(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 530: Just Action Under the Color of Law

This week we’re joined by Leah Rothstein to chat about her book she wrote with her father Richard entitled Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. We discuss building wealth and ideas for building more equitable housing policies as well as convincing people why they are important.

To hear this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it and older episodes in the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:

Jeff Wood: Leah Rothstein, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Leah Rothstein: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before I get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Leah Rothstein: Sure. I am Leah Rothstein.

I live in Oakland, California. I’ve lived here for about 25 years. I’ve worked through all sorts of avenues and roles in community organizing, affordable housing policy, local government advocacy, and most recently have co-authored a book called Just Action, how to Challenge Segregation and Acted Under the Color of Law, which I co-authored with my father, Richard Rothstein.

We describe dozens of strategies that local groups can undertake to begin to challenge the segregation of their communities. Since the book came out in 2023, I’ve been speaking around the country about it, trying to spread [00:03:00] hope that there is something we can do to challenge segregation, and that there’s a lot being done in communities around the country.

Jeff Wood: Nice. So what’s your first inclination that you were interested in cities and in housing and policy?

Leah Rothstein: I grew up in a family of activists. My parents were both active, before I was born in the Civil Rights Movement, anti-Vietnam War movement. My dad was a labor organizer when I was a kid, and my mom ran a homeless service agency in Santa Monica.

So I grew up seeing, the inequities in society and that there were avenues to address those and that. We all have a responsibility to improve what we see is wrong in our communities. So I grew up with that in my blood and in my understanding of how I related to the world. And I grew up in Santa Monica, which you know, had a homeless problem before most places did.

And I saw how. Just devastating. That is to see people in your own community who don’t have a place [00:04:00] to live. And I struggled to understand as a young person how we allow that to occur in our cities. How we could allow people, our neighbors to live on sidewalks in our own communities.

Struggled with that question a lot growing up. And then when I went to college, I got into some campus organizing efforts to defend affirmative action in California. And from there I went on to work in community organizing in the Bay Area and around California, working on issues of racial equity, community sustainability, environmental justice.

I started to see that underlying all of these issues of equity that I was concerned about in our country and in our communities, underlying all of those is how we develop communities, what communities we have access to, and how access to different sort of housing resources and community resources really affect the outcomes of individual lives and community equity.

And so that got me more [00:05:00] into looking at housing policy and community development policy.

Jeff Wood: So then now let’s jump to the now time, and you wrote this book, just Action with your father, Richard Rothstein, as a follow up to the color of law. Before we get to just action, I’m curious what the reaction was and what you all heard from folks who had read it and the tidal wave that it started in terms of discussions about these issues.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah, the color of law has been and continues to be very widely read. It was not expected to be that way. My dad had a hard time finding a publisher to publish it. It was not seen as, a popular topic that the generic, readership of the country would pick up. He finally did get a publisher, and it was published in 2017.

The publisher initially printed 5,000 copies of the book. That’s how it was thought to go. And a

Jeff Wood: million copies later, right? A million

Leah Rothstein: copies later. Yeah. It has really shifted the conversation in the country, and it came out in 2017, so it was already, gaining readership and then 2020 and Black Lives Matter movement.

The murder of George Floyd got more [00:06:00] attention from around the country on why our country looks the way it does. Why are we still dealing with racial issues? Why are our communities so racially segregated and divided? And so the color of law really has shifted the conversation a lot more. People understand now that it was government policy.

Not everybody understands it, but a lot more. We hear about redlining just that term so much more than we did 10 years ago. To explain why neighborhoods look differently than each other. So a lot of people read the color of law, and what that book did was really debunk the myth that racial segregation was a form of defacto segregation, not caused by laws or policies, but caused by.

Personal preferences or private actors, without the backing of the government. Now the color of law showed that was blatantly untrue. The government at all levels intentionally created racially segregated communities. And you know what my dad’s hope was with that [00:07:00] book? Is that once we understand that, that’s how.

Our communities, you know how segregation was created on this unconstitutional basis, then we would understand that we have an obligation to do something about it. And a lot of readers did understand that, read his book, listened to his talks about it, and then asked him, okay, how do we live up to that obligation?

