 But we are quite thrilled that you could join us for this event that we're holding in conjunction with the Century Foundation on neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. We hope this afternoon adds to the scholarship and the discourse around poverty by examining the additional adverse consequences that people face when they are concentrated in high-poverty communities. We hope that today's program stays with you for a long time, and to encourage that, we want to encourage you all to, if you are on Twitter, to, if you are having a conversation about this program, to please use the hashtag high-poverty to create some conversation and discourse about what's going on. We also hope to have you all involved with questioning the panelists and presenters this afternoon. To facilitate that, we will hand out, pass around some note cards, which will come around the room, and we would ask that you would put your questions on those note cards. We'll collect them, and our host and moderator will order them appropriately so that we can get through as many questions as possible. I'd like to advise you all that the rest rooms are located in the back part of this room if you use that back door entrance, if you should need to use them. But as you are leaving the room, please be mindful that in the back, we do have a video camera, which is performing our live feed, our stream for people who are not in attendance in the room, so please be mindful of that if you do walk in the back. So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce our host for the afternoon, Richard Rothstein, who is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, as well as being a senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy at the University of Southern California, Berkeley School of Law. Richard is one of the four most experts we have in this country on inequities, particularly as it relates to education and residential sector. This event is his brainchild. He's the inspiration for it and the convener of this incredible panel of national experts and commentators to guide us through this issue. So please, Richard Rothstein. Thank you, Christian. Christian forgot to introduce himself. That was Christian Dorsey, who's responsible for getting this all organized. As Christian mentioned, this event is co-sponsored both by the Economic Policy Institute and by the Century Foundation. And as he said, I've organized this because I've been mostly focused on education policy for the last number of years. And I've tried to understand the challenges that we face in closing the achievement gap between black and white children. And in so doing, I've come to understand that many characteristics of children from low income families, such as poor health, housing and stability, inadequate pre-literacy experiences when young, inadequate after school enrichment opportunities when older, make it difficult for them to take advantage of what even the best schools and best classroom instruction can offer. The quarter of a century ago, William Julius Wilson's book, The Truly Disadvantaged, transformed the study of urban sociology and also education policy by showing that the harm I've just described to children who come to school with a variety of characteristics that make it difficult for them to take advantage of schools is magnified enormously when children with these disadvantages are concentrated in urban ghettos where jobs have vanished, where violence, drugs and stress are commonplace and where there are a few adult role models of academic success. In the last year, two scholars, Paul Jargowski and Patrick Sharkey, have published new research that, in my opinion, will also be transformative in William Julius Wilson's tradition for those who are trying to understand the challenges faced by advocates of racial equality and justice. And we're privileged to have both Patrick Sharkey and Paul Jargowski here today. Paul is a Century Foundation Fellow and a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, where he also directs the Center for Urban Research and Education. He's the author of the Century Foundation's report, Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium, and he'll discuss that here this afternoon. He will go first on this panel. He'll be followed by Patrick Sharkey, who's an associate professor of sociology at New York University and at NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He's the author of the book, Stuck in Place, Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality. And this book will also be the basis of his presentation this afternoon. As Christian mentioned, we'll then have time for questions to the two presenters, but before doing so, we'll have comments from two discussants on this panel. First, from Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for the Atlantic and author of The Memoir, The Beautiful Struggle. And last year, Mr. Coates won a National Magazine Award for his essay, Fear of a Black President. And then we'll hear from Cheryl Anifel, the president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Prior to assuming her role as the seventh director counsel of the Inc. Fund, she was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. Professor Eiffel is also the immediate past chair of the Open Society Institute. As Christian mentioned, staff members of the Economic Policy Institute will collect for me your written questions during the presentation and discussion and I'll pose these questions to the panelists. So with that, let me invite Professor Drogowski to come to the podium and tell us what we should know. Okay. Oh, good afternoon. Thank you for that nice introduction and I am just happy to be here and I appreciate all of you coming out this afternoon to see this presentation. I heard that a legend that Walt Whitman took the wrong train and ended up in large letters on Camden City Hall. But as you can see from these pictures, and I hope you can see them back in the back, Camden is not invincible and it was really fundamentally destroyed by deindustrialization and out migration of people with any income to the suburbs. So this, when you have conditions like this, and Patrick will talk more about this, nothing really works in those cities. The schools are failing. You have high crime. You have an astonishing murder rate in the city. Most of the kids have very difficult times. And the question, though, is how big a problem is this? And what is the prognosis for concentration of poverty? Is it a problem that's growing, is it shrinking? So that's what I'm here to talk about today, the basic facts about concentrations of poverty. And I'm gonna be using data from, to go back to 1990, from one year, they release it in five year aggregations. So the first data we have from the American Community Survey covered a span of time, 2005 to 2009. And this continues, they release it every year. My report that concentration of poverty in the Millennium released last year was based on the most recent data was the 2007 to 2011 ECS. I've just received recently the latest version 2008 to 2012. Now this is the first data that is collected after 2007, in the middle of the housing crisis, financial crisis and the recent economic troubles. So this really gives an accurate picture of what's going on. And you could think about it as representing 2010 since that's the middle of that period. There's some technical differences between these data sources, but I'm not gonna talk about that now. I'm just saying once they ask me later, we can. Here's the problem we have. Fourth, census tracts with poverty rates of 40% look like the kind of neighborhoods that you saw in the picture from Camden. They sort of have to look and feel often of the neighborhoods you might see in the wire and other depictions. And they meet the descriptions in the work of William Julius Wilson and so forth. So what do we have here? Well, between 1990 and 2000, the number of such neighborhoods together anyway. And 40% is sort of a standard benchmark that I like to use. So the number of people who live in such neighborhoods is also really exploded. So in 2000, we had about 70 old fashioned pointer. The increase was fastest for non-Hispanic whites. So since 2000, there's been a 122% increase in the number of non-Hispanic whites that live in high poverty census tracts. It also increased for blacks, 51%, and Hispanics, 74%. So that's a little bit different than in prior decades. So, all right, moving along. One interesting thing also about these high poverty neighborhoods is they are less likely to be dominated by a single racial or ethnic group. So this chart shows the percentage of these high poverty census tracts that are dominated by a group, meaning that three-fourths of the residents of that neighborhood are in that group. So this top orange-colored bar is, or census tracts where there is no one dominant group. And that was about a third back in 1990. And now it's going up to about 50%. And so this means that we have more high poverty neighborhoods that contain a mix of perhaps black and Hispanic or other groups in some of the white residents. That's, again, a difference from the earlier decades. We also, I also look at the extent to which the poor live in high poverty neighborhoods. So this is what I call the concentration of poverty. So this is the percentage of the total poor in a metropolitan area that live in high poverty neighborhoods, the 40% neighborhoods. So these are people of both their own income deficits to deal with, and most of their neighbors are very low income as well, and subjected to those conditions. So overall, of all the poor, the percentage of who live in high poverty neighborhoods has gone up from 10.3% to 13.6%. That's the first two bars. The highest rate is for African-American poor, up from 18.6% to 23.6%. But you'll notice that the second column there, that is non-Hispanic whites. It's much lower in general, but it has increased from 4.1% to 7.1%. So relatively speaking, the increase was faster for the white poor living in high poverty neighborhoods. Now, that's the average. If we look at specific metropolitan areas, you see some places where the situation is far worse. So you have, for example, in Detroit, in the Detroit metropolitan area, you have roughly 50% of the African-American poor live in high poverty census tracts. And so on, you see some of the other cities that also had very high levels, including Milwaukee, Rochester, Dayton, Ohio, Cleveland. You can see a pattern there. It's a little different if we look at the concentration of poverty among Hispanics. Highest rate is actually in Philadelphia. And that's, I guess, has a lot to do with Puerto Ricans there as well as others. But then we see a lot of in the South, Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville, as you might expect, Fresno, California. So these are cities where you have concentration of poverty is a very substantial part of the overall poverty population. And so dealing with those people and services for those people would have to take that into account. OK, there's also an interesting phenomenon in that if we look at the metropolitan areas by size, those metropolitan areas that have more than 3 million people, sort of some of the largest metropolitan areas, weren't the ones that particularly had large increases. You see that the 1 to 3 million group, the 500,000 to 1 million group, those are the metropolitan areas where you see more larger growth change, percentage point change in the concentration of poverty. So this used to be a phenomenon that we was mostly associated with really big cities. But you see it's now spreading out into all second-tier and third-tier and fourth-tier cities across the country. And this is also a very disturbing trend, I think. Another way to look at that is to look at some individual cities. So this graph is set up so that there's a diagonal line. And if you are above that line, that meant you were increased between 2000 and the 2012 ACS data. If you're below the line, you had a decrease. So you can see the large metropolitan