 Welcome to our fourth event of this year's Racial Foundations of Public Policy Speaker Series, hosted by the Center for Racial Justice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I am Celeste Watkins Hayes, Director of the Center for Racial Justice, Interim Dean of the Ford School, and Professor of Public Policy and Sociology here at the University of Michigan. At the Ford School and the CRJ, we seek a world in which people are able to achieve their full human potential, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories that have been used to divide and marginalize people. We train leaders here who understand the critical role of public policy in improving our world. We recognize the power of public policy to bolster or undercut our life opportunities and experiences, and we see policy analysis as a critically important tool for us to measure, reflect, historically examine, and help us define the way forward. This Racial Foundations of Public Policy Series augments the work that is already being done at the Ford School in the area of social equity. At the Center for Racial Justice, we seek to illuminate evidence-based solutions and support the change makers and scholars who advocate for sound, just, and fair public policies. We take an intersectional approach, seeking to expand knowledge and highlight strategies and tools that address the complex intersections between public policy and race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social categories. As we examine the fraught histories and consequences of some of our policies and the transformative power of others, we learn a valuable lesson. Effective and just public policy can only be achieved if we bring diverse perspectives to the table. This fall, the CRJ featured a cadre of scholars to deliver virtual presentations on the historical roots and contemporary currents of race and reproductive justice, health policy, LGBTQ rights, and housing policy. Our esteemed speakers for the series have included Melissa Murray from NYU Law, Stephen Thrasher from Northwestern University, and Bianca Wilson from UCLA. We encourage you to visit the Ford School YouTube channel to find recordings of those previous events. And now I'm delighted to introduce you to today's speaker and the speaker for the final event in our Racial Foundation series, Dr. John Robinson. John Robinson III is a scholar, analyst, advocate, and sociologist at Princeton University. He studies the racial underpinnings of money and markets with an emphasis on housing and credit policies. His award-winning work examines how the rise of finance is reshaping place-based inequalities within and around American cities. His current book project explores the ongoing rise of the affordable housing industry in the United States and its intersections with racial and economic inequality. His secondary project investigates the politics of race, punishment, and municipal debt in suburban areas. John's work appears or is forthcoming in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, the Social Economic Review, Politics and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Housing Policy Debate. And his earned recognition from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Ford Foundation, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Society for Advancement of Social Economics, and the Paris Institute for Political Studies. He's a faculty affiliate with the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago and Progressive International's Debt Justice Working Group. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Arch City Defenders, a holistic legal defense agency, and on the Social Science Advisory Board for the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Dr. Robinson, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here and honor and a pleasure to be here and to be a part of this really important and path-breaking series hosted by the Center for Racial Justice there at the University of Michigan. And even more than that, to be with you, Celeste, who has been such an inspiration for me. I've admired Celeste for so long, benefited from your research over the years. For me and not just for me, I think for a whole generation of us, Celeste really is the shining example of an engaged and impactful scholar. We're all trying to get there. But you're the shining example. And so it's a real high point for me to have this circle-back moment to be in conversation with you. Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much, John. So appreciate that. So appreciate that. I'm so excited about this conversation because you focus on an area of public policy that is of great interest to not just our students, but a lot of people who are interested in inequality and that's housing. When you think about the recent conversations around evictions, when you think about the kind of subprime lending fiasco, when you think about all of the different ways in which housing is a huge aspect of our conversations around public policy and inequities within public policy, housing is very much one of the pieces in the center of that conversation. So I just wonder if you can start by talking about the significance of housing and why you chose it as an area of focus, what it signifies to you, what it signals to you when you think about larger concerns about economic and racial inequity. Why housing? Yeah. Thank you. And that's a great question, Celeste. And when I think about this question of why housing, one of the things that comes in mind, and this is something that I always tell my students, is that the real interesting paradox of housing is that it's really the most important, one of the most important thing, if not the most important thing that we possess, whether or not we technically own it, even if we're renting, it's the most financially important thing that we possess most of the time. Often it's a very emotionally and socially important thing that we possess. But there's also not much that is harder to get, and there's not much that is easier to lose than housing. And so it's that tension between how important housing is socially, emotionally, and economically for us, versus the experience of living in a society dominated by markets, dominated by price mechanisms, and increasingly dominated specifically by the financial sector, where our grasp on that really important thing is as tenuous as ever. And so to me, that tension has always been something that I've been really interested in. I think about my mother and father both grew up in public housing, and that experience was a really impactful one for them. It was a really identity-defining experience for them. And so if you talk to them, you won't be talking with them long before they bring up, growing up back on the hill. They grew up in two different public housing projects, but they met and had that in common. And I remember when I was in grad school, going back to the D.C. area where I'm from, one of the things that would be a staple when I would get into the car with my father is that he would sort of take me around town showing me where they're tearing down public housing projects. And so he experienced that in a very... We saw public housing projects torn down across the country, but my father and my mother experienced that in a really personal way, and you could tell that that's a part of their mental map of the city. And so both the housing aspect of that and the public-private aspect of that is something that has always been really fascinating for me, and that's kind of what sent me into the work of focusing on housing policy. So take us through... Whenever we talk about contemporary policy, which we'll get to, and particularly your work that starts at the 1960s and moves on to the contemporary moment, I wonder if you can start even before then and talk to us about how housing... Well, let me ask it as a question. Has housing always been a defining feature of American inequality? And how do we trace that lineage in terms of the relationship between economic stability and mobility and housing in the American context? And if you want to speak about the global kind of international context, feel free. But I wonder if you can kind of trace