What do we do about it? And so that’s where the follow-up book just action comes in to answer that question.

Jeff Wood: And y’all are pretty open about saying how out of touch people like John Roberts are in the Supreme Court, which continues from the first book into just action. Why is it important to push back on some of the legal aspects of this, as well as talk about the personal preferences and the discrimination that happened?

Leah Rothstein: It’s very important because as a country, when we reckon with facts that show us that our government violated its own laws. We as a country have an obligation to remedy those violations and the harms that those caused. This has happened in various instances in our country’s history, but has yet to be taken on in [00:08:00] the issue of segregation.

Now, what the color of law did was describe detail after detail of government policy that. We’re in violation of the Constitution to create racially segregated communities to, provide access to home ownership to white families while explicitly prohibiting access to the same opportunities to African American families.

These are in violations of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, and once we reckon with that, we have a legal. Obligation to remedy the ongoing harms of those actions of the government. And so it’s essential to understand the context and how we got here in order to understand how we get out of it.

If we ascribe to this notion of defacto segregation, that it’s just personal preference. We like to live around people who look like us or it’s a just a natural occurrence. That neighborhoods are sorted by economic status and that kind of tracks to race. And so the racial segregation is just an [00:09:00] accidental byproduct of that.

If we believe those explanations, then we look around and we think it’s too bad, but we can’t do anything about it. Not only do we have no obligation to do anything about it, but there’s nothing we can do because if it happened by accident, it can only unhappen by accident. We have no agency or responsibility, but once we can see that intentional actions created segregation, we can start to see that intentional actions can challenge that segregation and begin to undo it.

Jeff Wood: I think about intentional actions the last three months or so. Yeah. And what’s been happening at the federal level, and I’m just, I don’t know how you feel about what’s going on, and I know it’s heavy to get into this early, but I’m curious like your thoughts on the dismantling of a lot of the programs and stuff that weren’t even.

As far along as maybe they should have been, to get to the point where we are, making progress. And so now to see them completely destroyed or dismantled is frustrating.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah, just say the least. I, it’s devastating and [00:10:00] I’m trying to find. Sources of hope amidst it all. I keep seeing this image in my mind of a really huge brick wall or stone wall.

And we’ve been trying to break through the sort of smallest little piece of it for the last many decades and having some success, eking our way through it. But as we do that, it’s continuing to get bigger, so it feels overwhelming, but. I have found sources of hope in all of this, and where I find it is what local communities are doing to take on their own housing landscape, their own housing issues, the segregation locally of their own communities, because there’s a lot that can be done and is continuing to be done on the local level, even as the obstacles are being put in front of us on the federal level.

Jeff Wood: That’s something fantastic about the book is that you have so many examples of things that are wrong, but also things that can be fixed and ways that people are fixing them. I’m [00:11:00] thinking about the folded map project specifically and things like that where people brought together that may not have talked to each other before, but now they realize they have a lot in common.

And so I’m wondering, like researching the book and going through and finding these positive aspects of what’s going on, what did you get from that?

Leah Rothstein: I got a lot of hope from working on this project and continue to, from going around the country, continuing to speak about it even in the last few months.

Yeah, and I wasn’t sure that writing this book was I. Gonna be successful. My dad tried to convince me to help him write this book for a couple of years before I agreed. And part of the reason I was hesitant ’cause I wasn’t sure we would find enough solutions to fill up a book because, I, like a lot of people look around at our country and feel, racial segregation, racial disparities feel so built into the way our country operates.

How can we possibly make progress? Now this is coming from someone who I’ve been working on these issues my whole [00:12:00] life, but it still feels sometimes impossible. When I finally agreed to work on the book, it was because I started to see some examples of what could be done and what was happening, and then continuing to research the book.

We found examples from all over the country of all types of communities and red states, blue states, purple states, that are enacting policies that challenge segregation and are having an effect. And that gives me a lot of hope. And we explicitly focused on local policies because that’s where individuals where we can have the biggest impact.

And especially now, but as I worked on the book and have been speaking about it, I also see just how important it is. I. To hear about what’s happening in local communities around the country. We don’t hear about, you don’t hear about the small community thousands of miles away that has adopted this innovative, affordable housing program.

