'm a historian. But I do know that if we get the kind of conversation that's necessary going, we'll come up with the solutions and we'll come up with the strategies to do the kind of thing that you're talking about. I really think it's a little bit self-indulgent to talk a lot about policy now that we know can't be enacted and not be focused almost single-mindedly in creating a political base for making those policies. I agree, it's a matter of politics, not policy. And it's very easy to talk about policy. And if it's not possible to get it advanced, then I think it's all about politics. And that starts with finding the right local candidates, supporting the right state candidates, and when they move to the legislature and they turn against you, as they do all the time, the call of the hood, you know? I mean, it's so irritating to put Trump just differently. Oh my God, I mean, oh my God. But that doesn't excuse us for just sitting passively with the highest poverty rate in the country and doing nothing because we can only do one thing at a time. I mean, we can do more than fight Trump. We should. So I'm gonna respect the message I'm hearing about politics, and we're almost more important than policy as this budget. Since the people we have to convince, to be able to prevent the defense, probably look more like you than like me. What messages do you think will be effective with your peers or your children, since maybe in one of the generational projects, to help them understand the, what they have received and what it's owed because of that? Well, I've spoken to a lot of groups around the country since this book came out. And I think, and everybody has their own narrow focus on their mind. I think that understanding this history can change people's attitudes towards the president because people, not everybody, clearly we're a very divided country, but I'm concerned about the fact that even people who are considered liberal have this misunderstanding of our history and therefore use that as a justification for what we're not doing. So I think a public education campaign, and I believe my schools, I mean, figuring out how to get into churches and these of the, you know, the rosary clubs and with this kind of information is, can change people's minds. So we're in a period, it's obviously, I'm very frightened by the rise of white society and the consequences for which we're thought to rise and the covering of them that always existed. They're enabling in this administration. But I'm also very encouraged about the fact that we are having more honest and passionate and accurate conversations about the history of slavery in June pro and its present day consequences. And I think that in previous time in American history, I think that something that's probably more important than my book to read, and it's very short, is the speech that Mitch Lancer, the mayor of New Orleans gave when he presided over the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee. And two or three years ago it was inconceivable, that speech, if you haven't read it, it's a full text, it's on the New York Times website, you can easily find it. Two or three years ago it was inconceivable that an elected white politician could make a speech that was that honest and accurate and passionate. Not just about the history of slavery in June pro and its present day consequences. So I think we're at the point, and you know, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing terrific stuff about it. The MacArthur Foundation just gave, it's a genius award to Hannah Nicole Jones who's been writing about this history. So it's not just my book, there is a national conversation that's beginning. It hasn't gone far enough, obviously. But that's beginning, that's beginning to address our legacy of the history of slavery in June pro, which is reflected in the housing policies that I talk about. We need to figure out how to expand that discussion. So I'm actually, while I'm frightened by the rise of white supremacist groups, I'm also encouraged and hopeful about the kinds of conversations that we're having, and our big challenges have to expand in those conversations that take place. So I spent 22 years on the California League of Conservation Boners Board. I was their longest running minority board member. Hernandez is my dad's name, not my husband. And it was painful, how oblivious they were to working families. It was painful, how oblivious they were to the racial consequences of suggesting, I know, let's just charge 30 cents a mile for a mile of driven. Who do you think has the money to pay that, who has to do that right? And it was an affront to them because they felt a charge of racism underneath it. And they know they're not racist. And that's where I think we have to start. Progressive Bay Area people cannot wake up thinking that they are racist. It is impossible. And therefore they must be forced to look at the mirror. And that's what you have to do. There is an incredible group here I would say Abra J. and George Robert. Robert Apodopo, is he still there? We don't know. Abra J. 75, they are civil rights heroes. Cruz Reynoso, first Latino Supreme Court Justice. Herman Gallegos, founder of the Raza Nationally. John Gamboa, founder of GreenLine, which was an Aguilar Nation. I've worked with these gentlemen in the past. I've been working with them for the last three years. They have networks of Jocota others, African Americans, Asians, others across the country or the state. And what happened, they retired. And they woke up after the Great Recession and saw home ownership among minority families drop back 30 decades or three decades. And they got pissed. And they woke up and they said, where's the civil rights movement? And there was something called environmental justice. And that's very