that lineage to help us understand how did we end up here? Yeah, yeah. And thank you so much for that. So, and it's really a great question, like how has housing played into the picture of inequality, the picture of inequity and injustice, and what's the long arc of that story? And, you know, one of the things that immediately comes to mind to me is a Field Order 15, which is something that I know that you all have talked about here because I know that William Sandy Darity was one of the speakers here, and he spoke about his work on reparations and about the Black Reconstruction Era. And Field Order 15 was a part of that. It was about land. It was the sort of the famous 40 acres in a mule. And so even though we don't think about that specifically as housing policy, it certainly was about having the means to find a home for yourself and to create a home for yourself. And that was one of the original moments where we saw how that worked differently for Black people versus white people here in the US. And so that was just one example, but it kind of goes to show you how far back that goes. One thing I did want to talk about the importance of bringing a historical lens to this, because I think it really is an important thing. And I did want to ironically start with the present, maybe just in part because that's what's on my mind. And it's helpful to think about the, I think in thinking about the present, it really brings into full scope the importance of having a historical lens. And so one of the first things to come to mind when I think about the present is TikTok. And so I don't do a lot of social media, but I often find myself drawn to TikTok videos, the joy of those videos. And it's in part because people there are treated as a space to connect over and to air out often a really creative and relatable way. There are everyday frustrations and anxieties about stuff. And along these lines, one type of video that has gone viral a lot recently are the ones where people are reacting to being told by their landlords that their rents are going up often, often astronomically, sometimes doubling or more. So I wrote down a few notes about this because I thought it was relevant. So as one headline put it, TikTok is the new hot place to melt down about rent increases. And the folks who are airing out these issues, they are really letting all the despair and anguish of that hang out. So some of them are, as they say, laugh crying as they read through the landlord notices. In one video, one young woman says with some fake sincerity, my life is great. I haven't had four emotional breakdowns this week. And another young woman shows her letter where the landlord told her that the rent hike was really because the building's value went up. And so in the video, she's walking around showing the water damage. She's showing the chip paint and sort of the other examples of poor maintenance that suggests otherwise. Another young man encapsulated it really nicely when he said the rent going up, but apartment don't be leveling up. And another user chimed in that said they want us to make three times the rent, but they ain't paying us three times our paycheck, which I thought, how can you put it any more succinctly than that? So these folks may or may not know that they're really experiencing something that was a new thing that we're seeing today, which is the corporate landlord. These are not your regular landlords. This is about finance. It's about Wall Street. And specifically private equity firms and investment bankers, they're buying up a lot of properties where renters live and including lower income renters. And so inflation is raging in a lot of places. We know that. And so we see that across the board. But by far the biggest rent hikes are these places where these corporate landlords have bought the properties and now they own the properties. And so for these finance types who own a lot of these rental housing properties and low income housing, the business model is really a fundamentally exploitative one. It's about jacking up the rents abruptly. It's about letting places fall into disrepair and not really maintaining the places. It's about evicting people by the thousands really rapidly. And so this is just one example of a larger set of issues that I study, which is this question of why has the financial sector become so deeply involved in housing, lower income folks, especially renters? And so the corporate landlords that I just described, that's one end of the spectrum where it's really obviously predatory and exploitative. There's another end of the spectrum. The opposite end of the spectrum where big banks and financial markets are increasingly involved in actual policy and low income housing policy. And so when we think about low income housing programs, usually what comes to mind is Section 8 public housing. And part of the message that a lot of people don't really get, and it's something that I'm always repeating, is that we don't really live in that world anymore. Most subsidized housing today is produced by giving tax benefits to big banks, to financial companies, who then sort of invest in the development and the production of low income housing. And so across the board, whether we're talking about the policy end or the exploitative end, what we see is that Wall Street has become our society's biggest landlord when it comes to low income renters. And so that sort of brings me back to the issue of history, because I like bringing a historical lens to policy, because I think without it, it's hard to ask good questions about the present. And so in other words, it's really easy to kind of fall into this trap of the status quo, the present. It just feels like the one and only possible timeline. So even if we have a strong sense that the status quo is wrong, that it's unjust, it's not always easy to think beyond that status quo. So in the example of these corporate landlords that I just described, we may think that that's wrong, it's problematic, it's worrisome, but it's really on brand for the world that we live in today. It doesn't jump out at us as something that necessarily demands to be explained or something that needs to be explained. And so that's where I think the historical lens comes in. It helps us to get a glimpse of what those other possible timelines might have been, and I think doing so helps us to wrap our heads around and ask better questions about the present timeline that we find ourselves in. And so in my case, the historical lens is really about getting a glimpse of those other timelines, those other possibilities, and helping me to develop a curiosity then about why finance and these sort of corporate landlords play such a big role in the business of the world. Of low income housing today. And going into that history, I think one of the big shift, and we can kind of get into the more specific things, I want to shift back to you in a moment, but the big shift that we see is this overarching shift that has sort of led us to where we are today, this shift from exclusion to inclusion. That's a real simplistic version of it, but generally speaking it's a shift from exclusion to inclusion. And so in other words, for most of American history, Wall Street and big financial institutions have largely neglected the housing needs of lower income groups, and they've excluded them from access to the funds that they need for housing. And it's really just a more recent thing where these large financial firms have become a big player in that space and have become sort of society's landlord for these historically excluded groups. And so that I think provides sort of an entree into the larger history of race and racism and sort of driving that. So is it the case essentially that when you think about public housing and the kind of demolition and the move away from public housing, is what you're saying that as the state pulled back from actually being in the business of building housing and creating structures, and we can offer a whole set of critiques of what was happening in those structures and whether that was effective and what was problematic about that. But is your argument essentially that as government pulled away from that, essentially