areas. These are the more than 3 million metropolitan areas. They're scattered all around. New York is below the line. Philadelphia's above it. But they're pretty much evenly divided above and below the diagonal. So if we look at 1 to 3 million population metropolitan areas, you see very substantially more metropolitan areas above the diagonal. And here, 500,000 to 1 million, it's very consistent. It's not just that, on average, they're higher. It's that almost all these individual metropolitan areas are, in fact, having increases in concentration of poverty. So it's a very widespread phenomenon. And finally, I have 250,000 to 500,000. Again, you see a very consistent pattern. So this is something that's going on in our cities that is not just a sort of a random thing. It's actually very consistently happening across the metropolitan areas. We could also look at the regional differences. The green bars, African-American concentration of poverty, you see the largest increases are in the north-central region. So that's over close to 15 percentage point increase, on average, in those metropolitan areas in the north-central region. And also increases in the south, not so much in the northeast and a little bit less in the west. So sometimes it's easier to see these trends in concentration of poverty at the state level, even though I prefer metropolitan areas as a unit of analysis. It's hard to map those very well. So just looking here at the state level, this is a map of the concentration of poverty for non-Hispanic whites. And virtually very few of the states have higher than 10%. A few, Pennsylvania looks like Michigan, Ohio. But mainly, they're less than 10% across the country. If we look at African-American concentration of poverty, you see quite a different picture. And you have that whole Midwest and then the corridor leading down to the deep south, where you have levels of concentration of poverty. The highest level there is greater than 25% and that's statewide. And then the next color is 20% to 25%. So it's quite a different pattern. Among Hispanics, you got a sort of an interesting difference. You have some states in the southwest and then states in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio again. So the distribution of this problem among ethnic groups is different depending on the region and the state. Here is, what's going on here? What's causing this? There are some kinds of explanations. Racial segregation can contribute to this. But racial segregation has actually been declining slowly. What's really going on in some ways is that as the suburbs grew and developed and had exclusionary zoning and other forms of keeping people out, people with income moved out and left behind people in the inner city. And here's a dramatic map that shows population change in the Philadelphia metropolitan area from 1970 to 1990 when this phenomenon was really unfolding for the first time. And what you see is the red areas had population decreases of 20% or more. Already? So then, but outside, growth is 20% or more. So we have a very consistent pattern. And you see this in many, many metropolitan areas across the country, that there was just basically abandonment of the central city in the inner ring suburbs. So that's a lot of what's driving this. And as a result, you have mostly all the high poverty census tracts in metropolitan areas are in the central cities. So for example, here's Philadelphia and Camden across the river. You don't see high poverty near-prids in any of those suburban areas. And we kind of know that, but it's important to realize what that is. And so what that means is a disproportionate burden on those central cities. So of the people who live in concentrated poverty, all of them in the Camden metropolitan area live in Camden City and two other smaller towns. And 75 other towns, 75 other suburbs, other jurisdictions, have a total of 463 people in the high poverty near-prids. So the burden is falling on those central city towns. And it's the same thing in Philadelphia. And I'm kind of short on time, so I'll kind of rush through that. But again, the vast majority of the high poverty zones are in the central cities. So we've had this tremendous increase since 1990. And the latest data shows that it's continuing. And we have this problem where it's spreading into more medium-sized and small metros. And high poverty neighborhoods are a little bit less clustered within central cities. They're kind of more spread out. They're not all in one big group anymore, but they're still within the central cities. And so finally, the policy question is, will we continue to build ghettos and barrios? And right now, a lot of the policy conversation is, how do we fix Camden? How do we fix these neighborhoods? We MTO, Enterprise Owns, Promise Neighborhoods, et cetera. But that doesn't address the underlying issue, because concentration of poverty actually results from our policies, our policies of political fragmentation of metropolitan areas, of suburbs that are allowed to grow as fast as they want. So they grow much faster than the metropolitan area, and therefore their growth is coming at the expense of the older cities and the older suburbs. And an exclusionary zoning, which creates kind of an architecture of segregation that is very durable, and we have to begin to change it. So we need to change the paradigm. We need to match the growth of the suburbs to the rate of growth of the metropolitan areas. And we need to understand that every city, every suburb, every town really should be building housing that kind of matches the distribution of income. So that I have, if I'm a low-income person, I have opportunities to move anywhere in the metropolitan area to access opportunities for my kids and for myself. So finally, if we did that for a couple of decades, it wouldn't change it immediately. But if we started to do that, we would see more infill development, higher density, more efficient public transportation, and fewer failing schools. So I just want to conclude with the idea is, the question is not how to fix Camden. The question is, how do we fix this development machine that creates Camden's in Detroit's? And that's really the policy challenge. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. And let me remind you again that his paper is available on the Century Foundation website, tcf.org. And there are copies here as well. But for those of you who are watching online, it's on the Century Foundation website. And I urge you to read it. It's an excellent and very important paper. And I'd now like to call on Patrick Sharkey to give us his thoughts on this topic. Thanks, Richard. It is really a thrill for me to be here. And I'm so grateful that we have Tom Housie and Charlotte in the comment. I've got a big extended family. And I think my book sales were basically driven by my family for a while. And then Tom Housie blogged about the book, and other people started to buy it. So I'm really grateful to have them here. And then Richard Rothstein reviewed the book. And we saw another spike there. So it is a thrill to be here. And I'm really grateful for this event. So what I thought would be the most productive use of my time is to pull out what I think are the most important empirical observations from the book. And I'll do so very, very quickly. And I wanted to start with the subtitle, which is the end of progress toward racial equality. What do I mean here? What I want to make clear is that there is a lot of progress toward equality in the 1960s. So I didn't live through this time. But I looked at the data, and it's just absolutely astounding how much better things got in the 1960s. This was a decade of major civil rights advances, the start of affirmative action on a large scale, and really kind of the decade where the large segment of the Black middle class emerged. That progress ended in the 1970s. And so just a couple of figures, this is from a report that Julia Isaacs did for the Pew Economic Mobility Project, where it's just showing that the gap in median income between Black and white families has remained just remarkably stable since 1970. And this runs through the Great Recession. It cuts off here in 2006, but the same is true through to the president. And the wealth gap has grown since the Great Recession. So we have this persistent racial inequality that hasn't changed since the 1970s. And then to go with that, African-American children from middle class families have experienced extremely high rates of downward economic mobility in the last generation. So families that were doing fairly well a generation ago have moved downward in the distribution. This column on the right just tells us that over half of African-American children from middle class families have moved downward within the income distribution over time. And 35% have moved upward over the same time. So how do we understand these patterns? That's kind of the motivating puzzle for the book. And the overarching argument is that to understand the persistence of racial equality, we have to look beyond human capital. We have to look beyond income. We have to look beyond the home and the individual and consider the environments in which Black and white families have lived over the past four decades, over the past two generations. And Paul touched on the gaps in neighborhood environments that exist right now. I just want to make the point that these gaps look much more severe when we incorporate the dimension of time. So when we consider what types of environments children and families live in over an extended period of time, the figures that I'm showing here show the average environments. This is from a survey where we can follow kids over time and, in fact, over multiple generations of panel study of income dynamics. So this shows the average neighborhood environments of Black and white children in two cohorts. First, a cohort born from 1955 to 1970. And there you see that about 60, just over 60% of Black children spend their childhoods on average in neighborhoods with at least 20% poverty. OK, this is true for 4% of white children. 30 years later, and there is virtually no change except the percentage of white children has risen slightly to about 6%, but about 66% of African-American children born in this latest cohort. These are adolescents and young adults today. Grew up in neighborhoods with at least 20% poverty. So Black and white children continue to be raised and spend their childhoods in entirely different social worlds. And just the second point is that this is not explained by income. This has very little to do with income. So these are comparisons of the average level of neighborhood disadvantage. This is a scale that incorporates poverty, unemployment, welfare receipt, family structure, density of children, all of these things that come bundled together in high poverty neighborhoods. And this figure looks at this for Black, Hispanic, and white families, the size of the 2,000 census, in different income groups. So on the far left, we have families making less than $30,000 per year. We see this racial gap with Black families on the far left and with high levels of neighborhood disadvantage. White families on the right with low levels. These are in standard deviation. So this essentially means that these white families making less than $30,000 per year still live in neighborhoods that are less disadvantaged than the average neighborhood across the country. The other finding, I don't want to go into too much detail on this figure, but the other finding that stands out here is a comparison. And I'll just point it out here. The comparison of this column with this column. What this tells us is that African-American families making $100,000 or more per year live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods than white families making less than $30,000 per year. So that is what we're talking about when we discuss racial inequality in neighborhood environments. It has very little to do with income. Very little to do with wealth. It has to do with the interaction of