Building off the assertions on housing inequality that her father, Richard Rothstein, made in his book “The Color of Law,” Leah Rothstein co-authored “Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law” with Richard to address how communities can directly combat housing segregation. While she recognizes the federal origins of segregation and housing inequality, she presents the groundwork for conquering these issues at the local level.

The housing difficulties faced by minority communities, particular for Black people, are plentiful and continue to reflect prior injustices. Some key areas to address from Leah Rothstein’s perspective are disparities in household wealth, higher rates of poverty and crime, and long-lasting public health impacts on minority communities. Rothstein calls for local action from biracial, multiethnic groups focused on not only creating a more just future, but also crafting policy to rectify the segregation of the past.

Rothstein outlined four key categories of action during her lecture: place-based strategies, mobility strategies, increasing black home ownership and delimiting wealth building.

Place-based strategies

The intent of place-based strategies is to provide better support for minority communities to stay and thrive, such as inclusionary zoning ordinances, which designate a certain percentage of new builds to be affordable housing units alongside market-rate units to better integrate communities. A community also can implement offsets to property tax increases for businesses and residences located in gentrifying communities, which would aid middle- and lower-class residents in maintaining their property despite increases in investment and development.

Perhaps the most unique strategy that Rothstein described is a community land trust that allows a nonprofit to either purchase or receive via donation land from a local government to develop housing. The nonprofit then sells the affordable houses while still maintaining ownership of the land, allowing the homeowner to only be responsible for the home itself. The land trust and its tenants allow for appreciation in home value to build some wealth, but they control it to not go beyond the economic range of potential tenants, creating perpetually affordable housing each time the house is sold.

Mobility Strategies

These strategies aid minority communities in expanding housing options throughout the community. A key component is zoning reform to allow multi-family units to be built on traditionally single-family lots to increase supply and provide more affordable options throughout a city. Another key policy area is improvements to Section 8 housing vouchers, which can have harsh restrictions on exactly where the voucher can be used and bias on the landlord’s end toward their use. Loosening restrictions on where a person can use a voucher and improving protections against bias can drastically improve the supply of potential housing.

Increasing Black Homeownership

Sometimes direct change requires direct actions. One solution Rothstein suggested is to explicitly subsidize new construction in majority Black communities in an effort to increase supply and ensure greater affordability of new homes. Another less direct route is to enact credit score reform to unlock barriers to the necessary finances to purchase a home. One way to achieve this is to count rent payments in credit scores – something that a community land trust, for example, can calculate independently – to allow longtime renters the opportunity to qualify for loans and better mortgage rates.

Delimiting Wealth Building

This strategy helps ensure that barriers to building wealth and equity in a home are removed to level the field. Owners of inexpensive houses often pay much higher effective property tax rates on single-family units, so taking steps to ensure that valuation on these properties is accurate – or even providing direct property tax relief – are great ways to ensure that minority homeowners have more capital to build wealth through their home. Another community approach is to ensure that homeowners are properly counseled and educated about having a will in place that can guarantee their home is passed down to children or other family to build generational wealth and assets.

Making strides for local improvement

Knoxville, and East Tennessee as a whole, continues to grapple with decades of discrimination against Black people and other minorities, and the recommendations included in Leah Rothstein’s book and lecture are just some of the multiple tools available to build a better housing system for everyone. For as much injustice as there has been, and resistance that continues to be, we can make true impactful changes as a community through collaboration and positivity.

Key takeaways

• Community: While it’s true that ongoing issues with housing segregation began at a federal level, we can make the biggest drive for change in our own communities.
• Expanded access: A local community can take multiple routes to create fairer housing. Communities around the country have enacted measures such as inclusionary zoning ordinances, bolstering Section 8 housing options and support for paired testing programs, which compare how equally qualified home buyers are treated in different racial or ethnic groups.
• Local advocacy and positivity: Local politicians and decision makers too often hear the negative side of building new housing or introducing new zoning legislation. It is massively important to share your positive perspective to enact change.