the private sector stepped in and became part of the kind of invisible hand of housing for low income individuals by kind of subsidizing deals for private landlords who would then house low income folks? Is that the kind of shift in rotation that happened? Yeah, yeah, and that's a really a great way of putting it, Celeste, and you know, and one other thing that I would add to that is that really it was a story where for a long period of time disadvantaged people were sort of on their own. And that part of the story is really important for understanding this new phase that we're in where big financial firms are really interested in serving and doing business with these households. And you know, the other thing that I sort of emphasize here is that race and racism has been a driving factor throughout all of that. It's been a driving factor on the exclusion part of that and in the inclusion part of that. And so it's helpful to sort of get a sense of how racism drove the exclusion part. And so when we look at housing policies from past to present, we see that those policies make distinctions about who the policies should benefit. And those distinctions are highly racialized, as many of us know, and they're informed by racist assumptions. And so two key examples of that that we see throughout the history of housing policies that very much led us to the moment that we are at now in terms of inclusion. One example is the policy distinction between homeowners and renters. And so since before the New Deal, our housing policies have privileged homeowners, while at the same time limiting home ownership to white, largely to whites. And so here we usually think about the redlining policies and those were enacted as part of the New Deal between 1934 and 1937 or so, really into your point about going back beyond even further than the 60s, even further than the 1930s. Really, a lot of the work that historical work that has come out about this has shown that the redlining policies that were nationalized during the New Deal really existed before then, just not at the national scale. And so what federal policymakers did during the New Deal was nationalized practices and policies that had already existed. And so the redlining practice really predated when those practices became nationalized in the 1930s. But these policies really explicitly shut out black neighborhoods and residents from access to mortgages. And so many of us, we've seen the colorful redlining maps, but there were lots of other policies too that did essentially the same thing as that. And so I'm sorry. I think some of us know what it is, but I wanna make sure that we, people understand what is redlining. It's a term people hear a lot, but can you explain what it is? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So redlining, generally speaking, is it's a concept that's based on the fact that a lot of the policy benefits that were given to folks throughout American history, were given to them in the form of loans and loan subsidies. Things that help people to have low-cost loans. And so whether that means bringing the interest rate down, whether that means giving them essentially free insurance, a lot of the aid that we've gotten, that a lot of the way that the U.S. government has distributed aid has been in the form of loans and loan subsidies. And so a lot of folks have done work on this, sociologists like Monica Prasad, like Greta Kripner, Sarah Quinn, and lots of others. And so redlining is a way that certain neighborhoods and particularly black neighborhoods and people were excluded from that. And they were excluded because they were deemed not eligible to receive these mortgages and the mortgage assistance type of stuff that came along with that. And a lot of times, the policies gave rationale as to why these neighborhoods weren't eligible. And so maybe there was a factory in the neighborhood, but often it was explicitly racial. So if you look at the criteria, you'll see that these are places that were characterized as having a mix of races. And that meant that they were downgraded in terms of their eligibility for these loans, that were very beneficial for homeowners. Renters played a really big role there because a lot of folks don't realize that renters were often thrown in there with racial minorities. Renters were also seen as a detriment to a neighborhood's credit worthiness. And that meant that this is not a place where we want to extend this type of aid. And so that was redlining. So you were talking about, super helpful, thank you. So you were talking about this kind of original idea of this distinction between homeowners and renters. And when you think about it, it's even kind of baked into the ideology of the American dream, right? It's about having a house and that's a key part of how we define the American dream. And it's interesting that even within that ideology, there's this underlying distinction between renters and owners. So talk us more through and kind of draw at this argument more about how that thread continues and how it shows up throughout housing policy and access to credit. Yeah, yeah. And thank you so much, Celestia. That was a great point that you just pointed out. And it's really important because there's the formal distinctions which are implicitly racialized and then there are sort of explicitly racial distinctions. In housing policy, we see both of them. Sometimes I think we pay more attention to the explicitly racial distinctions, but the formal distinctions are just as destructive. And so this distinction between homeowners and renters and the assumptions that we carry into that distinction were really important to, like you said, American identity. It was really important to sort of the founding of a national sense of identity relative to other places. And it was important to understanding what racial differences meant. And so I think that's another place where the racial lens is meaningful and helpful there because it helps us to connect that part of it, this specific history of American home ownership to a longer history where notions of property and actual property arrangements have been used as tools to shore up these sort of racial distinctions and hierarchies. And so that history includes slavery, it includes colonialism, empire, and in all of that, we see that whiteness has been linked to this presumed right to own things. And while non whiteness and blackness in particular has been linked to propertylessness or this sense that a person is unfit to own property. So sociologist W.B. de Bois talked about this a lot in his writing about whiteness and its connection to notions of property. And so that has a much longer history but you're so right that you see a particular distillation of that developing in American housing policies over the course of the 1900s. And then talk about like the 1950s and 1960s was a really watershed moment in this argument because then you start to see suburbanization, right? And I wonder if you can talk about that, wasn't that another big kind of defining moment and wasn't there also that kind of post-World War II boom in terms of housing and access to credit and access to housing loans? Would you think about that as a P moment too in the history? