Segregation by Design — Event Recap
This Monday we teamed up with East Bay for Everyone to bring Jessica Trounstine, author of Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities, to Oakland to discuss her book.
About 60 people gathered to hear Trounstine break down how segregation is actively created within and between cities and what we can do now to address it. You can watch recorded livestream here, or read our livetweet thread here:
Trounstine began by animating the opening comic of her book, which follows a young white couple and their real estate agent in their mission to buy their first home in Camden, New Jersey. Along the way, the couple discovers how drastically different the neighborhoods within and around the city truly are.
Trounstine (through the character of the real estate agent) explains that since the earliest days of urban development in the U.S., local governments have influenced property values and strategically allocated public goods and services to benefit their most powerful constituents. At the beginning of the 20th century and the birth of urban planning, most property owners were white. The ways in which white property owners used land use regulations to protect their wealth and resources have been a massive factor in the racial wealth gap we see to this day.
She argues that local politics is at its core the politics of land use; it is the single most important power that local governments have. Local politics have been used by property owners seeking to enhance their wealth and control the allocation of services like schools through land use regulation, zoning, and redevelopment. It is through these processes, Trounstine explains, that segregation has been created along race and class lines.
Over time, white property owners saw their land use designs and control over public goods threatened by demographic change, shifts in political power, and higher levels of government coming in and forcing integration. When such threats appeared, white property owners expand the scale of segregation from simply between neighborhoods to between cities.
Trounstine explains that segregation not only produces an unequal allocation of public resources, but also breeds political polarization as well. We have ended up with political and geographic separation that has reached a national scale.
Trounstine underlines that this approach to land use has benefitted those that have owned first, and has disadvantaged people of color and those at the economic margins. However, she notes that in regions in which people of color had political voice and collective mobilization, segregation and inequality were reduced.
The first step to policy solutions is to acknowledge that segregation is purposeful, and that is has existed intentionally for more than a century. The people who create, maintain, and benefit from segregation are always those that are most opposed to undoing it. There will always be a coalition of blockers to change segregation.
However, Trounstine declared that it is possible to undo segregation. Here are some of examples of effective action:
- Large school districts can be used to foster integration within schools and, by extension, within communities. When school districts are large enough, parents can’t simply move outside the district to concentrate resources elsewhere without being too far away from their jobs.
- States can push cities to build more integrated and multi-family housing to encourage more efficient and dense land use. She warns, however, that we need to be careful to not force denser development in already-marginalized communities, which leaves them prone to gentrification. Instead, we need to focus on building more inclusive and more dense housing within exclusionary communities.
- Low-income residents could be given massive housing subsidies to move and give them a broader range of housing choices.
- States can be more aggressive with redistributing public funds, goods, and services.
After Trounstine’s rousing and passionate overview of her work, we moved into the Q&A portion of the evening. Derek Sagehorn of East Bay for Everyone moderated the discussion, reading questions from the audience.
The questions from the audience ranged widely, from discussing a possible repeal of Article 34 in California, Minneapolis as a city to watch in its fight against segregation and housing shortage, how to prevent gentrification and displacement while developing, and how to harness land use regulation to do integrated urban planning. You can read more of the questions and answers in our livetweet thread:
One of our values is doing work in our own backyard. Segregation has existed in the Bay Area since its inception and is still deeply entrenched in our communities. We look to scholars such as Trounstine to better understand our history, and we look to our community to help us agitate within our neighborhoods for change. Check out our housing priorities for 2019 to see what we have on tap for this year, and sign up for our newsletter to get involved. Big thanks to Jessica Trounstine for joining us and to East Bay for Everyone for co-hosting this event!
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