BOOKS

Nathan Connolly: A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.

James DeFilippis: Urban Policy in the Time of Obama.

Matthew Desmond: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Mustafa Dikec: Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded.

David M. P. Freund: Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America.

Paige Glotzer: How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960.

Laura Gottesdiener: A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home.

Kevin M. Kruse: White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.

Rebecca Marchiel: After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation.

Peter Moskowitz: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.

Antero Pietila: Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.

Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Beryl Satter: Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America.

Samuel Stein: Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.

Thomas J. Sugrue: The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.

Rhonda Y. Williams: The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality.

ARTICLES

African American Intellectual Historical Society: Housing Discrimination in the Jim Crow US and The Case for Reparations.

Leah Platt Boustan: Was Postwar Suburbanization “White Flight”? Evidence From the Black Migration.

Jemal R. Brinson, Christen A. Johnson, Nausheen Husain, & Darcel Rockett: Disinvestment in Black and Latino Chicago neighborhoods is rooted in policy. Here’s how these communities continue to be held back.

Mark Brown: Ally of reparations movement ‘fought battle his whole life and never gave up’: John R. “Jack” Macnamara led a campaign in the 1960s to battle for Black homeowners trapped in exploitive real estate contracts and never gave up fighting for social justice.

Brent Cebul: Tearing Down Black America: Policing is not the only kind of state violence. In the mid-twentieth century, city governments, backed by federal money, demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

Matthew Desmond: Evictions: a hidden scourge for black women.

Matthew Desmond: How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality: An enormous entitlement in the tax code props up home prices — and overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy and the upper middle class.

Abdallah Fayyad: The Unfulfilled Promise of Fair Housing: Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an integrated America was about creating a more equal society, but to many white homeowners, it was a threat.

Paige Glotzer: Building Suburban Power: The Business of Exclusionary Housing Markets, 1890-1960.

Brian Goldstone: The New American Homeless: Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. Just ask the Goodmans.

Justin Gomer: Housing and the Racial Wealth Gap: A Historical Overview.

Richard D. Kahlenberg & Kimberly Quick: The Government Created Housing Segregation. Here’s How the Government Can End It. No policy limits African American income, wealth, and education as thoroughly as housing segregation. Herewith, a plan to end it.

Debra Kamin: Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals: Companies that value homes for sale or refinancing are bound by law not to discriminate. Black homeowners say it happens anyway.

Kevin M. Kruse: What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.

Trevon D. Logan & John Parman: The National Rise in Residential Segregation.

Andrea Morris: The Lasting Environmental Impact Of Racism In Cities.

Diana Olick: Lenders deny mortgages for Black homeowners at a rate 80 percent higher than whites: “I started to realize maybe, maybe I need to not disclose my race.”

K-Sue Park: Predatory Inclusion: A Long View of the Race for Profit.

Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich: How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering.

Eric Michael Rhodes:The Needle of the Nation: Eric Michael Rhodes on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit.

Gillet Gardner Rosenblith:Covid-19 has exposed the consequences of decades of bad public housing policy: A reduction in public housing units left Americans at the mercy of private landlords.

Richard Rothstein writes prolifically about housing segregation and disparity. You can find many of his articles here and here. See also Segregated By Design, a short documentary narrated by him and based on his work, as well as this video of Rothstein in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Patrick Rucker: Trump Financial Regulator Quietly Shelved Discrimination Probes Into Bank of America and Other Lenders: At least six investigations into discriminatory mortgage loan “redlining” have been halted or stalled — against staff recommendations — under the Trump administration’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Claire Schwartz: When June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller Tried to Redesign Harlem.

Alana Semuels: Rethinking America’s ‘Dark Ghettos’: A Harvard professor argues that fixing America’s urban poverty will require a dramatically different approach.

Allison Shertzer & Randall P. Walsh: Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities.

Samuel Stein: Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalist Urban Planning.

Thomas J. Sugrue:

• The Big Picture: America’s Real Estate Developer in Chief.
• The Housing Revolution We Need: A decade after the crash of 2008, a growing movement has thrust our prolonged housing crisis to the center of the national agenda. Could this generation finally make the right to housing a reality?
• Trump Doesn’t Understand Today’s Suburbs—And Neither Do You: Suburbs are getting more diverse, but that doesn’t mean they’re woke. Thomas Sugrue says if you want to understand where American politics is going, look how suburban whites are sorting themselves out.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:

• When the Dream of Owning a Home Became a Nightmare: A federal program to encourage black homeownership in the 1970s ended in a flood of foreclosures.
• How Real Estate Segregated America: Real-estate interests have long wielded an outsized influence over national housing policy—to the detriment of African Americans.
• Against Black Homeownership: The real estate market is so structured by race that black families will never come out ahead.
• Housing market racism persists despite ‘fair housing’ laws.

Unequal Housing: collection of video lectures. 

Andrew Van Dam: Black families pay significantly higher property taxes than white families, new analysis shows: Unfair property assessments lead to widespread overtaxation of black Americans’ homes.

Gillian B. White: The Steady Destruction of America’s Cities: Peter Moskowitz’s new book on gentrification outlines how local governments cede their power over residents’ lives to private interests.

Mary Jo Wiggins: Race, Class, and Suburbia: The Modern Black Suburb as a ‘Race-Making Situation.’

ORGANIZE FOR FAIR HOUSING

• A Green New Deal For Housing.
• Eviction Lab.
• Homes Guarantee.
• Just Shelter.
• Mutual Aide Hub.
• Unequal Cities.

For more resources on systemic racism, visit the systemic racism section of the website.