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because that was a, you know, one of the really interesting things about that moment is that that was a moment both of dramatic government expansion. As one person wrote about it one time, they said that suburbanization was the equivalent to the clearing of the American West. And so that kind of puts it into perspective how big of a change this was. And it was a change that was overwhelmingly driven by government. And yet it was also at the same time where this notion of economic self-reliance and that specifically white families were economically self-reliant really took root in a different way. And so there's a real paradox there because it's a dramatic government expansion, but it was a government expansion in a way that really rested on this idea that government wasn't actually doing it and that people's own initiative were the thing that was driving this big change. And so that moment was really big because for a lot of people it meant mobility and it meant a real boost in household finances. It meant that they could imagine things after that that they couldn't necessarily imagine before that. In my own work, but in lots of other people have written about this, they've written about how hard home ownership was before that expansion of credit. It was hard for just about everybody except for the extremely rich. And so what that moment did at the same time as suburbanization was a racial project was a racial project that created suburbs that were exclusionary and created sort of a form of housing that was exclusionary. It was also very much a story of democratization. It was a democratization of home ownership where home ownership was made more affordable and more accessible to lots of people. It's just that that was really skewed toward white Americans. That's so interesting in terms of both things being true at the same time. This idea of expansion of home ownership in this period but only for certain communities and populations and races of people. And then that's really essentially where your work is grounded, right? And kind of the 1960s and kind of what happens after that in terms of the expansion of home ownership for whites, access to credit, the rise in low income housing for kind of everybody else. Largely people of color, poor whites and your work really, I think, takes off from there to think about what was left in terms of an option for housing, for those people who weren't part of that housing and access to credit and suburbanization boom. What was left over for them, policy? And what did they have access to, if anything? Right, right. Well, what was left for them up until the 19th? Things changed a bit in the 1960s or so and that's what a lot of my, where that was sort of the genesis of this moment of inclusion. And I meant to do this before but I'm using inclusion with the quotes here. I don't mean real inclusion. I mean that companies that didn't pay attention to these folks before increasingly pay attention to them but it doesn't mean that it amounted to full citizenship. But to the question of what was available to folks who were left out of the broader expansion of home ownership. Well, before the 60s, not much. What we saw was a lot of slums, a lot of people being at the mercy of slumlords who were often smaller folks who, smaller landlords who, to be honest, weren't really making all that much money themselves but there wasn't really a model for them to provide housing in a way that was non-exploitative. And so you actually saw a lot of folks, historian Arnold Hirsch writes about this, about these really small kitchenette apartments that existed. Historian Keanga Yamada Taylor also writes about this, about these small kitchenette apartments that you would see in the black areas of town, particularly in Chicago and the west sides on the south side where landlords and developers were basically cut up regular apartments so that multiple families would be living in there with very little space to themselves, often very unsanitary. And that was the way that housing was provided to folks in the absence of regulation, in the absence of social rights, in the absence of actual capital and any sort of regard from federal government. That's sort of what was left for them. And so in the 1960s, this is why a lot of folks have written about the 1960s as sort of a dramatic turning point in some ways, not necessarily because it radically solved the problem of housing inequality and the problem of racism in the housing market, but because it was a big shift in how much public and private sector investment went into the lower income part of the market. And so up until that point, there was not much available to renters. And I'm thinking as you're talking, I'm thinking about Lorraine Hansberry's very famous play Raisin in the Sun. And it's since been made into a film and it has all kinds of Broadway revivals, but kind of the core question is this family is living in one of those small housing units and they get an opportunity through an insurance policy to move into one of these larger houses and they get approached by the neighborhood not to move in because they don't want a black family moving in. So the play kind of is this family having this existential question and debate of what happens to dreams deferred and the ways in which they shrivel like a raisin in the sun and it's largely about their access to housing. And what it dignifies in terms of the American dream and belongingness and all of that. So your description of the policy is really resonating in terms of how we think about how folks have been grappling with that question in terms of their own lived experiences but in through artistry and all kinds of means it's been kind of part of the American experiences if you will to think about our preoccupation with the relationship between race and housing. That's so true, that's so true. And I love this example about Lorraine Hansberry work and it really puts into full relief why it is important to really think about that connection between racial identity and housing status and how people of color really haven't ever, there's never, if for as long as we've collected data on the share of black Americans and Hispanic Americans who own homes there's never been a majority of black Americans and Hispanic Americans who own their homes. Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have always overwhelmingly rented. And so when I think about what you just said versus this cultural worth that we imbue into home ownership and the reality that home ownership has been so radically limited to white communities and white families and lots of other people have been left out of that there's a real tragedy in that story because we, because folks of color are often left out of that cultural worth that comes along with ownership and it raises questions about what do you do about a problem like that? So walk us through, so what happens after, so you have is people are experiencing kind of these slums and the houses that have been kind of chopped up, you also have the rise of public housing within that and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that because you started your comments by talking about how your parents had a very strong connection to public housing but at the same time we also know about a lot of experiences and literature that really are quite critical of public housing. So I wonder, first of all, am I using it as a blanket term that needs to be unpacked? Talk to us about the growth of it, talk about its decline. If you could just walk us through that chapter, when do we start creating large scale public housing? When did that happen? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If it's okay, I see that my natural light is a dwindling. I'll just cut on my light. Okay. Sorry about that. Oh, no problem. So yeah, and that's a really important part of my own work that the story of public housing is so central and so thank you for asking about that. And public housing, and this kind of goes back to the question that you just asked, what was available to folks who were left out? And so one answer is that not much was available to them and another part of the answer is that but there was also public housing. And so public housing was sort of the people who work in the welfare state literature use this term residual, but public housing was sort of the policy that was used specifically in neighborhoods that were redlined. And so you see a lot of public housing projects built during the period in which they were built in communities of color that were explicitly denied access to home ownership. And so it was a containment mechanism in that way as well. And so one of the things that it's worth remembering about public housing is that, and this is something that I'm always pushing in my conversations with folks is that it's really easy to re-inscribe this, again, the assumptions that we attach to public versus private when we talk about these things because they're so ensconced in our language. But like one of the things that I am always sort of showing in my work is that lots of people, in some ways all housing is public housing. Maybe