Race and Space: A Straight (Red) Line from Housing Segregation to Communities in Crisis

Across the country, federal, state and local governments have used “redlining” and other discriminatory policies with the explicit intent to segregate cities and towns. As a result, black communities have been hobbled by a lack of economic investment, depressed property values, underfunded schools, and violence. Perhaps more than any other single cause, state-sanctioned segregation has contributed to the crisis in policing, gun violence, the school-to-prison pipeline and a host of other devastating effects that an ascendant group of activists has mobilized to rectify. How does housing segregation’s role as a root cause of current racial disparities impact efforts to design effective solutions to these problems?