neighborhoods and race in America. OK, so this stuff is not new. Richard pointed to William Julius Wilson's seminal work back more than 25 years ago where he was really the first scholar to observe how urban poverty had transformed. And he pointed to the new concentration of poverty in America's cities and linked it with the life chances of African-Americans in a way that hadn't been done. What I'm arguing in this book is that in order to understand the consequences of neighborhood inequality, we have to focus on the fact that it's not just that poverty has become increasingly concentrated. It's that the same families have experienced life in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods over long periods of time, and in fact over multiple generations. And just one chart to demonstrate this, this is based on data that follows families over two generations and looks at the neighborhood environments in each generation of the families. So this is pairs of parents and children. And the bar on the left shows that about half of African-American families have lived in the poorest quarter of US neighborhoods over the past two generations. So this is the median experience for black Americans in the US compared with about 7% of whites. So this multi-generational nature of neighborhood inequality really amplifies any of the consequences. And I think this finding is probably the most important in the book, because it suggests that to understand American inequality, and particularly racial inequality, a shift of thinking is necessary. We have to think about inequality as something that occurs over long periods of time that extends across generations of families with consequences that link one generation to the next. So neighborhood poverty experience a generation ago doesn't disappear, doesn't become inconsequential. It lingers on to affect the next generation. And just a few slides to support that claim. The first, if we go back to this work on economic mobility, or the findings on economic mobility that I showed you, a large part of the reason why black Americans have had higher rates of downward mobility is explained by the environments in which African-American children were raised a generation ago. So when we condition on where a child grew up, then these racial gaps in economic mobility are largely explained. And one analysis I do that's not in the book. I consider the neighborhood environment and the larger spatial environment, the gap between whites and blacks in terms of downward economic mobility is no longer significant. It is explained away by considering the childhood neighborhood environments. In this analysis, the estimate was that growing up in a high poverty neighborhood increases the probability of downward mobility by 50% by half. And the explanation for this is over the past four decades when African-Americans make advances in human capital, move into the middle class, this does not translate into an advantaged residential environment in the same way that it does for other groups. So African-American families in the middle class continue to attend schools that are relatively low quality, continue to be exposed to higher levels of crime and violence, continue to be exposed to higher levels of pollution in the air, continue to live in neighborhoods that do not have the basic amenities that are taken for granted in most communities across the country. The second piece of evidence to demonstrate the cumulative nature of neighborhood disadvantage is an analysis done with Felix Ellwert, who is a sociologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where we looked at the effect of being exposed to neighborhood poverty over consecutive generations. And the reason this is a shift from the literature is because when researchers study neighborhood effects or the consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood, they almost always focus on the neighborhoods in which families currently live. But what we found is that the neighborhoods from a previous generation are actually at least as consequential or more consequential for kids' developmental trajectories than the child's own neighborhood environment. So this figure looks at cognitive skills, a common indicator of the developmental trajectory of children. And it looks at cognitive skills for groups. And this is after adjusting for everything we can observe about the child and his family. So these are kids that are identical, except for the neighborhoods in which they live. And on the far left, see that kids from families that have never lived in poor neighborhoods over consecutive generations score. This is a standard IQ scale. So score about six points above the national mean, whereas kids from families that are always in poor neighborhoods write three points below the mean. This difference, the difference between kids never in poor neighborhoods and kids always in poor neighborhoods, is about two-thirds of a standard deviation. This is almost the size of the typical gap between black and white children on these assessments of cognitive skills. This is the equivalent of missing about three years of schooling. And it's still purely to the neighborhood environment. OK, so the point here is that when we think about in terms of generations, when we think in terms of long-term exposure to disadvantaged environments, then the consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood look much more severe. Consequences look cumulative. Consequences from one generation extend to the next generation. So we have to think about inequality that exists now as a continuation of inequality that's been experienced by families over long periods of time. And this is particularly true for African-American families where 80% of the kids who are currently in poor neighborhoods are from families that have lived in similarly poor neighborhoods for at least two generations. So this means that children going to a low-quality school overwhelmingly are being raised by parents who also went to a low-quality school. It is a continuation. It's a process that has occurred over multiple generations. Taking a multi-generational perspective, also, I argue, changes that we should think about policy. And my thoughts here are really complementary to Paul's. I think I agree entirely with Paul's assessment of the policy picture at the end. We have to think about policy on a different time scale. Most of our urban policy consists of short-term investments or short-term programs that allow families to leave high-poverty neighborhoods for a short period of time without making a sustained change. I'm arguing that we need to shift to policy that allow for families to alter their trajectories, that allow for communities to undergo transformed trajectories in ways that are sustained over time. I argue that more important than having good ideas for urban policy is the need for durable urban policy. And what I mean with durable urban policy, the principles for a durable urban policy agenda are here. I don't talk much about specific. I mentioned some programs, but more of what I'm trying to do in the book is lay out a set of principles. So durable urban policy disrupts multi-generational patterns of neighborhood inequality, has the potential to generate transformative changes in places and in families' lives. And lastly, in the one where we've had the most trouble to withstand fluctuations in the political mood and the business cycle, I think we have, I just list a few examples of programs that meet some of the criteria for durable urban policy here, which I won't discuss in any more detail. But I will make the point that I think we have good examples of policies and programs that fit these criteria. I think we have very few examples of this last category. Investments of programs that have withstood shifts in the political mood and in the business cycle. So I think this is the real policy challenge. The last thing I'll say is this. The types of investments that I'm describing, durable urban policy investments are already in place and are taken for granted in communities across the country. So stable suburban, ex-urban communities were created by federal policy. They were, when the government decided to directly provide home mortgages, that allowed for home ownership on a large scale. That allowed for the emergence of suburbs. But that was restricted to almost entirely restricted to white communities. So the federal government took a direct conscious approach to creating stability in affluent and predominantly white communities. Our policies, our approach to giving localities, unparalleled autonomy in the capacity to exclude unwanted populations and to restrict the construction of affordable housing is another active intervention in the housing market that has created this neighborhood inequality. So when I'm asking for durable urban policy, I'm not asking for a unique commitment to low-income non-white communities. I'm proposing that we extend the commitment, the massive investments that have been made in affluent, predominantly white communities, and extend them to a higher population to communities across the country, including low-income and non-white communities. That's really what I mean when I talk about a durable urban policy agenda. Thank you. Thank you very much, Patrick. I have a strong interest that I share with Patrick in reducing the share of his book sales that are attributable to his own family. So I urge you to, if you're watching this online, to Google the book and order it. It's called Stuck in Place. And if you're here, there are other forms for the book outside. It's a terrific book. As he said, I reviewed it. And I think it's one of the more important books that have been written in many years about this topic. I'd now like to call on Tanahisi Coates to make some comments in response to both Pauls and Patrick's presentations. Hi. It's a little too hot. OK. I should just make the quick correction. It's Tanahisi Coates. I have no offense for people mispronouncing my name. It looks like Tanahisi, but my mother would kill me if I didn't make that correction. So I'm going to go ahead and do it. I'm from West Baltimore. I grew up in West Baltimore during, well, I was one in the mid-70s, grew up there mostly in the 80s and into the early 90s. And one of the reasons why I was such a fan of Patrick's book, I feel like I'm getting, I have a big mouth. I could almost go without this. One of the reasons why I was such a fan of Patrick's book is because it was, as though somebody was doing like mapping the DNA of my life or something. I don't know if that's the correct scientific term, but it was very much a roadmap of my life. I lived in West Baltimore, but I had a very active father. Sometimes I wished he was less active when I was a kid. I had a very active mother. I was raised in a very, I would say, stimulating intellectual environment, books everywhere. But my friends were very different than me. It was not particularly common to have a father in the house. It was not particularly common for everybody to be stably employed. And as soon as I got to college and I left West Baltimore, I always wondered, how could it be that I had the attributes, if you looked at my family in many ways, of a quote unquote middle class white family. And yet the neighborhood I lived in was nothing like that at all. And when I got to college, I met many more African-Americans who were just like that. And I realized that that was something essential to the African-American story of my generation. What Patrick was able to do is take that away from the realm of memoir, which was the only place I had dealt with it before and to make it scientific. It made so many things that I had observed in my life substantial and real. And I just, I can't recommend that book enough, because I think what happens in these conversations very often, I think this is the spirit of the time. It is much easier for us to talk about, to have conversations around class, around poverty. These are very important conversations to have. It's much harder to expand the