legitimate, but it's not the same. And so we need the civil rights. Those guys meet 9.30 every Friday on university. They have students, they organize, they play some vicious tactics and they've been playing them for 50 years. I think you should have John over. And I think you should learn tactics from civil rights lines who are still among us and are fighting. Thank you both. Let's open it up to questions. I believe Victoria's gonna run the mic as far as possible. The mic just had you all come up. Actually, so Mike said that long. If you wanna ask a question, please come on up over here. Let's just do that. So my name is Tasikara. I work for Hell Housing and I'm a former housing developer in San Francisco. I had a question about high opportunity neighborhoods and some of the research around that. And whether or not you're familiar with this whole idea about private right of action, whether or not individuals living in affordable housing developments might have an opportunity to sue developers and the jurisdictions that they live in for building units in concentrated neighborhoods of poverty. That's super controversial. Even by my stand, it's beautiful for you. So I don't have, the Obama administration was poised to take this on. And I don't know how to do it. I can take a program like CEQA, show disparate impact and take that before, especially if it's gonna be expanded. But I don't know how to take on the pattern of land acquisition and development. Sorry, I'm good on environment though. One quick thing, John Gamboa, fantastic. We did interview him on the infill podcast. And now I know that Laura thinks that was a very boring episode. But if you do want to listen to it, it is up there. So I think the real rust of this conversation was it hard to understand, how can a bunch of activists who mostly focus on race, blind housing policies. Now we're in form of the district, but I don't think any of us are under any sort of illusion that bringing by right housing development, strengthen the housing accountability act, and up zoning are going to lead to racial justice. I think it's gonna help, but I don't think it's gonna get us there. And so one of the questions I had and I know Richard, you were very careful in your books, but you don't do them on policy, but I just wanted to put you in the spot, not anyway. You know, each of them, okay, we have a real housing shortage in the Bay Area. We have prices that are in the stratosphere, far beyond the $300,000, and that sounds like a pretty kidding. And incredibly cheap in the Bay Area. So given the sort of economy and the issues that are confronting us as a region, what sort of policies do you think that we should be fighting for in the near term that we might be able to get? And maybe when we saw things, okay, we'll get us there. And I would just close with saying that while you're right, that we need to do a lot more to work with organizing work and we are working harder. You know, we were able to achieve, I think, some decent victories this year. And some of those victories, you know, folks thought were crazy when we were proposing earlier. So like the fact that this room is mostly a room of like renters, well, welcome to the future. You know, like we are rapidly, we are the majority of California, now we're at a six, seven year low and 2,000 extra crates. We are sort of the California of the future in a way that, you know, that the folks in Danville are elsewhere, I think we need to convince them a little bit less and organize ourselves. That's a good question. Well, it's hard, it's hard to speech, but in part a question about policies that we can advocate here at the local level or at the state level, that maybe are going to get us all the way there, but are going to be hard. I thought that we could cross the line. Yeah, I really, I did not think of the use of me. If you're asking questions, it'll be on my area, but you know much more about these policies than I do. I'm not a housing expert. You know, I know generally that, as I said, that the things like the Section 8 program will have impact credit program reinforce segregation. Jennifer referred a minute ago to the Obama administration adopted a rule in its last two years that adjusted the Section 8 voucher amounts so that they were higher for renting in middle class high opportunity neighborhoods and lower for renting and already segregated neighborhoods. The Trump administration has announced to stop on to enforce that rule. Enforcing that rule would have made some difference in the desegregation, but I think it would have run to enormous political opposition. So let me tell you something that I have an expert in, which is history. In 1970, you mentioned, something I mentioned Richard Nixon before. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president. And he appointed, this is Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a fellow named George Romney, who was the father of the recent presidential candidate. George Romney understood, like most people understood 50 years ago or 40 years ago, all the history that I just described, which we all forgot. And George Romney said that the federal government, this is what he said, he said the federal government has created a white noose around urban African-American neighborhoods and it's the federal government's responsibility to untie that noose. That's what the Republican Secretary of Housing and Urban Development said in 1968. And he embarked on a program called Open Communities, in which he required every suburb that received federal funds, and every suburb who received federal funds for water projects and sewer projects and green space to repeal exclusionary zoning ordinances, to accept its fair share of the metropolitan areas of public housing and moderate income housing or lose