Ask the Scholars

The racial situation in America is in the interest of those who are racially privileged (i.e., whites) and nowhere does the rubber hit the road more than in real estate. There is a premium in housing values to live in a lily-white community, as opposed to a minority community, or an integrated community. When whites are the majority group and control most of the money, the task of changing that dynamic is very difficult. One way is to create tax incentives and create "integration insuran...

It's really important to understand that the economics of segregation and tipping points does not exist outside of peoples' ideas about race and property values. These values will go down precisely because white people think that the values will go down. There's no existing pure market that says that when people of a minority group move into a neighborhood, values will automatically go down. In fact, in a lot of black middle-class neighborhoods, the values go up. But there are two things...

There is one other very radical solution, but there would be no political support: just get rid of the tax credits or the tax advantages of homeownership. You wouldn't find any political support for it, but essentially that's the mechanism that created the middle class and also created racial inequity through homeownership and real estate. The different mechanisms people are talking about are basically ways of changing how people actually decide the value of their homes. In other words, ...

In terms of resources on this, I would like to refer people to two sources on metropolitics. john a. powell's work on race, poverty, and urban sprawl and why urban sprawl is a civil rights issue, and Myron Orfield's book, American Metropolitics.