conversation out to racism. And I use the term racism very deliberately instead of the term race. I love where Patrick ended his comment, because his point is that things have been actively done. The suburbs didn't just happen. It didn't just spring up out of nowhere. White families who were formerly living in Camden, living in Baltimore, living in Philadelphia, living in Detroit, didn't just up in one day decide that it'd be nice to move somewhere else. And when I say racism, they didn't even just move because they necessarily had hatred in their heart. It wasn't even so much that you saw this black family move in, and I hate them so much that we now have to leave, although that happened on occasion too. But one of the things that has been very interesting for me in terms of the research I've done in terms of housing that I've had to do over the past year is even if you were a white family who wanted to stick around, we had laws and we had housing policy in such a way and that was an effect that would make it totally illogical for you to stay in these neighborhoods when black people moved into them because the chance of you being able to refinance your mortgage, being able to invest in your property, immediately dipped down. As soon as I moved in, as soon as my brother moved in, my sister moved in. Regardless of whether we were educated, regardless of whether we were a two-parent household, regardless of whether we went to church every Sunday, no amount of virtue was going to save your ability to invest in your house. So people did what logic dictates, they moved. And I think this is really important because when we talk about these issues, there's some sense that what has happened over the past 30 or 40 years is somehow natural. That it's not the result of policy, that it's not the result of governmental intervention. And I think when we say words like race, which sort of just filters in, yeah, you're different from me, you're from Africa, I'm from Europe, whatever, so this happened. As opposed to racism, where we have actual decisions made out of animus for a particular group of people or out of a need, maybe not even animus, a need for particular people to occupy a place in society. I think it's really, really important that we think about things in that sort of way. I wanna historicize that just a little bit, that claim that I just made. Time with the WPA files that researchers took when they went out in the 20s and 30s, and these files have all sorts of problems, but you get direct testimony of enslaved black people in this country, and it's very, very interesting. And one of the files I came across was a woman who had been enslaved on I believe it was the Georgia plantation of Alexander Stevens. Anybody know who Alexander Stevens was? Alexander Stevens was the vice president of the Confederacy, intellectual architect of the Civil War, if there were to be one. And Stevens, I knew about him from his famous cornerstone speech, when he made the argument that slavery was itself in elevation of civilization. And it was very interesting, because I had feelings about that, obviously, not particularly positive. And then to hear this woman who had been enslaved on Alexander Stevens' plantation, talking about how nice he was, and how good he was, and how well he treated everybody who lived there. And so I was faced with this reality of what he had done systemically, and advocating slavery, and who he was on a person-to-person basis. And this is true of a lot of people. You follow George Wallace's story. You can find black people to say very good things about George Wallace. I say that to say. It's important not to think of racism, to not think of you are a bad person. You are the equivalent of a child molested. It is something corrupt in your heart. When I say that, I'm talking about things that we decide to do, that we make a decision to do. And I think that's the great challenge as I really appreciated Patrick and Paul both laying out the way forward. But I've been in this sort of, I guess, depress the moves when people have put it lately. But I just want to put this out there. How do we have programs over the long term that are politically durable, that can be durable throughout a business cycle, that we can have a commitment if we haven't made a commitment to excising racism from the heart of this country, from the heart of its policy. Look, we're here talking about concentrated poverty and where people live today. We could have a very similar conversation about mass incarceration in this country. We could look at the fact that African-American males in the world comprise some infinitesimal amount of people and yet comprise 8% of all people incarcerated on this world so that if an alien came and decided to visit Earth and said, can you present me with what a prisoner looks like, it'd be very likely that should we get an African-American male. We could go across the board. In any, we could talk about health and have a very, very similar conversation. I just have to say, and with great, great appreciation, I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, for Paul's work, for Patrick's work, we have a history, and history doesn't just go away because we did some nice things in the 1960s. We have a history, we have a heritage, we have a legacy of treating people with African ancestry who were enslaved in this country, particularly, in a very, very specific way. I'm very, very skeptical about our ability to craft policy that can end this sort of thing, it can deal with mass incarceration, it can deal with the sort of statistics that Patrick and Paul just laid out if we can't get that outside of ourselves. And I'll leave that there. I'm Sheryl, and I just wanted to note that if you have questions that you've written out just to hold them up, and one of the EPI staff members will collect them for you. Oh, I'm gonna get a bonus prize early, okay. Sheryl? Thank you very much. I want to thank Richard Rothstein and EPI and the Century Foundation for including me in this terrific program, and I really am thrilled in this moment to be on this panel because all of the material that both Paul and Patrick have presented are critically important at this particular moment. They build on what I really have, for myself, seen as kind of the four essential texts to understand from my line of work, race and housing in America. And those are, of course, Massey and Denton's American apartheid, Oliver and Shapiro's Black Wealth, White Wealth, Sundown Towns, who's author, I can't remember, Jim Lohan, and then Blockbusting in Baltimore by Ed Orser. I'm originally from New York, but I have raised three children in West Baltimore. And that last book describes precisely the phenomenon that Tanahasi talked about a few minutes ago about white flight and the inability of whites to maintain themselves in neighborhoods once blacks moved in. So let me just kind of tie together what I think here is a theme across the two presentations and Tanahasi's comments, which is about accident, chance, and race. Two of these things go together. One is an outlier. When it comes to housing and race, there really is no such thing as chance or accident. So Paul began with this story about, was it Walt Whitman and Camden, right? It reminded me of the story that Robert Carter tells. Robert Carter was a brilliant lawyer, one of the architects of Brown versus Board of Education who worked for the ACP Legal Defense Fund and one of the lawyers who argued Brown and later became a federal judge in New York. And Robert Carter describes when his family came up from the south as part of the great migration with so many other black families and he explained how so many black families ended up in Newark, New Jersey. And what he said was that many black families were on the train and when the train conductor announced the station, Newark, many of them thought that the conductor said New York and so they got off the train. And then they didn't have the money to get to New York and so they stayed there. And that was a story of how his family ended up in Newark. So that sounds like chance, that sounds serendipitous, right? But why were they on the train? Why were they leaving the community that they came from in the south? And they were leaving the community they came from in the south along with so many hundreds of thousands of others in the great migration because of the astonishing conditions in which African Americans were living in so many communities. So I guess I have to add Isabelle Wilkerson as the warmth of other sons as the kind of fifth in the collection of texts that you need to understand race and housing. So for me, it's very important to remember that if you pull the thread long enough when we're talking about housing and race in particular, you get to a point where actions were compelled or imposed in ways that have generational consequences that we continue to live with today. And the problem, of course, is that when it comes to talking about race and discrimination, it's very much the way Tanahasi described it. We don't do structure well. What we like to do is to identify a policy or a practice that is discriminatory and then we like to stop doing it. And we think that that solves the problem. So although the FHA from 1935 to the 1960s used an appraisal process for home mortgages that graded home mortgages A, B, C, and D with A being for homes in neighborhoods that had no blacks and no foreigners and D being for neighborhoods that were black and even though they required racially restrictive covenants in homes that they insured for whites and even though they would not allow whites to sell homes to people of color. Between 1935 and the 1960s, at some point we just stopped doing it. But we were left with a structure in place that gets inherited over generations that we then are presented with today and we wonder how did we end up here? We try to fix Camden. We try to fix whatever neighborhood we think we need to fix but we never deal with the structural problem that created it and our response is not structural. So what I hear both of the authors calling for is the need for a structural response to issues of concentrated poverty and housing. Not just stopping doing something that's bad but making an affirmative effort to reverse, to change, to transform the legacy of structural decisions that were made in prior generations. Now here I do think that we're in a particular moment where this is important for us. We just had the biggest financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression. And even as we sit in this room over in Congress, plans are afoot to rebuild and they are engaging in the process of rebuilding our financial structure as it relates to housing and loans and credit and so forth. We're here while they're making decisions about loans and down payments that you'll need and credit and so forth. That's a structure, the financial system is a structure. It collapsed under its own weight. And as they're remaking the structure, the conversation is actually not at all focused on race and discrimination and some of the legacy that existed within that structure that made African American middle class homeowners so precariously balanced anyway. I know there was a housing crisis. I know it was a terrible economic crisis but it's also true that even before 2008 many middle class black families were there hanging by a thread. The fragility of the black middle class is very much dependent on the decisions that we've made about how to organize our financial structure. The only place in which I would say I disagree somewhat with Patrick is in that I think, and it's a very light disagreement, is in that I think we can do both things. Which is that we can make decisions that are structural, that is policies that he said can withstand shifts in political mood. And we can provide opportunities for choice for people who are currently living in distressed communities. So I'm a civil rights lawyer. I have big ideas but I also have clients. Real people suffering who want real opportunity and chances for their