federal funds. And he actually refused to release federal funds for three suburb, three subrogate suburb. One was Baltimore County, the area of the white noose surrounding Baltimore City. Another was an area near Cleveland, and another was an area in Michigan. And there was a backlash. There was political protest. President Nixon reigned him in, forced him out of the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and canceled the Open Communities project. But we've done nothing. The system that's nearly as aggressive as what George Romney proposed in 1970. But the lesson I take from that is if George Romney came close to achieving that then, we can do it too. And we'll just need to go a little bit farther than he did. I'm going to exorbit moderate in front of the floor. Thank you. So then, President, I actually have an example that I think speaks to some of Brian's point. In the city of Atlanta, the city has this economic development arm called the best designer that has money from the source that I could not find all down to tax dollars. And they actually use those funds to buy portions of new developments. And then the city basically owns those and makes it close out. Now, I'd like to use this primarily as a tool to break the economically mixed neighborhoods. But if you so decided that you could get in the courts, they're going to use it to make racially integrated neighborhoods and speaking personally. Having grown up in a segregated neighborhood, I'm always a little bit torn about the way electrification is posed as sort of like temporary integration. And we're fighting that in one place, I feel to be weird. And there seems to be an opportunity to be able to articulate a form of no integration that we will stabilize rather than we will maintain a segregated neighborhood. So to be specific, we can articulate that vision because no one else is either preserved as it is or completely changes. But if we can articulate policies that can achieve balance, which Oakland is now kind of temporarily having, but may lose, if we can articulate that in type of that, that may be the way, but not that much of a funding to kind of achieve something that looks something more integrated on a southern end of the hood. Hi. You both talked a lot about the importance of political organizing work and getting kind of this history and the story and all this information out there. And I was hoping to hear a little bit more from both of you about, I know you wrote this amazing book and it's all over. And you've been doing a lot of work with pushing kind of the environmental laws. In what other ways have both of you been getting this information out there and spreading the story and kind of doing that political organizing work that you feel is so important? You know, frankly, I'm stunned by the reception that this book has received. I'm an old man. I should be spending time with my grandchildren. You know, I'm constantly now speaking of that and writing about it. And some of I have time but traveling all across the country and then explaining this to all the answers in a way that I never thought I'd have the opportunity to do. So I'm doing it in a way I hope it never ends in a way I wish it didn't soon. There's no tires. I'm having an opportunity to do this. But obviously not many people do that for I have a responsibility to keep on doing it. But as I said before, I think that now I'm feeding myself. I think that you all can come up with ways that the place I want people to start is within a local school board. It's because that will educate the community. It's not just educating the children. But that's a very concrete local thing that we can do is attacking the way this is taught. I'm actually working with a group you may be familiar with that some of you are called the ZIN Education Project which is developing an alternative curriculum around this history that can be used in schools. And it seems to me that that's a good place to start. And I hope all of you will write a book and it will become popular. It's a game you'll walk around the country and take the sun's flow off me. Thank you. So I've read your book, Hover of Law, and one of the things that struck me about it was it was like there was a long series of stories about how individual municipalities enacted different policies and the impact they had on people that ended up creating a segregated society which we live in. My question for you is, are there communities today that are enacting policies that you would consider to be successful as to roll in back the segregation which we currently live? There are no policies anywhere. There are no policies anywhere that are rolling back what we've got. But there are some very successful policies that address the margins that is new development that is created in a more segregated way. So the New Jersey has a fair share program which requires every community to have its fair share of low income families than I allowed to say minority families because the Supreme Court wouldn't let them do that. And so as a federal New Jersey constitution, they adopted a program for our community that enters good development. There's a book that's written by Douglas Massey called Climbing Mount Morrill, which I recommend to you, which describes how successful it can be to put a mixed income development in previously all affluent community, where people were afraid that the climate would increase and the schools would deteriorate. None of it turned out to be the case and it's fairly successful. Massachusetts has a somewhat similar program over 40B program. The most successful program I know of is Montgomery County outside Washington, D.C., which is a very, very affluent county, but it's still, about lots of old in space and it's still developed and going on. And the county requires