with the small exception of housing that the ultra rich people who have no mortgage at all and who don't actually benefit from any sort of aid or assistance that is sort of mortgage oriented. But beyond that, in some ways all housing is public housing but it's just that we think of public housing as public housing and we think of the other housing as not public. And that was a very important theme in this story because it's because the public housing residents were seen by lots of people as being a drain on the overall wellbeing. People didn't see them as public housing is good for society but public housing is bound up with society's overall general wellbeing. People saw them instead as being a drain on the wellbeing and that's what the public sector meant. And so it was really an interesting time in the 60s because while that was usually something that didn't really cause a lot of turmoil for officials, increasingly it did in the 1950s because when riots happened in the 1950s and when officials saw themselves being confronted with unrest, what did they think? They thought, well, we have to give these communities something in order to keep them in check. We have to give these communities something in order to project a sense of order to our constituents. And the solution to that for many of these officials was let's give them housing. But the problem was what you just described. The stigma that is around public housing, the stigma that is around this idea of the government helping in a very active and direct way, the stigma around that and how that's really attached to, how that's really symbolically tied to blackness. And so what they found is that they couldn't really expand public housing as much as they sort of wanted to and they couldn't give communities as much as they wanted to give them in terms of a concession. And so that was an important moment in this shift to these, what I think of as more subversive strategies, strategies that are still using a lot of government capacity and using a lot of public funds but are doing so in a somewhat more underhanded way in a way that's not as direct. And so while that has always been used for homeowners and for privileged groups, the shift in the 1960s is that increasingly officials used that same strategy for lower income groups as well. And so this was sort of a gradual shift away from public housing as the sort of main policy mechanism that was used when officials needed to build housing specifically for the excluded people. Hmm, interesting. And then at the same time, you also saw particularly in the 60s a growth in economic opportunity for some segments of communities of color. And kind of post 1960 civil rights era and you started to see kind of this growing black middle class and other racial minority groups that started to have kind of concentrations of wealth. And I wonder if you can talk about, what happened in terms of affluent racial minority groups and their relationship to housing? Yeah, there, that's what a rich question and what a complicated story that part of the question is. I think we've all sort of encountered that in one way or another. You know, one- I'm sorry to interrupt to just to connect for people who are watching. You know, this gets to the work of your mentor, Mary Patillo, who really focuses on kind of the black middle class. So I wonder, you can tell us kind of help us think through that kind of increasing class diversity within communities of color post 1960s and what that means for housing. Yeah, well, what you just said was exactly what I was going to say. So we're on the same page here because I was going to bring up the great Mary Patillo who I'm sure lots of us have read but she really wrote about this question sort of more or less directly in her book, Black on the Block. And I love Mary's argument in that book because that book essentially is about its centers on the story of public housing demolition. All of the drama and the politics that was happening around public housing demolition in Chicago. And one of the things that that book shows is that some of the most vocal opponents of public housing were more affluent and middle of class black people of the same community. And so, you know, a lot of the, you know, something like that is something that could upset our progressive sensibilities. But, you know, I think Mary's, the way Mary analyzed it made so much sense to me because what the book actually argued was that because of this larger history of segregation, you know, you could imagine that if you're a black middle class family, it is possibly empirically true that public housing would have an effect on your property values. And if you are a black family, the longer history of that is that you are unlike your middle class white peers, you are in a neighborhood that, where public housing has been concentrated because of these segregation mechanisms that have kept public housing from white communities. And so, I think there's a larger discussion to be had, again, getting back to the public private distinction, which I think is, which I think that we have so much work to do every day to just tell people this distinction isn't real. But, and so I think there's a big conversation to have about whether it should be the case that we should think about public housing or we should sort of really be okay with appraisal mechanisms that encourage homeowners to see public housing as a detriment. But aside from that, if we just focus on the reality in which many of these middle class black families live, it sort of makes sense in a way that they didn't want any more public housing after they've had a disproportionate amount of public housing already built in their communities. And so, it's a story that really is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place because you want to expand housing affordability for the people in the community who are lower income and who need that kind of housing. But you also want to imagine that middle class black people live in the same society and live in the same context as middle class white communities in which they too can imagine their home values accumulating. And so, I think what that story shows more than anything is the inherent contradiction of that. And none of us are unfortunately able to completely get outside of that. That's a contradiction that is systemic and that is structural. And so, but I think it's a really great question, a really great way of framing that moment in the history of housing policy as one where you did have these class distinctions and people within communities of color having different and sometimes very contentious orientations toward affordable and low income housing. So I wonder, and in just a minute, I'm going to turn to some student questions, but I want to kind of finish this historical arc that we've been building. And we start to see in, I guess what, the late 80s and early 90s, well, the 90s, right? In terms of the widespread kind of demolition of public housing, right? The movement away from that and public housing, of course in quotes, is you're really kind of encouraging us to challenge that understanding of public housing equals, quote unquote, project. But the demolition of those housing complexes in many, many cities, and you're seeing kind of a whole new set of housing dynamics take place. And it looks like that's where your work really kind of takes off in its argument in terms of the kind of filling in of private actors to think about if we're demolishing, units of two and 300 family units, what steps in its place and private entities essentially stepping in to do what? Are they building housing? Are they buying existing property and kind of amalgamating them? What's the exact mechanism through which people are housed in properties that belong to these large corporate entities? How does that happen? Yeah, yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Thank you, Celeste. So yeah, and it is sort of these stories that are happening side by side, the sort of gradual dismantling of public housing and of the direct and sort of straightforward sort of social programs. And at the same time, the rolling out of these other programs that don't look like programs