children and for their families. And I think we have to be responsive to both of those things. So I want to give an example of each. So structure, durable policies that can withstand political mood, to me, in my view, one of the most important of those policies that affects the issue of distressed neighborhoods and poverty is transportation policy. Transportation, when you finally do it, actually survives generationally. We all drive on the interstate highways. They didn't just go away, because Eisenhower was no longer president. They live, they endure. And transportation policy, I think, is one of the least engaged areas of policy for civil rights organizations like my own. This is a self critique. Tanahase will know this. Baltimore City, for example. So once you get out of the big cities, that in New York you can take a subway or bus anywhere. It arrives on pretty promptly. Yes, your train might be delayed by a smoky condition or a man on the track, but it's coming. Baltimore City has the same subway system that it had when LDF's great mentor Bill Coleman was transportation secretary and Nixon was president. It's one line, it has about 10 stops, goes up to Johns Hopkins and back down. Does not cut east to west. The light rail, which was built in Baltimore City, which goes north to south to get people out to the suburbs. I mean, there's an interesting story associated with the light rail. If you get on the light rail in downtown Baltimore and you begin to take the light rail, every stop comes at about five minutes, a five minute break. And then suddenly you get on at say Falls Road and then there's a really long stretch. It's like 15 minutes long. You pass a lake and everything. You say, well, when is this train gonna stop? And that's because it passes a community called Rockston, which forbade Baltimore City from having a light rail stop because they did not want people from the city coming into the Rockston community. So the decisions that we make about transportation, even if you live in Baltimore and you have a job at Johns Hopkins, and I know many of the low wage workers there are striking right now, but if you have a job there and you're making 10, $15 an hour, Tana Hasey knows this. If you get up at five o'clock in Baltimore and you go out and you drive in West Baltimore, you will see black women standing in their nursing smocks at bus stops waiting 40 minutes for a bus that was created basically for the maid's route to get to the actual job they have. Now we were just talking about children and education. What that means is they've left their children at home who will have to get to school on their own in the neighborhood that Tana Hasey's described. They haven't given them breakfast. When they come home at night, they'll do the same thing. Their children will be out at three. If they're working a 12 hour shift and they get off at seven, they'll get home at eight. And you'll wonder why they didn't read Good Night Moon to their children and help them with their homework and give them a delicious home-cooked meal. And you'll say that that person should lean in. An election of about it. An election of about it. So for me, this is such an important and powerful issue to being able to unlock what is this kind of generational distress within too many, from my perspective, African-American communities. Very interesting to see the increase in white communities as well. But from my perspective, to see this in African-American communities, generation after generation. What we will talk about is the child that was left alone, the child who came unprepared to school. We'll talk about all the symptoms, but we would never relate it to the transportation issue. We would never relate it to the fact that if there was a quick rail that could get the mom to the office on time, she'd have time to actually take her kids to school, get on that train, get to work and get home. We don't think that's relevant. So that's a structural piece that's durable. But the choice piece, we litigated a case called Thompson versus HUD. Actually, we were really part of the remedial part of the case. The ACLU did really a lot of the heavy lifting in which we were able to provide opportunities for families in Baltimore to make the choice to leave highly distressed communities. We sued HUD. And we sued HUD because HUD had been actively involved in creating segregated public housing in Baltimore City. The case settled, and we've been able to allow parents to have the choice, not just the voucher to leave, but also the counseling that goes along with leaving your own neighborhood and entering a different realm and finding the supports that you need. So I think we need to be doing both things. We need to be making decisions that produce these structural shifts that can break some of these intergenerational problems. But we also need to be giving real opportunity for choice. I was very interested last week to see the Washington Post article about a recent study that was done out of University of California challenging the Amy Chua's tiger mom theory and studying low-income Asian-American families, because Amy Chua was like a Harvard professor, so it was kind of hard to tease out how much of her children's achievement was about being a tiger mom and how much was about the fact that socioeconomically they're doing quite well. And so they picked poor immigrant Asian-American families, that next generation. And what they said in that piece in the study was that the single most important predictor of the children's outcome in life and the difference between those families and other families was that they said Asian-American families carefully chose their neighborhood based on the schools and what schools offered AP courses and so forth and a kind of enriched educational opportunity. Ask yourself how many African-American families can choose what neighborhood they want to live in economically because they're steered by real estate agents into particular neighborhoods because we continue to have, as in Baltimore County, an unwillingness to allow for the use of Section 8 vouchers, for the building of affordable housing, for mixed housing neighborhoods so that communities are kind of broken up. I mean, all of these affect the ability to have your family thrive and succeed and leave that distressed condition and break what may have been generations of poverty. So I think we need to do both things, and I'm deeply grateful for being able to be part of you today and just appreciate so much the enormous work that both Paul and Patrick have done and hope that we're going to keep this conversation going. Thanks very much, Sherlyn. I've looked over all the questions that were turned in and they're almost all on a single theme. So I think I'm going to summarize them and ask each of the panelists to describe it. And they all relate to policy. What should we do about it? And I guess in asking each of the panelists to comment on it, I'd like to ask them to think about two things. First is, what's the single most important policies, concrete policy that you think we should follow to undo the concentration of poverty and the effects of concentration? And then secondly, if it's not the same thing, what do you think is the most important thing we can do that's politically realistic in the short term as a way of addressing this issue? So I don't know if you want to take a minute to think about it, that's okay. Or if somebody wants to volunteer to go first, who's finished thinking, that's okay too. Paul? I hope I'm not finished thinking completely, but I think that the most important thing is that we need absolutely to understand that exclusionary zoning is a big part of this problem. And I can't, I've actually been an expert witness for developers that wanted to build small 1,000 square foot homes in the suburbs because they done studies and found that there was tremendous pent up demand for smaller houses in better school districts. And they knew they could sell as many of these houses as they can build. And if the zoning didn't already prevent it, as soon as they said they were gonna build it, the city council would change the zoning so they couldn't do it. It's sort of like the stuff. So this is, you can't even think about moving to the suburbs if there's not a housing that you can move into. And funny, we both used the word durable in different ways. I talked about a durable architecture of segregation. That's what we've built. And it's gonna be here for 30 or 50 years. So that's why what we need to start doing is to start to stop exclusionary zoning and in fact go in the other direction and say actually every community has a responsibility to build housing that is going to fit roughly the income distribution of the larger area. So then the difference between being the wealthy suburb and the poor suburb in the central city would be smaller. So there'd be less of an incentive to have to sort of fight to be the wealthy suburb by keeping out everybody. And does this sound unrealistic? Well, it happens in Europe all the time. In the city of London, every town in London, which London is actually comprised of many smaller cities, every one of those places has its share of social housing and just taken for granted. They take it for granted just like we take for granted the opposite that of course the suburbs are all rich people. Well, you know, in 1968 we said we can no longer discriminate on race in housing. Now we haven't actually enforced that as well as we should have and it still happens in various subtle ways but we should also have the same principle for income. You shouldn't be able to discriminate as a community legally on the basis of income but you can't prevent people two thirds of the income distribution, for example, from living in your community. That shouldn't be legal. And we have to start there. And now, is that politically realistic? Ah, I don't know. Well, if you have a politically realistic suggestion we can come back to you. Patrick? I'll think about it. Sure. So, all right, I'm gonna answer this in a indirect and roundabout way. I think what is on the policy agenda right now is essentially our model of dealing with urban poverty, crime, disadvantage and unrest and we've had the same model since the late 1960s and that model has been disinvestment and investment in policing and the criminal justice system. That has been the dominant, now I'm not saying that other policies haven't come and gone, there have been a lot of policies and exciting really good ideas that have been implemented but that have not been sustained over time but that has been the dominant model particularly at the federal level but also in terms of corrections at the state level that our country has dealt with the problem of urban poverty. It has been to disinvest in programs like public housing and to make large investments in criminal justice and corrections. I think that model has broken down. I think there is consensus across the political spectrum that it is no longer sustainable. I've heard this from people who I never would have predicted would argue against our rate of incarceration or now arguing against it for different reasons not necessarily because of social justice reasons but because of economic reasons and budgetary reasons but there is this consensus that this model has broken down and is no longer sustainable. So the question now is what is the next model? What is the next model for dealing with the issues that Paul and I discussed and we're asking this question in the context of consistent racism as Tana Hazi pointed out. So that is the context. We can't ignore that but at the same time we're also dealing with this question at a time when violent crime is as low as it's been in the last century. Okay, so this is just an absolutely incredible time period. We are at the safest point. People don't believe this but we haven't had a homicide rate this low. We had it for a few years in the early 60s and then prior to that it was before World War I. So we're dealing with these issues at a time when the link that's been made