any development, whether it's single-family homes or townhouses or apartments, to have 15% affordable units, market rate units. And then the public housing authority of Montgomery County purchases one-third of those moderate income units for its public housing program and places public housing residents throughout the county in this way and it's been a very successful integration plan. But all of these programs I just described just affect new development. They do nothing to undo the segregation that's the vast majority of housing in this country. And I know there's lots of focus on gentrification but it's always easy to focus on things that are changing rather than things that remain the same. The vast majority of gentrification is a serious issue and something we need to control and make sure that I fully agree that the gentrification can be a tool of integration and stabilize the very community as its share of affluent, middle-class, fathered, low-income housing. But for that, the vast majority of the white population in this country is not moving into former neighborhoods of this advantage. The vast majority is still living in all white communities that have never been touched. So we can focus on the gentrification problem but that's leaving untouched the vast majority. The vast majority of African-Americans are not, low-income African-Americans are still living in highly segregated, low-income neighborhoods that are not being gentrified. Populations of, you know, in Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore are places of, you know, so we need to focus on things that remain the same if they're the bigger picture, the picture not just the things that are changing which is always easier to pay attention to. Just, there is one smallish but not so smallish trend that the first great recession which was the institutional purchase of single-family homes and a more or less permanent removal of that housing stock from home ownership opportunities. There's no reason because that's a business venture that taxing that activity at somewhat user-risk level let's say three years out or something coupled with if this tax plan does get through and lose capital to $5,000 mortgages if that housing stock could be released because it is no longer economically advantageous to the investor-owned entities that acquired them, that would actually create a fair amount of soft that's available for your sale again. Then if you couples out with a lending program that allows you to build those into new flexes or try products so that families can acquire a lot and build multiple units on it, that would do it. Nobody's doing that yet. Nobody's really doing this at all. One thing you can do though is stop the design review process by just objecting each and every time to adding that fifth or sixth contour surface while it may appeal to some architect adds already impossible housing burdens on top of housing burdens. So just challenging the values of architecture that have driven pricing through the roof is a local policy to take on. Hi, first, thank you for your book. It's incredible. I bought so far 11 copies. I've handed out five so far. I still don't remember. So I found your argument for a knee-jury segregation very convincing, but also super sympathetic. But one of the horrible irony is such a systemic problem is that it's really difficult to find anyone with actual standing. And I believe there's a passage in your book talking about the issues of standing and how difficult it would be. Do you have any possible way forward on finding someone with standing? And the second quick follow-up, is there a middle ground, what's your ideal middle ground between where we are now and completely eliminating zoning regulations? Yeah, and that's a terrific question. This residential segregation cannot be attacked through litigation. So the, because as you say, nobody has standing under our legal system to attack it. An African-American living in a low-income neighborhood can't go into court to say, if only my great-grandfather did it to buy a house in a white suburb, I would have more wealth today. The specific farm is a good distance. And that's why this has to be solved through politics, through congressional action or state legislative action, which would be reviewable by the court. So it's not a legal problem. But the analogy is affirmative action in higher education. Texas has an affirmative action program which takes race into account for the University of Texas. It gives African-American applicants a boost in their application process for the University of Texas. That didn't happen because some African-American high schools who sued the university said that if only I hadn't been the, I'm not in this situation because of generations of discrimination against my parents and great-grandparents, I'd be better able to apply and be a stronger candidate and therefore should be admitted. That's not how it happened. How it happened was that the legislature of Texas adopted, took recognition of this history and said that because of this history, African-American students who are fully qualified for the university should be given a boost to overcome the disadvantages that have been imposed on them for generations. And the Supreme Court then had to review that policy and they have held it. So the same thing is going to happen with housing if we ever got to the point where exclusionary zoning ordinances were prohibited by congressional action or by state action. Courts would review us and courts would uphold it only if there was a widespread public recognition of the history that resulted in this exclusionary policy. So it's not that it's not a legal problem but the legal review will come after the policy is enacted and individual litigant is not the way to get it to