at all to many people. And for that reason, most people don't even know that they exist. And so for example, a lot of my work focuses on this policy called the low income housing tax credit. And that was a policy that was created in the 1980s and that really replaced public housing and it replaced section eight, the version of section eight that produced housing. It replaced both of those. And so today this is sort of, this policy is sort of the main housing policy for it occupies the space that public housing used to occupy but now sort of that's a tax credit program. And so your question of like, what are the entities actually doing? It's really a range. And so you have private developers who are the people who are actually building and constructing housing and buildings and developments. And you have banks and other financial types of entities especially private equity firms who provide the financing. And so you could kind of think of it as a story where the financial sector increasingly sort of is wedged between the state and residents and renters. And the financial sector sort of gives cash and gives capital to private developers. And so the two main types of private actors here are the private developers and the banks and the financiers. And so they are kind of again, filling that space, filling that void. And it was already a very small void by the way because public housing was always very undersized relative to the public housing sectors that we see in the Western European states. And so the US was already sort of distinct in how small its direct welfare state was. And public housing was an extreme example of that. To some degree, these private sector sort of policies have filled the gap. But again, it was a very small gap to begin with. What's the relationship between section eight and the low income tax credit? Because I know some people are finding housing through vouchers. Are you talking about different policy mechanisms? Is there a relationship between the two? Yeah, thank you for bringing that up because I thought about clarifying that and I was like, okay, so I don't know if I should get that far into the weeds here. But I think it is something that needs to be clarified. So section eight has two different components. One component is what economists will call the demand side component because that's just sort of when we give people cash like benefits and then they can use those cash called vouchers. And so they could use those cash like benefits called vouchers. They could use that to get into apartments that already exists to get into housing that already exists. And so that program actually still exists and it's one of the biggest federal programs that still exists. And so that's one of the biggest examples of what remains in this period that we're living in now where a lot has been dismantled. Eva Rosen sociologist Eva Rosen has written a book about this about the vouchers, about the housing voucher program. Then there's the other side of the housing voucher program that was about actually building affordable housing buildings and developments. And you can imagine that we really need both. We need to policies where folks can have cash immediately to get into places and we also need policies that create spaces because one of the things that happens out in the real world is that a lot of most of the real affordable housing that exists is what we would call natural affordable housing, which is basically housing that has fallen into disrepair and has lost value over the years so much that it's become relatively affordable. And so you can imagine that we really need to also provide housing that's designed to be affordable so that it doesn't really suck to live there. And so you need kind of both things. And so the ability to finance and produce housing is what's really been dismantled on the public side. And that's really where the private sector folks have filled in. And yeah. So essentially what's happening is with these kind of the developers and the banks is there's a relationship where they're building units and then people are coming into those units using Section 8 vouchers. Is that right? Yes. And not always using Section 8 vouchers, but a lot of the times the two are used together. Yeah. And so a lot of times what we see in the real world is that you sort of need both in a lot of places in order for the unit to be truly affordable. You need the resident to have a voucher and the unit to be sort of tax credit subsidized. But they also exist on their own as well. Okay. So what are the implications therefore of the growth of the private sector as a huge kind of source of landlord and not just the private sector, but these large entities, not just kind of your mom and pop landlord, but people like big corporate entities that are essentially housing large populations of people. What do you, what does it mean? Can you tell us a story that kind of illustrates what the implications of that kind of structure might be? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so, I mean, here's where I sort of would go back to the TikTok videos that came to mind to me because a lot of those folks are really dealing with what you just described as the consequences of that. When your rent doubles, when it almost triples, you have to ask questions about what institutional structures actually allow that to happen. And a part of that story about what institutional structure allow that to happen is that for a range of reasons, these corporate landlords are now filling that space and they do have, not all the time, but they have a very exploitative model, a business model out of time. This is something that they brag to their investors about. And so if you see the reports of their communications with their investors, you'll see that they're telling their investors that they've already raised the rents several times and that they envision doing so more. And the investors sort of cheer this thing on. So it's a different dynamic there. Now, when it gets to be more on the policy side like the low income housing tax credit and some of these other things where really the financial sector companies are playing a policy role. And so they're operating not just in sort of the wild, wild West private sphere, but they're really operating within a framework of regulation and so on and so forth. It's a bit different there. And I would say that a lot of the times it is not as exploitative as what you would see with the other corporate landlords. And in fact, what you'll find is that in a lot of these properties, renters get better social protections and often a better quality of housing than you than other low income renters. And so because other low income renters really don't get any subsidies at all. And so there's a lot of that going on. And so if you're living in one of these tax credit housings subsidies, you actually have more, for example, one example of this is good cause eviction. It's a provision that where landlords actually have to go through a process of justifying eviction. And so you can imagine that without a provision like that, you would see a lot more evictions than you would with a provision like that. It certainly doesn't solve the problem, but that's one example of, and the other thing is sort of income restrictions. And so in many of these properties, part of the deal, a part of the criteria for investment is that the properties have to remain affordable by some threshold for a period of time, usually 15 to 30 years. So that's not something that exists in the unregulated private rental world, right? So many of these renters are actually better off than the people who are in low income rental housing that are completely unsubsidized. Now, whether or not they're better off than something like public housing, even though that program isn't really producing in a unit anymore, that's a different question because in theory, public housing would be better. But in practice, public housing is highly politicized in part because it's a direct program. And so one of the things that has happened with these private sector programs that has changed the politics of this housing policy space. When I first got into this work, I was already