You hear about what’s happening on the federal level. You hear about all the obstacles that are put in front of you, but you don’t hear about [00:13:00] the successes that are happening on the local level. And I think it’s really important that we continue to listen to those success stories, hear about them, learn from them, and be emboldened by them to start to understand we can do something in our own communities.

People are doing this. We’re not alone. It’s possible there are success stories out there that we can model our efforts after.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, there’s so many good examples. Inclusionary zoning, rent control, tenants rights, organization, rental deposit retainers, land trusts. The list goes on and on. Do you have a favorite one that you found out about when you were going through the process?

Leah Rothstein: I. That’s a good question. The map twin story is my favorite story, but that’s setting up how we can start to build relationships across segregated communities. Land trusts, I think are one of my favorite examples. I didn’t know a lot about them before writing this book. There’s over 300 communities with a community land trust around the country.

They’re growing rapidly. It’s a great. Tool in the toolbox for meeting not [00:14:00] only advancing efforts to challenge segregation and integrate neighborhoods and prevent displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, but to create permanently affordable home ownership opportunities in areas where those don’t exist.

And land trusts as I learn more about them and meet more folks involved with land Trusts are just so many innovative and creative ways to use the land trust in combination with other housing policies or programs. Here in Oakland where I live, the Oakland Community Land Trust has done amazing work.

They’ve partnered with tenants who were on a rent strike because their landlord wasn’t keeping up with maintenance on their building and to resolve that dispute. What happened was the Land Trust and the tenants together bought the building from the landlord, and now the tenants own their units. The Land Trust owns the land underneath.

It’s permanently affordable that these creative solutions are possible under that model.

Jeff Wood: I really appreciate the diving into history that people do as well. And I think this was something that came to me first when I started talking with [00:15:00] folks about Minneapolis 2040 and the rezoning project there, Lisa Bender and some other folks.

I think that lesson and learning locally about what happened in your community is really important. You talk in the book about Modesto and other places. How important is that? That local folks going and looking at their deed restrictions and stuff in the contracts, going into the libraries and finding information about what was happening before, what does that do for folks?

Leah Rothstein: It helps ’em understand that their community doesn’t look the way it does by accident or by natural occurrence, that it was engineered to look the way it does. And when you see in writing on the deed of your own home or other homes in your neighborhood, that the home as it was built was designated to only be owned or occupied by whites.

You can start to see that, oh wait, maybe the reason my neighborhood looks the way it does, or, the. Home prices are the way they are isn’t just a matter of accidental occurrence or market forces, but there was something more sinister at [00:16:00] play. And once you can see that, you can start to see that, oh, maybe I have a role to play in fixing that and fixing the ongoing harms of those past actions.

And I’ll give an example. This isn’t in the book, but I wrote about it in our substack column, that we’ve been continuing to try to share ideas and success stories. This comes from Silicon Valley in the Bay Area. Very expensive community. Median home prices over $2 million. Residents of this area read the color of law.

And I think it was 20 18, 20 19, they developed a educational sort of workshop called Color of Law, Menlo Park Edition. Menlo Park is the city, and they outlined all of the local policies, government programs that created the segregation of their community and made it a place where homes are very large.

There’s, primarily only single family homes. They’re very expensive. It’s not a very diverse community. It’s obviously not very affordable or accessible. And [00:17:00] they did this workshop all over their community and got people involved in an organization they formed committing to creating a community that was more accessible, more diverse, more inclusive.

So they understood this history of how they came to be in the place they were. And then in this time, the local neighboring school district. Proposed building 90 units of teacher and school staff housing on a vacant lot it owned in Menlo Park. The school district lost a third of its teachers every year because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere nearby, so they wanted to do something to try to improve housing opportunity for people who worked for the school district.

Some people in the community didn’t like this idea of 90 units. Thought it would, ruin the character of their quaint neighborhood, quote unquote character comes up.

Jeff Wood: It’s its own character.

Leah Rothstein: It’s, yeah, it’s a, it is a character. Thought it. Hurt traffic congestion and neighborhood safety.