between race, central cities and violence has been weakened dramatically. You can't make that argument in a lot of big cities across the country that cities are places where violent crimes are rampant. It's just not true anymore and every group has been affected by this. It is a myth that the crime drop has not reached most disadvantaged neighborhoods. We've looked at this over several cities and in each case the drop in crime in the most violent neighborhoods has been equal to or much larger than the drop that has occurred in the remainder of the cities. So I guess I hesitate to say that it's politically reasonable to think that we'll have a progressive answer to this question of persistent urban disadvantage but I do think we're at a point where the old model has broken down and something new is coming to replace it. And so it is an active time to kind of point out that cities are in a good place, that violent crime is down, that a lot of the problems associated with central city disadvantage, low income, non-white communities have dropped considerably. We're not where we were when Bill Wilson wrote the truly disadvantage. So I'm at least a little bit more optimistic about where the policy agenda could go. Sherilyn, both the highest priority policy and one that might be more politically realistic. Well, frankly, I think everything associated with issues of fair housing in this moment, particularly maintaining HUD's commitment to recognizing the importance of disparate impact as a way of measuring a jurisdiction's compliance with the Fair Housing Act. Of course, it is clear that at this point there are forces and maybe some on the Supreme Court who are quite determined to get rid of the disparate impact standard. That's where my organization comes in and we'll continue to stay on top of that. But I also just mentioned transportation. I think that we don't pay enough attention to it and we missed an important opportunity with the stimulus package to really focus on that and to see that as important. So here's the difficulty. The narrative associated with all of the things that would work is deeply racialized. So if you talk about wanting to invest in public transportation, in fact the word public I think now has become public schools. Public transportation, public universities has all, that's part of the code. People know what you're talking about. And so there's some narrative work to be done here too that really has to change and reinvigorate the conversation and the lexicon about who we are as Americans and what we hope to accomplish. There is a theory of America in which we all privately live in our bunkers and drive our biggest cars and have our own driveway and our own gun and our homeschool our kids and you know what, it's America, do your thing. However, there is an alternative view of America one that has been more consistent which is an America of interaction and a publicly robust America. And in fact, the truth is that America as a nation of immigrants only worked because of the public infrastructure certainly for the 20th century. The idea was that you had to integrate waves of new people into the cities and decisions were made about public education, about public health, about public housing, about all kinds of things to deal with the fact that you had an immigrant population. And so it seems to me we're kind of, we need more ambassadors, more high thinkers, more John Dewey's to kind of create a narrative to help us think about a different way of imagining America to support that policy. I wanna take issue with the politically realistic challenge. I'm not sure it was ever realistic. I mean, the aberration of the 1960s, it really, it was an aberration, right? So for most of our country's history, it was not realistic to imagine that you could advance public policies that would benefit people who were poor, who were black, who were powerless. That's not been our history. So we've always had to run counter to the political headwinds. And to me, the question is, what are the efforts that we can workshop and show success that you then can lift up? Because I think part of the moment that we're in in this country is where everyone's throwing their hands up about everything, everything looks like it's too hard. It's also complicated, Congress is deadlocked, all the things that people say. But what convinces is success. Paul just put up some of these communities that he thought were doing, or maybe it was Patrick, that he thought were doing good things. Like one of them was the Harlem Children's Zone, Jeff Canada's Harlem Children's Zone, which is not replicable everywhere, right? But he showed a model. In a matter of fact, he's showing how much investment it would take, right? To save a community and their children and to educate them and so forth. It's a fascinating example for us. So part of what that does is, it's not just about the fact that he is working with that community and those families, but he's also shown us, and the people he works with have shown us what it takes if we are serious about doing that kind of work in a community. So part of what we have to do in a Baltimore, or maybe a Baltimore County, right? It's show what it could look like if you dealt with exclusionary zoning. If you created incentives for mixed income, the development of mixed income housing. If you provided choice and counseling for people moving into different neighborhoods so they would know how to navigate themselves, right? So part of what I feel is kind of my charge is that, is being able to create models that take away from people the ability to say it can't be done. Of course. I'll gladly answer the question. I also want to challenge the premise, but first to answer the question, protecting the right to vote for every American citizen. I mean, you want something that's doable right now, you should pay attention to what's happened and what happened in North Carolina and what's happening across the country on the thinnest premises, removing the right to vote from American citizens. That's the most tangible, doable thing, I think. Thank you. I'll take the applause. Thank you. But I think it's important to challenge the premise because I think we live in this time when if you can't get a filibuster-proof majority, it shouldn't be talked about. And I think that's like a very ahistorical way of looking at history. And I think African Americans particularly should understand this to a great degree. Slavery ended in this country, technically in 1865. That means that there were roughly 250 years when black people lived insolated in this country. Black people lived enslaved in this country longer than they thus far lived free. I say that to say that abolition was a really, really old idea when it happened. And the fact that it wasn't politically doable at the time, I'm sure did not stop black people in 1620, 1621, 22, living in Virginia colony from saying you really should get rid of this slavery thing. I really shouldn't be a slave. So I think it's very, very important that we state ideas whether they're doable or not. And the other thing is we don't know what's doable and what's not doable. In 1860, no one thought, no one, not the most radical or radical abolitionist thought within five years all African Americans in the country would be emancipated. No one thought that. The Seneca Valley Conference happens and convention happens and what? The 1850s, within a century women get the right to vote. You say to the Seneca Valley Convention, you guys shouldn't assemble because that's clearly not doable. I think it's really, really important that we think of politics beyond Congress, beyond what you do in the ballot box, beyond who you elect for president. All that's important, don't get me wrong. But politics is a big, big process that happens over a long period of time with all sorts of actors. And I'll conclude that by saying, whatever policy you endorse, and I would say this for the one I endorsed, in terms of the right to vote, the conversation around racism must be attached to it. I know that we don't wanna get into it because we wanna talk about what's doable right now and anytime you start talking about racism, that immediately makes things less doable. But I think part of the problem, I guess my great fear is we solve one problem then it moves to somewhere else. So this is not an original observation, but is it a mistake that after abolition you have a large swath of African-Americans in the South are effectively enslaved under debt peonage? Is it a mistake that after the revolutions of the 1960s you have a system come up where you have mass incarceration? Unfreedom is not unfamiliar to African-Americans. And my great fear is if we solve it in one area, racism, white supremacy moves to another area. Because we haven't really dealt at home with why we keep making these decisions. That's a tough fight, it's a rough fight. But I do think it's one that needs to be engaged. And I'll tell you why, just to end on this. You know, we started this conversation talking about William Julius Wilson's great summoner work, The Truly Disadvantaged. The horrifying upshot, and I don't know if Patrick would say this, but the horrifying upshot that I took from his book was Wilson is saying, well, there's this coterie of mostly African-American poor people who live in this neighborhood. Middle-class black people have gone over here. They're doing pretty well. We don't have to worry about. We need to worry about the truly, truly disadvantaged. And you look at those charts that Patrick puts up where you see African-American families earning $100,000, living in neighborhoods that are equivalent for white families that are earning $20,000 or $30,000. And the conclusion can only be that the truly disadvantaged are black people in this country, period. That there is no necessary escape because whatever your individual accomplishments might be. So any conversation that we have policy-wise in terms of housing, in terms of healthcare, in terms of transportation, I think like Americans as a country, we really, really need to be reminded of where we live, that we have legacy, that we have heritage, that if George Washington is important, then redlining has to be important too. I really, really think we need a frank acknowledgement of who we are attached to any policy. Thank you. I'm gonna take the prerogative of the host to elaborate a bit. Of course, nothing's politically realistic this year, but there are short-time unrealistic and long-term unrealistic. And let me work off two of the questions I've gotten to give an example and get your reaction to it. One of them was a quarter of children in neighborhoods, live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, I'm sorry, a quarter of children in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty receive federal rental assistance, by which I assume the question means with commonly known Section 8 Housing Voucher Assistance. So one long-term unrealistic solution would be to prohibit the use of Section 8 Housing Vouchers in high-poverty neighborhoods. A short-term solution, which I think is not realistic this year, but might be if we mobilize appropriately and could be, first of all, fully funding the program, so all families who received that voucher assistance would have the funds, would be able to use them. Since it's already on the books, we might conceivably think that we could persuade Congress to fund it. And secondly, although it might not be realistic to prohibit their use in high-poverty neighborhoods, there have been a number of efforts to combine the Section 8 Housing Voucher Program with counseling to persuade people to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. So does that answer your challenge about political realism? Richard, is that one of the biggest problems has been even when individuals are counseled to move to other neighborhoods, has been the issue of transportation, has been the issue of mobility, because mobility is not just where you move to live, it's where your children, you leave your children off for