pretty much an expert in housing policy. I had been studying it for years and years. But, and so I was blown away that I didn't know about the low income housing tax credit until I got further into my dissertation. And if you talk to a lot of other people, they don't know that this is kind of the main housing policy now, and that's sort of by design. It's something that's buried in the tax code and that you wouldn't really know about unless you went kind of digging around for it. And so there's a real question, when you talk about the implications, there's a real question about how that actually changes the politics of in a space where housing has been usually hyper-visible, way out of proportion with how much we actually spend on it. And this interesting thing, and I just wonder if you can talk before I turn to a student question. In terms of methodology, the reason that you're able to make these arguments about the private sector and how that profit motive drives this desire for churn and this desire for kind of rapid raising of rent is it's part of what you studied in your dissertation, right? You kind of looked at, you know, how you looked at private companies and I just wonder if you can talk about how you did the digging to kind of be able to walk us through this path and journey of how did we get here and where are we to get today? Methodologically, how did you learn all of the dynamics particularly within the private market? Yes, yeah, thank you for that question. So yeah, I mean, for me, it was a real journey methodologically and, you know, I've, for this project and for a lot of my work, I've really been drawn to the idea of having a sort of a diverse methodological sort of a diverse array of data to bring to bear on the question. And so that is really how I approach it. Like I did a lot of archival work, archival work where, you know, you can kind of sort of see, you look at the papers, for example, of people who were pivotal to the industry. And, you know, sometimes you can find these, sometimes very extensive collections of folks like that. And even if you aren't interested in that particular person, you can see the industry through the eyes and through the papers of that person. So I did a lot of that. And from that, you kind of come across all kind of documents. Some documents are like literally budgetary documents where you can kind of look at how much people were proposing to spend on something, how much people were actually spending, look at how companies actually characterize their own business models and so on and so forth. And then also through interviews and observation. And so, you know, I found that, you know, you get different kinds of information from different kinds of things. And so I did a lot of interviews with folks who are in the industry. And I asked them about stuff that I came across in the archive. I asked them about stuff that I observed in sort of an industry setting at a meeting or at a hearing, at a bond hearing or at a conference, at a professional conference. And so in the sociology world, we call it triangulation, triangulation. We call that in the sociology world. But for me, it really is a way of leveraging different sources of data to provide sort of cross insights. And so that's what I found myself doing a lot of. But the very first thing that I did that kind of led me into everything is just that I started looking at who received these tax credits. That forced me to know how the tax credit worked, you know, because what I learned there was that the developer is the person who always receives the tax credits, even though the developer is not the one who's gonna actually use the tax credit because they usually don't have enough taxable income for that thing to even be beneficial to them. So in order to have that much income, you need to have to be a multi-billion dollar company. And so the developers get these tax credits and that's their leverage to get the money that they need to build. So there's a courting that happens between the developers and the banks and the investors. And so it was just me kind of learning about that process, seeing who got tax credits and taking the lists of who got these tax credits and then actually using that list to reach out to people for interviews, using what they tell me in interviews to then inform how I approach the archive and so on and so forth. Interesting. Okay, student questions. There are class racial foundations of public policy reger work and here's one of the questions. I was super intrigued by the statement in the reading, constitutive whiteness of credit. As it concisely encompasses the systemic racism rooted in a market that may not often be considered initially to generate racial disparities. In the reading, Dr. Robinson emphasizes that the racial politics behind credit expansion has been under theorized by sociologists and researchers. Why is the relationship between the credit-based economy and racially motivated marginalization not been focused much on or studied? And feel free to also take this opportunity to talk about your conversation about credit as a race specific model of policy intervention or the constitutive whiteness of credit. Yeah, thank you so much for that. Yeah, that's such a great question. This sounds like a good class. I wish I could take it. Oh, there's a comment there. Yeah, and so that's a great question. And so I guess the first thing I wanna do is sort of backtrack a little bit because one of the things that we know as scholars is that it's usually never true that nobody has said what you said, nobody has said. And I hope I didn't characterize it in such a sort of extreme way in the paper. But what I really meant is not necessarily that nobody has studied it or that very few people studied it, but that there was some mismatch. Essentially, there are different communities who have addressed these questions and the questions that they have pursued have not sort of aligned. And so in the paper, I sort of wanted to sort of draw some connections between the questions that were being asked by these different communities. And so to be more specific about that, people who have studied the credit-based economy are often kind of thinking about the US relative to these other states where the welfare state is more direct. And so in this literature, the US really stands out as an interesting thing because the welfare state is invisible. It's hidden, it's submerged. And these are all the terms that folks have used about this. And so they're engaged in a certain conversation that's around the particularity of American governance, of a US governance, and the implications of that, many of which are negative. And so we've talked about already a bit that one of the negative implications of this is that, is that this is something that really benefits the elite of the elite because a lot of the wealth that they extract from the public sector is hidden. And so there's not as much scrutiny around it as it should be. And so it's something that benefits them quite a bit. But that's the nature of that conversation. Then there's another conversation, I think by racial justice scholars, by race scholars and scholars who have really been more sort of mindful about issues of racial justice. And they really have looked at sort of inequalities of credit and they have done so mostly by sort of thinking about how people of color have been left out and excluded from the credit-based economy and how they have increasingly been included in that economy under very predatory terms. And so this is where I think again about the work of historian Kiana Yamada Taylor in her term, and excuse me, in Taylor's term of predatory inclusion. And this is a term that I think many of us have come to use because it really perfectly captures this shift from exclusion to inclusion and how that hasn't been sort of a totally good thing. So again, my main answer is that these are two separate conversations where they both sort of touch on race and credit in different ways, but that what I wanted to do was to kind of make them speak to each other a bit more because I thought there was an interesting connection that could be made there. Many of our students are interested in