All of the same arguments, right? So they put a [00:18:00] measure on the ballot that would’ve made this housing development illegal. And any future rezoning of a single family zoned lot have to go before the voters if this ballot measure passed. So it would virtually make any new housing multifamily or denser housing development impossible in the city are very hard to do.

And so this group, Menlo together that had been. Learning about the history of segregation and exclusionary policies, understood that this measure was, just the next rung in that history. And so they launched a campaign to try to defeat the measure. They went door to door and talked to all of their neighbors, even when they thought, looking at a house.

There’s no way the person who lives here is gonna agree with me. They would have conversations and actually found a lot more support than they expected. ’cause people started to understand how these exclusionary policies were impacting them and their community teachers, couldn’t afford to live there.

Their favorite cafe was closing ’cause no staff could live nearby or it was reducing its hours and they ended up defeating this measure. So [00:19:00] the teacher housing is being built and there’s a future prospect for building more dense housing in the community. So it’s an example of how understanding the history can motivate people to do something different today.

Because again, when we think it happened by accident, we are, we don’t have any agency today to do anything about it. When we see that intentional action created the conditions we’re living with, we can see that intentional action can change those conditions.

Jeff Wood: I also have a question about the comparison that we have between the United States and other countries that are in our same kind of economic orbit and the lack of services and the connection between the race issue and lack of services like healthcare, childcare, and all that stuff struck me after reading both the color of law and just action is like we have this.

Whole system that we’ve built up of segregation that’s actually created a poorer country overall versus many of these other countries that seem very well off. They have good social services, they’re very connected to each [00:20:00] other. I’m wondering if that’s something that came across to you all when you’re writing this book, is that, comparing what’s happened in the United States in the past and how we built our housing and how we grew up has affected what’s going on today in terms of how we access social services and the things that we need to thrive as a country.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah, it did occur to us, and maybe not in those same words, but it’s very clear when you look at the history and you know the current landscape of our communities, how where you live makes such a big difference in what sort of services and opportunities and resources you have access to. The fact that a child growing up in a segregated African American community can have a life expectancy that’s decades shorter than a child who grows up a couple miles away in a.

Affluent white community that is just horrendous and it’s not something we should stand for, and that is due to how we segregated people and then segregated resources. Between different kinds of neighborhoods. So yeah it’s [00:21:00] definitely a piece of the puzzle. The other thing that strikes me in learning about these issues and talking about them that I think is different here in this country is because of our lack of services and social safety net, there’s so much put into the value of our homes, right?

Homeowners rely on their home appreciating and value indefinitely. Because we don’t have a good enough safety net for retirement or for weathering health emergencies, homeowners rely on the equity they build in their homes. So homeowners in more affluent communities where those home values have risen, feel entitled and feel like they need those values to continue to rise and will do whatever they can to try to protect their property values.

Because we lack the other social safety nets that they should be relying on. And that sort of fear and need for property values to always rise is behind a lot of the efforts to keep exclusionary communities [00:22:00] exclusionary and to maintain their segregation. So there’s a lot that’s all tied together in these issues for sure.

Jeff Wood: It’s so interesting. We just chatted with Alexis Magical about his book the Pacific Circuit, and I don’t know if you’ve read that one yet, but you should. ’cause it’s really great. But he talks about a woman who basically moved around San Francisco and Oakland and everywhere she went, her house was bulldozed for a highway or for redevelopment or whatever it may be, and the family fell apart eventually because of it.

And compare that to other families like my family who, when the hospital curve here in San Francisco was built, I had family, Italian Americans, they lived there and they were pushed out, but then they were able to buy homes in another spot in the city, and so they were able to build generational wealth, and some of them still own those houses, right?

They passed them on after they passed away to their children, and so there’s that disparity there about. Home ownership. And then also who gets to keep their homes, right? Like where we are allowing people to build wealth. And so I think that’s another important part of the book too, is like that wealth build building aspect.

And you talk about how there’s other ways than housing to build wealth, but like you just said, housing is the [00:23:00] main way. And then protecting that value because we don’t have the other social safety nets, is of utmost importance to people, which falls disproportionately negatively on, black Americans who can’t keep their homes because they’re pushed out.