the day, it's how you get to work and how you get home. And this is why I keep coming back to the transportation issues. The number one reason people will tell you, is how am I gonna get there? How am I gonna get there? How am I gonna get there? And if we don't do that, what we do is we set people up in Baltimore for things like payday loans to try to have cars that they can't afford, and we actually just kind of exacerbate the problem. So I'm fully in agreement with you, but there has to be an infrastructure to begin to support the mobility that we want to see happening of people in those communities. I want to add one other thing about, well, two things. One is something Paul said. Paul said, you shouldn't be able to discriminate based on income, then you said, keeping two-thirds of the income distribution from being, so I'm playing around with that in my head, and I just want you to know I'm taking that with me because that sounds so right and put that way sounds like something. I'm gonna work on that. The second thing is Patrick said, we talked about crime levels, right, which are back at the same level they were at in 1966. In 1966, the incarcerated prison population was 250,000, which is a little bit more than today's federal prison population, right? So now we have 2 million people in prison, about 202, 211,000 of them are in federal prison. That was about the size of the entire prison population in the United States in 1966. And yet now our crime levels are back to that same level, right? So somehow we should be dialing it back. And you're right, there are people on the right, including a group called Right on Crime. I was just in a meeting with them the other day who are quite focused on the issue of mass incarceration and who understand that it's unsustainable. So if there is such thing as a peace dividend when you don't have war, I wonder if there is a peace dividend when crime goes down, right? That the funds that were funneled in that direction should be, there's an argument that they should be redirected in a way that invigorates the community. And I just kind of like to see us play around and talk about that a little bit as there's this goodwill on the criminal justice side, some goodwill on the criminal justice side. Okay, does anybody else want to say before I go on to the next one? Can I actually? Yeah, sure. Both Charlotte and Patrick, you guys make this point. Are you guys at all worried that that becomes then an argument for preserving incarceration where it is the low crime in effect becomes a justification for it? For preserving? Well, yeah, I mean, clearly, well, crime dropped because we put all these people in jail. I mean, that's not my argument, but. We've heard it. All the criminologists have demonstrated that that's not true. So, yes, we've heard the argument, but even the people who you would expect to make that argument and accept it, recognize that something else happened. Go ahead. Sometimes people say, listen, people who live in the interstate don't want to move to the suburbs because they want to stay with their churches and their groups and their friends. And even when in MTO, they move people out to low poverty neighborhoods, many of them ended up moving back closer to their neighborhoods of origin. And my answer to that is very simple. People should have that choice. And for that choice to be real, there has to be, first of all, the unit they can move into. Secondly, maybe the transportation to use that. And then we'll see. And my belief is that many people would take that option to get better services, public services and education for their children. And if others have priorities that involve staying close to an historical community, that's okay. But right now they don't have the choice. That's the point. And let me go on to another issue that's reflected in the number of questions that I've gotten. And that is, what does gentrification have to do with all of this? And let me elaborate just for a minute. As we know, there are many high poverty neighborhoods in this country that are being gentrified. And so they look like they are being integrated and look like they're no longer areas of concentrated poverty. And many of the families that did live in these gentrified neighborhoods are now moving to first ring suburbs, which also look temporarily integrated. So my question, interpreting the question that I got is what can we do to stabilize both the inner city neighborhoods that are being gentrified so they don't become all affluent and the first ring suburbs to which the former residents are being expelled so they don't become all poor. Consequence of gentrification is that the high poverty neighborhoods that used to be very centralized are now scattered around the middle pockets and including some in the inner ring suburbs. So if you look at a map of these neighborhoods, they seem to explode between 2000 and 2010. And you see this, they're now scattered around, which I think makes it harder to have service to delivery and so forth. Part of that is gentrification. When I lived in DC in the early 80s, the Shaw neighborhood was not a place I went very often. And now you go there to hear jazz and it's wonderful. So that's good. I have a couple of questions. And one of those is when these neighborhoods gentrify, who benefits, right? So if you have homeowners there that they want to sell in order to get maybe more house in the suburbs or something and then their owners, they benefit. But if they're renters, then they sort of get displaced and they don't get any benefits. So there might be some way to look at the tax, increment financing and so forth that as these places develop, maybe some of those resources could be used to support better transportation options or housing, the construction of affordable housing. In other words, I don't think gentrification is a bad thing. We want communities to be better. We want people who live in the suburbs now to think about realistically living in the city instead of retreating further and further away. But let's make sure that as that happens, it's the benefits of that are somehow captured and used for good purposes. Patrick? Okay, thanks. So I'll admit, I get very frustrated with the debates on gentrification because it's usually not defined well. And we're talking about a whole bunch of different things when we talk about gentrification. Let me just make two points. First, there's much, much more stability in terms of the hierarchy, in terms of disadvantage of neighborhoods over time than there is change. And Robert Sampson's book, Great American City is the best demonstration of this. Just how rigidly structured cities and metropolitan areas are in terms of the distribution of disadvantage and advantage. Secondly, when we look at neighborhood change, so I'm consciously not using the term gentrification, but neighborhood change that occurs in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, it looks nothing like most of our visions of what gentrification is. Over the past 40 years, the dominant form of neighborhood change in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods has been to become more ethnically diverse. That is, most disadvantaged neighborhoods have absorbed new populations, primarily from immigrants moving in. Not white populations displacing black populations. That is extremely rare. And it's a definite problem where displacement happens, but it is extremely uncommon. The much more common form of change has been for neighborhoods of extreme unemployment, neighborhoods that have lost populations for long periods of time, neighborhoods that offer few economic opportunities, and neighborhoods that have been almost entirely racially segregated have become much more diverse, absorb new immigrant populations. And when this happens, or at least as this has happened over the past 40 years, the original residents of these neighborhoods benefit enormously. They benefit when new populations repopulate communities that have been abandoned. They benefit when new businesses arrive, new economic opportunities emerge. So I think we've, the point is, I'm not making argument about gentrification as most of us probably in our minds are thinking of it, but if we think about neighborhood change and what has been the dominant form of neighborhood change, when neighborhoods have become less repopulated with new economic opportunities and new populations, the most disadvantaged neighborhoods have improved dramatically over time. And we can demonstrate very clearly that the original residents in those neighborhoods benefit enormously as they move into adulthood. So this is a process that we should be encouraging and trying to expand upon. So let me say a few words just about the gentrification that is the one in everybody's mind, not the one that Patrick was just talking about, which is neighborhood change. And I think you're quite right about it. I haven't seen the data, but I think that seems intuitively quite right. So the gentrification that is in most people's heads, which actually seems not to be that rare in a place like New York seems actually to be quite prevalent. But one of the things that's interesting about it is why do people do it? Gentrification happens, I think, because going back to the point I was making earlier, the two points I was making earlier, one, it is in fact quite convenient to live in the city. Why is it convenient to live in the city? Because you're close to public transportation, because you're close to rep, because of all of the public infrastructure that tends to exist within the inner city. People don't gentrify the suburbs. They move to the suburbs, that may be true. But the idea of coming into a distressed community and deciding that you're going to make a life there largely happens because of the location. It's near the waterfront. There's something about the public space that is attractive to the gentrifier, which tells me that there is still a lot of power in the idea of public life in this country, because that's really what those individuals are craving. It's also true that going back to something Paul said earlier, I mean, there are, it seems to me, ways to create incentive for mixed income neighborhoods when gentrification is happening, right? It's not that you wanna have neighborhoods that have fortresses and walls. You only may enter, I mean, this would be counter to everything we've said on this panel. You may only enter this neighborhood if you have two generations of poor people in your family. That would be crazy, right? Or if you've lived here for three generations. It's not that we're saying there shouldn't be change. What disturbs people about gentrification is when those who have usually a higher, much higher socioeconomic condition and often are white, are displacing and changing aspects of the neighborhood that now make it unaffordable for the people who originally lived there. So that rather than helping those in that neighborhood reinvigorate the neighborhood to make it a good place to live, others come in who displace. But it seems to me, again, if we make this commitment as a policy matter to ensuring that communities must have mixed income housing, must have mixed income and affordable housing within every neighborhood, you dilute the most egregious effects of bad gentrification. Not all gentrification's been bad, by the way. But of bad gentrification where you really have this horrible displacement. But I first and foremost think it's worth pausing for a minute and recognizing the way in which the whole idea of gentrification reinforces the idea that there's something important about public life that people want in this country. And using that as the springboard to think about repairing, reinvigorating and creating infrastructure, public infrastructure within distressed communities. I share Patrick's sort of distress when people use the term gentrification because I'm never quite clear on what they're talking about. It's such a vague, vague use of language. I went to school here in D.C. And I understand people are very