happen. Real quick, we're supposed to be at a grade nine so it's pretty much the last series of questions and we're just on it. They've been really good questions but we're just going to get it at a grade nine, so. 8.30. So when I read your book, I learned about Article 34 of the California Constitution which says in 1950 the citizens of California in their infinite wisdom decided to enact propositions that any low income or public housing development could be must be subject to a city-wide referendum before the funds can be dispersed and that housing can be built. This was, there was a three appeal attempts in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s that all failed. Given what we've learned about in your book about the history of segregation in public housing is the time now right for another attempt to repeal Article 34 in two. With that, would we have any kind of reparation type of effects or remedy in doing so? I won't take a lot of time. Any time is right to repeal it. Yeah. We have to, but it's going to depend on whether there's political support for repeal and that's our challenge. So I agree, you said in the 90s what happened in the aughts but because there's less and less understanding of this application and we need to spread the understanding. I want to emphasize that there was a fantastic pro bono lawsuit that local law enforcement waged for gosh years aimed at the current teacher tenure rules which effectively after about 18 months on the job school district has to make you've got a job for life or you don't decision. I don't know about you but I wasn't ready after 18 months on any job to have a clue and I didn't think people was working with it either but it was a whole other issue. So this pattern has resulted in greens of evidence of the most poorly qualified teacher falling lower and lower and lower in the socioeconomic ladder on schools until they're disproportionately teachers at the lowest income lowest English proficiency schools and the data and evidence is overwhelming. They had a trial. The judge said this was unconscionable. They had reams of data. The judge said this system, I don't know how do you replace it but this system is unconstitutional violates the equal protection laws to subject in this pattern wasn't saying teacher tenure rules were racist but as applied it resulted in a discriminatory form of governance which disproportionately infected low income minority students. The appellate court was then barraged with defenses of that tenure rule by Kamala Harris by Jerry Brown, by the teachers union and the appellate court said yes, this evidence sure is disturbing but this is a political question, not a legal question and that's where it stands and we now have another generation of kids that have been taught by the worst teachers so I completely subscribe to the need to start with the politics. Had Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown said you're right, your honor, we can't move it legislatively but you're right or even if they had just stayed silent and let the appellate court make a decision on the evidence, there would be better teachers for more kids today. Hello, I have a question regarding the housing developments and there are things that are happening with an open and how they're being worn to skyscrapers is there any way how to like battle that within policies or politics and on how to buy and purchase homes and keep homes from generation to generation? So on the first question, the way our housing policy centered around transit oriented climate and I know you guys are mostly urban bothers who walk around and have a great time, this is a very cool place, it wasn't always the case but the cost of building residential units increases with height. There's no more expensive unit to build than something that's more than six stories tall because it's steel and concrete and elevators and systems during the house. So by choosing a form of high density housing around transit that's too high, right? If it goes above six stories and has to be steel you have guaranteed that that is a luxury product at $4,000 or more a month in rent. So you have to be aware of costs. What's cheaper? Triplexes, quads, townhomes, three stories without parking, four stories without parking, mid-range, two stories of parking, four stories wood on top. But sometimes when we ask for something we don't think about the cost as much. So it's important to realign that expectation. Now when you do lower density, townhomes, quads, four stories, you're not gonna have a fully amenitized hotel existence. I don't think people need that but somehow that's become the epic of the day. Let's do this high density, transit oriented, high density can be six stories. It doesn't have to be 12 and you'll cut the rent in half. It'll still unfortunately be rent because we have a 10 year liability tail on condos but those will start to flip the condos in the next discussion. I don't have a good story on multi-generational home ownership. My name's Balak, I live out on the west side of San Francisco with the beating heart of excluding folks as far as housing bills. I don't have a question as much as I'm hoping that at Richard in particular you can expand upon the history of one of two subjects and pick one, whichever one you feel like you know more about and I know you know about one of them because I read it in the book. I'm hoping you can either expand for two to three minutes either on the can decision that really kicked a lot of this in the high gear when it made explicit racial segregation unconstitutional or if you're able to tell the story of this if you, I don't know if you know this but the history behind Yonkers and their efforts to integrate that neighborhood in that city in New York. I found the story when I watched the HBO