Or they have all these predatory lenders or whatever it may be. A lot of the examples you give in the book, and so I’m curious about that too, is that connection between our wealth building, our generational wealth, and the other opportunities that we have to build wealth that maybe are down the pike. I.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah we focus mostly on housing. We do mention that there’s a lot of other policies, national policies, that we should be pursuing to increase incomes in African American communities to build wealth in other ways. But the way things currently stand, most families wealth, is in their homes or in the property that they own if they own property.

And so we do see that as the primary way of building wealth in this country is to own a home and see it increase in value. But that avenue towards wealth building really is only accessible to white families and less accessible to [00:24:00] African-American families. Even African-American families who own a home and have been able to hold onto it.

Are less likely to be able to build up the same amount of wealth through that home ownership experience. So what we say is that yes, it’s essential that we reduce the obstacles to home ownership that African Americans face, that we close the home ownership gap between blacks and whites, but we can’t stop there.

We have to then look at the obstacles to wealth building that African American homeowners face uniquely that whites don’t face in the same way. For example, property taxes. So all across the country, African American homeowners are overpaying in property taxes relative to the value of their home compared to white homeowners.

And this is a little known fact. It’s true in most communities around the country. These are, local tax assessors. I. County tax assessors that determine the assessed value of a home for applying a property tax rate in order to determine how much that homeowner pays in property taxes and how it’s done serves [00:25:00] to assess the values of homes in white communities at lower than their actual market value and assess the values of homes in African American communities at either.

Closer to their market value or above their market value, which means that those African American homeowners are overpaying in property taxes relative to the value of their home. When you’re overpaying in property taxes, you can build up less wealth through home ownership ’cause your property tax bills are higher.

So there are these hidden disparities, racial disparities that exist within home ownership that we need to address if we really want to make the home ownership experience an equitable way of building wealth for all families. It

Jeff Wood: feels like, especially in California, I know we have Prop 13, but at the same time, if you buy a house new, for yourself, not necessarily new built those are very rare around here, but it’s expensive.

A million dollar house is $12,000 a year. Yeah. Every month is a thousand dollars for every million dollars of the house. And so it starts to add up and takes away from the value that you can generate.

Leah Rothstein: Exactly. Yeah. [00:26:00]

Jeff Wood: In the book you talk about also thinking about a reinvigorated civil rights movement.

I’m wondering what that might look like.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah, it might look a little different today than when we wrote the book. Not that different. What we wrote in the book is that to advance these strategies to challenge segregation, we need to create a movement around the country of local groups that are taking on these issues in their own communities, focusing on local policies and programs and institutions where they can affect.

Change and that those local groups will then, bubble up towards building a national movement that can affect change on the national level. Now we’re. A few steps farther behind than when we wrote the book in terms of affecting national change. But we can still build these local movements in our own communities to advance, civil rights to encompass challenging segregation, which the civil rights movement for all of the advances it made left residential segregation virtually untouched.

And so what we argue is that [00:27:00] it’s time for a newly invigorated civil rights movement to take on these issues.

Jeff Wood: Changing Minds is not enough. Action is something more, is it one of the quotes that I wrote down in my notes? It feels like that’s connected to that specifically.

Leah Rothstein: It is, yeah. And it’s also connected to, we wrote this starting around 2020.

There was a lot of, lawn signs people put up after the murder of George Floyd for Black Lives Matter. A lot of reading groups, a lot of white folks reading books about racism, and that’s all important. But what we wanted to emphasize is that’s not enough. Examining our own internal prejudice is important, but it’s not alone.

Gonna change the systemic issues that underlie the segregation of our community. So we have to then take that into action. Advocating for policy change, electing officials that agree with these goals. Supporting, advocating for local institutions and corporations to be better actors in our [00:28:00] communities when it comes to funding housing or providing mortgages.

There’s so much we can do when it comes to action, but it’s essential that we take it from thinking and talking about it to acting on it.

Jeff Wood: And this is where I think the book’s really important because you have so many instances and indicators as well as policy ideas that you can go and make the smallest little, slight, little change to a policy one by one.

There’s thousands of them, if you go one by one just doing one thing, you actually might make, cascading effects overall in long term. And so I think that, laying all those out in the book specifically, there’s so many ways that people can get involved without thinking that they have to do everything.