upset about what they see as gentrification here. But black people, I think, have been leaving D.C. since the 80s for Prince George's County, for surrounding suburbs. And the black folks who were leaving were not unhappy about it. They were not pushed out. They were happily leaving the city. And so I think that really needs to be part of the conversation. At one point, I don't know if this is true today, but Prince George's County at one point was the only county in America, the only jurisdiction in America to become more wealthy as it became, more black. That's an unusual story. And most of those folks were coming out of D.C. and they were very happy to leave D.C. For the same reason that anybody else that we've been talking about on this panel, Americans have been leaving the city. I think that the whole conversation around gentrification could really use some precision in terms. I think that would help out a lot. To the extent that there is the kind of gentrification that Shirlen was just talking about, that it does exist where you actually have situations where folks are being pushed out. The thing I can't get past is why this isn't just a reflection of the racist dynamics at work in America as it is. We, I think the Pew Foundation just put out a study. The average white family is something like, I don't know, six, 10 times. The wealthy average black family has. The percentage of black families that have negative wealth is not even comparable to whatever the percentage is. I'm sorry I don't have to stand on hand, but I read the study like about a week ago. The percentage of white families that have negative wealth. If you are someone who wants to stay in your neighborhood and wants to hold on, what that basically means is you have less power, less ability. This is to say nothing about me if you even go beyond stats like the wealthy. If you talk about resources being taken out of African-American communities through incarceration and what that means in terms of people that actually want to stay in their neighborhoods. Black people in this country just have less power. And so it kind of follows that you would have, for those of us who do want to stay in our neighborhoods, that we would have less ability to do that. The expectation that something will happen outside of a systemic white supremacy just strikes me as bizarre. I'm going to take one final topic of questions that I've received and get your reactions to it and also relate a bit to what Tanahasi just said. The question relates public housing, rates to public housing. Public housing, as you all know, has pretty much been abandoned and been replaced by the sectional housing voucher programs. But in terms of the African-Americans who have left DC, Montgomery County, Maryland has a unique program which has not been replicated anywhere else in the country in that it has an inclusionary zoning program. But the Public Housing Authority of Montgomery County purchases one third of the low and moderate income units. And so you have scattered public housing throughout the county. The incredible thing about that program is it's been there for, I don't know, 20 years and it has not been replicated anywhere else in the country. So my question to you is first, does public housing have a role anymore or should we consent to its abandonment? And secondly, is this Montgomery County model something that might be applicable elsewhere? What is the, what are the functions of a government? And one of the first ones is to protect against attack from enemies, external enemies. But then a government is organized to make sure that people have shelter and food that systems work, the economy works, so that we have housing and we have an ability for the economy to be productive. And so housing, yes, absolutely, public housing. Now, how it should be provided, of course, is important. And we stopped building giant concentrated public housing projects like Cabrini Green and so forth that actually concentrated poverty by design. In other words, you had to be poor to get into those units. So of course you had concentrated poverty in those neighborhoods. So providing public housing, but in a way that actually serves the purpose of housing, which is to say that the housing is available near opportunities, near schools, in various scattered site ways so that people can actually use the housing if they can't afford to buy a private market unit to live their lives and to access opportunities and to get an education for their children. So that model is a great model. And as you know, I think there's their study showing that controlling for your family income and other characteristics that children in Montgomery County score better. Low-income children score better in school and do better and graduate more often. Because why? They're good school, you know? So that makes a huge difference. And so yes, I think public housing has to be more creative to achieve the goal. But let's just remember that the goal has to be that people are not just housed with the roof over their head, but they're able to participate in the economy and participate and to get their, to achieve their life, to be able to access opportunities and move forward. So I just want to make the point that the huge public housing high-rise projects that we have in our mind, we're not an inevitable failure. They were a major improvement over the housing conditions that existed prior and they represented a massive, it was an investment that was designed to enhance segregation, but it was also just a dramatic improvement and a basic reform that was a huge investment by the federal government. They didn't work because they were abandoned. So this is why I talk about durable urban policy because when we have had initiatives that represent investments in low-income or non-white communities, some of those investments are very good ideas. High-rise public housing projects may or may not be the best model, but it was a huge improvement over what had been there before and it was a basic investment in central city housing. The issue is that this investment was abandoned. Okay, so these projects were defunded entirely, in particularly in the 70s, but then in the 80s, the funding for public housing was absolutely slashed. So what happens when you have a high-rise housing project that has no funds attached to it, it becomes dilapidated, the walls start crumbling, the security is compromised, and they become what we saw in the 1980s and the 1990s. This was not an inevitable result of public housing or poor people living together. This was an inevitable result of public policy of the way that we invest in communities and when we abandon investments, that is the result. So when they conducted a national study looking at distressed housing and found that this enormous share of public housing projects, where I forget the term, they used severely distressed. Deeply distressed. Deeply distressed. Anyway, there was an official designation for places that had to come down and it is certainly true that public housing policy had to change, but again, it wasn't inevitable. It was a result of a conscious set of decisions that were made over time about where to invest and where to maintain investments over time. This is why I keep referring to this durable urban policy agenda. If you make a commitment to public housing, it can work. We have very good models of this. If that commitment is then abandoned, then we get the result where these projects look dysfunctional, look dilapidated, look like violent places, but that was the inevitable result based on our public policy. Because we have one quick thing on that, which is that the whole notion of building that housing in a concentrated fashion in the central city was based on an older understanding of what the economy was, that we had manufacturing employment in those central cities. So one of the reasons that they abandoned those public housing was in part because those cities went into a fiscal crisis because there was rampant deindustrialization. Now people were housed in a place where they couldn't access jobs because the jobs had begun to move out. So it was just kind of an unfortunate historical event that we built all that just in time for it to be redundant and poorly designed for the new economy. I couldn't agree more with both of the remarks that have been made and it would only add this. This is why I think we need a narrative and a better way of telling the story about things that have been discredited. Because I think we do accept the idea that yes it was the height of the buildings that made public housing so bad. And it is why I have this call to people to kind of come out and reclaim the value of public life in this country. So I went to Head Start, right? People talk about Head Start now like it was nothing. I'm the youngest of 10 kids. It was terrific, you know? So did things go wrong? Was it not funded enough? Of course, right? We have a Supreme Court justice who was raised in public housing, Sonia Sotomayor. So it's not that public housing in and of itself is somehow dysfunctional and bad, right? We make decisions after we make investments as Patrick says and we live with the consequences of those decisions. So I just think we're in a moment where if we're not really careful we're gonna throw out all the baby and the bath water. And we actually need to segregate out a conversation about the value of the things that we created to create an invigorated public life. It would be like going down into the New York City subway and your train is delayed because there's a smoky condition at J Street Borough Hall, whatever they always say. And then saying public transportation is just a terrible idea. Because you were late to work three days that week. Well, that's crazy, right? You wouldn't say that. But we tend to kind of conflate and we do it because of the narratives we tell very often about race, which was the narrative of public housing. Once when I was a kid, I knew white kids in public housing, but once public housing became identified as this is a black thing, then it was easier to create a story about it that allowed you not to have a nuanced conversation that might have helped us understand all of the factors that both Paul and Patrick have talked about. So I do think this is why we have to be attentive to the story of what is valuable about public investment in this country. I'm actually gonna beg off of this question because I don't have the expertise. All right, well then I'm gonna take your time and tell you a little public housing story. In 1949, when President Truman proposed a massive public housing program, a conservative Republicans proposed a poison pill in Congress to the public housing bill and the poison pill was that public housing had to be integrated. Knowing that if the amendment was adopted, Southern Democrats would then no longer vote for public housing and the whole thing would go down. And Paul Douglas, who was the floor leader in the Senate for the public housing bill, got up and made a speech in which he said, and I'm paraphrasing, he says, I want to say to my Negro friends that they will get more public housing under this act if it's segregated than if it's integrated. And Douglas and Uwe Humphrey and all of the liberals in the Senate beat back the integrationist amendment and a segregated public housing project was adopted. I think, and with slight disagreement with Patrick, I think that the disinvestment later in public housing was an inevitable consequence of that decision to ensure that it would be segregated. And again, I guess this is the opposite of what we were saying before. There are short-term and long-term consequences of the decisions that we make. And I think some of the consequences of some of the segregation decisions that were made in the past are still coming back to haunt us. With that, I just want to thank these four wonderful panelists for just a terrific, just a terrific presentation and I do hope you will get copies of both Paul's paper and Patrick's book. And thank you all very much for coming.