grassroots organizations. So one student writes, I have several questions for Dr. Robinson, exclamation point. How are grassroots organizations working to address racial inequities caused by housing finance agencies? Additionally, how is the government currently working to address predatory lending practices targeting low income communities of color? And how are these financial institutions, along with the government working to address black and brown communities lack of trust in these lending institutions? And I know you do a lot of kind of community engaged work as well. And I wonder if this is a great moment for you to kind of talk about what you're seeing happening on the ground in terms of people's responses to some of the dynamics that you've been talking about. Yeah, well, thank you so much for that question. And I love the enthusiasm, the exclamation points, I love it. We all need that here at 510 PM Eastern time. So yeah, you know, the community-based organizations, you know, I think in the US have always been at the forefront of the fight for racial justice and racial economic justice. And that is certainly true here. I think when we see, you know, who's in a climate where legislators are feel free to cut budgets and so on and so forth. Who's like, you know, raising their voice about that? You know, a lot of times it is the community-based groups. Who's still finding a way to serve their constituencies even when there aren't a lot of resources there? A lot of times those are the community-based groups. The community-based groups are also implicated in this in a relatively sort of complicated way because, you know, in a lot of the affordable housing industry that I study, they have a specific place in this industry. They have gotten a good bit of money from banks to produce housing. And this industry was really started more so on the idea of a grassroots partnership between these community-based groups and banks. Now, you know, I think that most people will say that's certainly not really the case anymore, but it certainly started in that way. And if you talk to folks in this industry, they certainly sort of, they still describe it in that way. They describe their own work as being about community empowerment and grassroots empowerment and so on and so forth. That is to say that even though it started that way, it's kind of become a part of the guys, the professional guys of this industry that a part of the way that this economic activity gets justified is because it's community empowering or at least that's what they say. And again, the community-based groups sometimes have a very fraught place in all of that because this is one of the channels where resources are still somewhat available, but it's a channel where they are also marginalized and so there's so much to be said about that. I mean, I think some sociologists other than me have written a lot about this recently. And so, yeah, but it's a great question. Thank you. And our last question is inviting you to imagine what a more just housing market would look like. And one proposal that the student wants to offer is could the end goal be to eliminate credit as the means through which people secure housing? Is there a fundamentally flawed relationship between the idea of people having housing and this reliance on credit markets in order to secure such a critical resource? And as I said before, inviting you to imagine what a more just housing market would look like. Yeah, what a great question. And I just want to preface this by saying I don't even presume to have the answer to that, but I just want to just kind of acknowledge that it's such a great call for all of us to think more about this. I think there are groups here just to kind of start at the end, whether or not eliminating credit could be an idea. And I think that what I agree with in that statement is that credit is sort of inherently fraught. But even if we go into a direct, fully public sector approach, I'm not sure that that would eliminate credit. I mean, I'll have to think about that more. But I mean, even the public housing program got loans from private bondholders. And I think there's an empirical question about whether that program could operate without that. Hopefully, I mean, I hope that it could, but there's a historian, Destin Jenkins, who just wrote a book about this, the bond markets and how they played a real big role in what we would call public housing. And so public housing, even public housing isn't as public as we think that it is. And so I just want to just be upfront that I don't really know the answer to that question, but I will say that the groups who are involved in this have put out lots of proposals, like the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. They talk about investing in the National Housing Trust Fund. They talk about maximizing the federal funds that go into public housing into Section 8. They talk about minimizing budget cuts and so on and so forth. Again, all of that is sort of within the system. And I really acknowledge in here in this question, pushing us to think beyond that, which I would love to do as well. Now, the last thing I'll say in terms of thinking beyond that is that I think one of the things we have to do is to separate slice of the pie problems from size of the pie problems. A lot of what we, a lot of our current political discourse around these programs are what I would call slice of the pie problems because they're about how much should we fund public housing, should we, I mean, can we find a way to revamp funding for public housing? How much should we put into this program and so on and so forth? And there are lots of other people on the other side getting mad about even the small amount of money that we put into these kinds of things. But then the size of the pie problem is that the ultra-wealthy people have their own pie and the non-wealthy people have their own pie and the problem is that the pie for the non-wealthy people is far too small. And it's because we don't actually have a system where we are being intentional about not losing a lot of tax revenue through by allowing wealthy people to dodge taxes and not pay their real tax burden. And so, you know, a lot of folks have written about this concept of tax justice lately. I'm thinking of Zuckman and Saiz, they have a book called The Triumph of Injustice where they're just kind of showing that our state and our social programs could be a lot bigger. We could have a lot more money and funds to work with and a lot more capacities to work with if we didn't allow the wealthiest people to shunt the tax burden to the non-wealthiest people. But that is what happens in our country. And so I think that we can get as far as we can get from talking about the programs that we have. But at some point, I think we need to actually talk about the size of the pie and how we really actually need to connect those slice of the pie conversations to a conversation about the size of the pie. I think that's so interesting. And I really appreciate that. And just helping us to imagine and we encourage our students to do that to look comparatively in terms of what a other country is doing, to link things like housing policy and the tax code, social programs to how do we think about the pie and where it comes from, et cetera. So I appreciate all of those linkages that you're helping us to think through, helping people, encouraging us to think historically. All of those tools, whether we're imagining historically, comparatively across countries, comparatively across programs, the relationship between inflows and outflows, you've given us so much to think about today. And I just wanna thank you so much, John, for your really fantastic work and your amazing insights here today. It's been a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to be here, to be in conversation with you and to hear from some students. It's been great. Thank you so much. You are welcome. And thank you to our audience. This has been our final public installment of this year's season of Racial Foundations of Public Policy. Thank you so much for joining us and you can catch all of the recordings on the Ford School of Public Policy YouTube channel.