They can do something.

Leah Rothstein: Exactly. That sounds like one of my quotes. You don’t have to do everything. I think

Jeff Wood: I heard Cory Booker say that the other day I was 25 hour talk on the Senate floor, but yeah.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah. We get a lot of questions when we talk about just action. People wanna know, okay, I know that there’s a lot of solutions, but what’s the one thing that I should do today?[00:29:00]

And what I always say is, the one thing is anything. There’s so much that goes into maintaining segregation, went into creating segregation. There’s just as many pieces that go into undoing it, and what we need to start to challenge it is just to start to go after those pieces one by one. And it almost doesn’t matter which one we start with, just that we start.

Jeff Wood: Yesterday I saw two of my least favorite people. Mike Lee and Paul Gosar are looking to pass a law that is making funding for A FFH illegal and funding for geospatial databases that show community racial disparities cannot be funded through federal funding, which as a GIS person myself, I was like horrified by this.

Yeah. Obviously they’re too far gone, you’re not gonna get to them. But what about the people on the edge who might know that this is something that’s important, might understand that this is something that we need to focus on, making these geospatial databases, collecting all the deeds and things like that.

Like how do you get people on the edge that are not the like true believers on the other side of [00:30:00] your like, just racist incarnate, there’s people who are reasonable and understand if you educate that change might be possible.

Leah Rothstein: I think it depends. I think there’s different ways of reaching those people.

Some people are swayed by understanding or learning about the history. I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me when I’ve spoken about just action, who tell me about reading the color of law for the first time, and it describing things that they lived through, that their families lived through, that they had no idea were engineered by the government and when they understood that, they started to see things differently about how they showed up in their community and what their community should be doing policy-wise or around issues of housing. So some people are swayed by understanding the history or seeing those restrictive covenants on the deeds of their own homes.

It’s hard to deny when you see it in black and white. On the deed of your home. Hard to deny that the segregation of your community was something done intentionally when you see it [00:31:00] written down in black and white, which is why this, these efforts to stop collecting or reporting on data is so devastating because, the history doesn’t get erased if we just stop looking at it.

But that’s what they’re trying to do.

I know. So I would say there’s some that are convinced that way. There’s some that are convinced with economic arguments. You mentioned before how we’re all harmed by segregation. There’s economists who have estimated the amount of GDP that we lose because of segregation.

When people can’t move freely to the communities where they could be most productive, our whole economy suffers. People could read the Sum of Us by Heather McGee, which shows how policies to maintain racial boundaries and racial segregation. Serve to hurt everyone, just to maintain those boundaries and that separation.

And people can see that, like the Menlo Park example, I gave people understood that, oh, these policies that were [00:32:00] initially enacted to ensure this community remained white. Now look what they’re doing to our community. My kids can’t afford to move back here. Teachers can’t afford to live here.

Service workers can’t afford to live here. People can start to see the impact on their own communities. So there’s a lot of. Different arguments and what we start just action with is how we have to build relationships across segregated communities with people of other races. To start to build the coalitions.

We need to advocate for change. And I think though that relationship building is an essential first step. That’s why we started with that. Once you start to. Get to know people who live in other parts of your same city, whose neighborhood has very different contexts and resources and opportunity available.

You can start to understand that something is off and we can do something to make that better.

Jeff Wood: How important is it to have the same language when you talk to folks? I’m curious about language and we try to ask a question from time to time about how [00:33:00] people perceive things, how they use language, and I was struck by the book specifically, and I’ve worked with HUD data sets and stuff for a long time, but thinking about what affordable housing means to people, like what does that word actually mean when somebody brings it up?

For some people who work with HUD or other folks, it means like 50% a MI. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for other people it has a different connotation when it comes into their minds. And so I’m wondering about when you’re trying to reach out, how important is it to understand where people are coming from and get on the same page with just language?

Leah Rothstein: I think it’s very important, especially today, there’s so much policing around language, so much meaning put into the words everybody uses. We were very intentional in just action to use language that would be accessible to the broadest range of audience that we thought might pick up the book. So we didn’t use the term racism in the book at all.

