Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society

Let me not bury the lede—in my judgment, Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society is an excellent volume of essays on pragmatic, evidence-based policy prescriptions for combatting racial and economic residential segregation in the United States. Editors Molly W. Metzger and Henry S. Webber have assembled a cohesive, complementary, and comprehensive collection of background essays and forwardthinking policy proposals. Taken together, this book joins Alex Schwartz’s Housing Policy in the United States, Greg Squires’s edited volume The Fight for Fair Housing, and Edward Goetz’s The One-Way Street of Integration in providing scholars, educators, and students an array of cogent analyses of the past, present, and hopeful future of American housing policy. From Michael Sherraden’s forward: ‘‘This book is about the residential segregation of Americans, the harms that follow from this division, and what can and should be done to reduce it. The title, Facing Segregation, is clear: it is oriented toward positive action, and it is hopeful’’ (p. ix). This is accurate and laudable but, at the moment of my writing, difficult to square with realities on the ground. It is May 31, 2020. Protests and police and National Guard responses have struck dozens of U.S. cities, spurred by the disastrous confluence of two diffuse and three acute events. The diffuse: the Presidency of Donald Trump has validated and encouraged white supremacist ideologies and social movement groups that were at least somewhat dormant for the previous 40 years, through three Republican and two Democratic Presidential administrations. The COVID-19 pandemic has ripped through poor and minority communities, killing tens of thousands and putting at least 40 million Americans out of work, many of whom have virtually no safety net to fall back on. The acute: the video of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by several white residents of Glynn County, Georgia went viral in early May, triggering their arrest after over two months of relative inaction on the part of local law enforcement. Several weeks later, a video of a white woman threatening to call the police on Christian Cooper, a black birdwatcher in New York’s Central Park, also went viral. Finally, video of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police surfaced later that day. On May 29, many American cities erupted in rage and fire. In this context, it is difficult to judge the merits of a book that adopts a largely technical and reformist response to segregation and its attendant social ills. This is not to say that the book does not have merit— indeed, it covers a wide range of policy options and explores them carefully, soberly, and with a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the history and path dependencies of the challenges we face as a nation to undo over a century of segregation. Nor is it to say that the authors are complicit in tacitly supporting the basic structures of American political economy or ‘‘should have known better’’ than to propose a platform of incremental, technical reforms. Indeed, many of the proposals offered in the book, if fully implemented, would yield substantial, long-lasting, salutary changes in the access of marginalized communities to healthy and affordable housing. And yet. The events of May 2020 bring into high-definition focus what scholars and activists have argued for decades—that reforms can only work to address searing racial and economic inequalities if they shade into revolution. I am not advocating, nor do I believe that the authors should have advocated, for discarding democracy or capitalism as the organizing political-economic structures of American life. But to effect durable, significant change, more will need to be done than tinkering at the margins of American poverty or housing policy. To quote at length the late Erik Olin Wright (1994:50):