special show me a hero very compelling and I'm hoping that you can pick one of those and just expand on a little bit because I feel like I don't know as much about either of those, like the history around both of those scenarios but I feel like they're both really instructive. Well that's a tough choice because they're both fascinating. I'll do the first one because I think it's probably more relevant. What you're referring to is a Supreme Court decision in 1917, exactly 100 years ago that, you know, I mentioned in my talk at the beginning that there were integrated neighborhoods all over the country in the year of the 20th century and during the rise of Jim Crow, local governments wanted to segregate their integrated neighborhoods. They wanted to end the integration and so they passed a number of cities past ordinances that prohibited African-Americans moving on to blocks that would be majority white and whites from moving on to blocks that were majority African-American. Let me just say that clearly such rules would have been absurd if they weren't recognizing the fact that there were many, many integrated neighborhoods in the cities but Baltimore passed the ordinance like that, Louisville, Kentucky did, St. Louis did, number of cities passed ordinances like that. In 1917, the Supreme Court said those ordinances weren't constitutional, not because the Supreme Court was in favor of racial equality but because for those of you who know your American history you'll know that for the first three decades or so of the four decades, almost the 20th century, the Supreme Court was obsessed with protecting property rights and striking down anything that interfered with property rights. So it struck down in the wage force to just interfere with the right of a worker and an employer to negotiate a contract without the interference of the government to negotiate a wage contract. It struck down health and safety for the same reason and so it struck down these ordinances because it said that they interfered with the property on this right to self and every please. Following that, well, this was gonna say in 1917, in 1920, Warren Harding was elected president and he appointed as his Secretary of Commerce a fellow named Herbert Hoover who later became, eight years later became president and Hoover developed a committee on zoning to persuade communities all over the country to adopt economic zoning rules. There's only rules that are exclusionary for us. They would keep apartments out of a single family called Abramuts. The members of this committee were explicit about the motivation behind this committee. The committee was designed to evade the Buchanan decision by using economic regulations to keep African-Americans in particular who also at that time, immigrants out of middle-class white communities. A lot of those, some of you know some of the names of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who was a member of this committee and he said that the purpose of the committee, his goal was to make sure that colored people could move into white neighborhoods. The president of the National Association of Real Estate Board, who was a member of this committee, at the same time who was a member of this committee, the National Association of Real Estate Board adopted a code of ethics that said that no real estate agent should ever introduce minority families into a white neighborhood. So the motivation of the committee was clear, although the zoning coordinates that they promoted, the propaganda that they put out, was all waste neutral, but they understood the effect of what they would do. So I conclude from that, that the motivation of most of the zoning movement in this country, there was very little zoning in this country before this committee started to promote it. New York City had the zoning ordinance in the early 20th century that was designed to eliminate safety hazards and slope dwellings, but aside from that, there was no zoning, really, and there was this committee that persuaded suburbs all across the country to adopt ordinances that kept out low income families, but the real motivation was raised, and therefore I conclude these are own constitutional ordinances. Thank you. I asked about education, because one obvious impact of segregated neighborhoods is segregated schools, and you mentioned that you had this idea of the federal government buying houses and returning them to black families, and that was completely out of, this is not gonna happen. But what has happened is the federal government forcing schools to segregate, I know that because I'm obviously not very old, and I went to a school that was under a Supreme Court order to bus across town, and that expired when I was 12 years old, and they immediately scrapped it because I'm from Texas and they didn't like it very much. And so I'm wondering if there is a reason why we haven't seen a resurgence of lawsuits and advocacy aimed at integrating schools as an effort to combat our segregated neighborhoods, and if there's a historical reason that that has to be really popular, it seems like, and it's kind of dropped off. That's a great question, and it goes to the heart of us and trying to say today, the reason that these lawsuits no more will succeed is because most, well, we have more segregation in schools today than at any time in American history to be beside the schools that were segregated by law from 1954 to South, but then places that like here or anywhere else in New York, the schools are more segregated than at any time in American history. But they're segregated because the neighborhoods in which they're located are segregated. And because the Supreme Court considers that the neighborhoods in which they're located were segregated by accident, the fact, though, there's no remedy permissible for school desegregation because the schools are not segregated by government policy, they're segregated because they happen to be located in segregated neighborhoods. That is actually how I got to this topic. I used to write almost exclusively about education policy. I wasn't that happy, so I thought I wasn't, but I'm not now a housing expert. I'm not an educator, and I became concerned about the fact that we couldn't desegregate schools, and I knew that we couldn't solve the problems we have in education unless we desegregated schools, and I became concerned about the fact that we couldn't desegregate schools because they were located in segregated neighborhoods, and I began to look into what we could do about segregated neighborhoods. In 2007, the last time, and this goes directly to your question, the last time the Supreme Court never addressed the question of school segregation, it prohibited two school districts, Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, from explicitly adopting a very, very token plan to desegregate their schools, so both school districts allowed high school students to choose which school they go to, but if their choice happened to exacerbate segregation, it would not be honored in favor of the choice that wouldn't do that, so if you had a school, a high school that was overwhelmingly white, and it was one place left, and a black child, and a white child both applied for it, the black child would give it some preference, because that child, she would help desegregate the school, and the Supreme Court said that that was uncommon. This is a trivial program. I mean, most high school students don't want to go to school away from their friends and outside their neighborhoods, and the cases where you have one place left and two children of opposite race and apply is insignificant, so as this trivial integration program is really accurate, the Supreme Court said you couldn't do it because the schools of Louisville and Seattle segregated, there's the neighborhoods in which they're located and segregated, and they was located de facto, there's no remedy for that. Well, I remember that, this was in 2007, I remembered after reading that Supreme Court case of a history I had read about Louisville, Kentucky, where a white family sold a home in the suburb to an African American family, a middle-class family, and the buyer was a decorated Navy veteran, a middle-class guy, and he and his family moved into this home. A mob surrounded the home, they fire bombed it, they dynamited it under the protection of the police who couldn't, there's a whole mob throwing bombs, and the police couldn't identify a single perpetrator. After the mob had destroyed the home, the state of Kentucky arrested, tried, convicted in jail, the white seller for sedition. And I said to myself, this doesn't sound to me much like de facto segregation, and that's how I saw it running was cool. It was just a really good question that you were asking. Thanks. Hi, I'm Medica, I'm a planner, and I'm a little nervous, but one thing I just wanted to talk about a little bit about representation in housing is the challenge with what is in our past, or history, is it's hard to change the housing, it has been built, and so coming up with a solution can sometimes be very impossible, especially, so the other thing I just wanted to touch on is if you did any research on other types of communities, so in Oakland, we have Chinatown, which is about to experience probably a really big change, the stadium comes, and I think gentrification in that neighborhood, there's a lot about what people move to that community or in that community about culture, and so I think when we talk about integration, it's important to talk about the culture of where people are living and why they move there as well, and I don't, in any of your research, you looked at immigrant communities and where they locate. Well, immigrants, low-age immigrants in particular, have always settled in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods. They settle there because their language is spoken because their culture is widespread, and then over the next few generations, they assimilate to varying degrees. When Italians immigrated to this country, they were Italian, low-income Italian neighborhoods. When Jews immigrated to this country, they were low-income Jewish neighborhoods, and they all suffered some discrimination as well as just choosing to live in these neighborhoods, but the reason I focus in this book on African-Americans is because discrimination and other groups have faced, while real, and I'm not minimizing it at all, a sort of a qualitatively different kind than the policies that were directed against African-Americans in this country. We have two separate problems in this country. It seems to me when it comes to the kinds of things that you're talking about. One is we have inadequate social policy, social and economic policy, that helps people be up and immobile economically to get better jobs and better educations, regardless of their race and ethnicity, and that's a social economic problem. It's not a constitutional obligation that we help people gain better incomes and gain more economic security, but it would be good social policy to do so. That's a separate issue from the constitutional obligation we have to deal with the legacy of slavery should grow with the African-Americans. I think both are necessary. My focus is about the latter. I'm not in any way minimizing the importance of the other. All right, and the facts, please join me in thanking both Dr. Ross and me. Please do not note that if you don't have the book yet, you're going to have copies, or you can buy one in the back. We're going to have to party somewhere. I don't know. Come talk to us. We have to get in here.