We didn’t use systemic racism, even though that’s what we were writing about, because those terms can turn people off who, don’t see themselves as racial justice [00:34:00] activists or who think that’s just, awoke agenda. But if you stay away from those hot button terms and talk about the truth of.

These issues and the history of our communities, people can engage with it more. They’re not turned off by the words that they’ve started to believe are toxic and so they can engage with the actual ideas and the actual history more. So I think using the most broadly accessible language, we need to build a broad tent for these issues.

We have to get beyond. Just the folks that have been talking about racial justice issues for years, we have to involve those 20 million people who turned out in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020 if we’re truly going to advance these solutions.

Jeff Wood: One of the things you talk about too is assessors.

You talk about property lenders, contract buyers, those types of things. You talk about real estate agents in the book, and as things go more digital we chatted with Jeff Boeing, maybe a year ago or so [00:35:00] about algorithmic discrimination and so thinking about what happens when the discrimination that happened in the real world.

Hops over into Zillow or Redfin or some of these other places. And so building on what you wrote in the book, moving forward to the digital space, I’m wondering if that’s something you all had thought about. As all this stuff gets enshrined in these AI large language models and the things like that, that are bringing all this information in.

But they’re also probably bringing in all this like races past and the problems that come along with that.

Leah Rothstein: Those models are built off what already exists, right? In the digital world. And when that was. Built off of discriminatory practices and what we’re getting from those models are gonna be discriminatory.

We did think about it, we didn’t write about it. We had to leave some things out to make a book that wasn’t, too overwhelming. But there are a lot of folks working on those issues and I think it, it is very important. The National Fair Housing Association has a toolkit on algorithmic bias. And [00:36:00] has been doing a lot of lobbying and advocacy work around that, for example, and, the property appraisal issue is another issue where using, relying on comparables or information data that’s out there is resulting in discriminatory outcomes today.

And so there is a lot of work being done around that and I definitely support it.

Jeff Wood: You mentioned transportation once that I remember you might have mentioned it a few more times, but I think the connections between housing specifically and transportation are really important. And the affordability discussion about that, the housing plus transportation and the, and how much it costs to get places and the accessibility that it sorts out.

I’m curious, obviously it’s not the main point of the book, but I wanna connect those dots because I think that is important to think about, the way that, we’ve developed as a country in terms of sprawl and the way that our neighborhoods develop, but how that kind of adds to the problems with segregation as well.

And you know how those two things might be connected in a way that’s similar to what you discussed in the book.

Leah Rothstein: Yeah. One overlapping example is we talk about single family only zoning. [00:37:00] And how that type of zoning, which is the prevalent type of residential zoning around the country, particularly in suburban, more affluent, more expensive communities, they’re zoned to only allow one house per lot.

That zoning has ensured that those neighborhoods remain. Those houses remain unaffordable to anyone, but the more a most affluent families, more likely to be white families. So zoning, single family only zoning has maintained segregation, the primary tool of maintaining segregation of white communities.

Now you overlay that with transportation issues. Those suburban communities often aren’t accessible by public transportation. So not only can lower income families not afford the homes because of the zoning of those communities, they also can’t afford to get there. They might not have a car. They, there’s no transportation option.

So a lack of public transportation to suburban communities has also maintained the segregation of those communities. So they’re overlapping causes and overlapping solutions.

Jeff Wood: You’ve [00:38:00] probably talked about this book a lot and done a few podcasts and such. I’m wondering if there’s a question that you wish people would ask you more or maybe a topic that gets overlooked in the book.

Leah Rothstein: I think what I would want people to think about more, and I guess they do that through asking me questions sometimes is, housing feels overwhelming. Most people think that housing policy is too complex for them to engage with. Now a lot of readers of just action understand that’s not true.

What I want readers to get and to understand and to engage with is how we take that into, how we show up in our own lives. How we talk to our neighbors, how we move around our communities, how we show up at parent associations or religious organizations who we vote for taking it out of this, policy.

Wonky level and into our day-to-day lives. There are a lot of [00:39:00] examples of that. There are people doing that, but I want people to talk about that more because that’s how we build these movements. It doesn’t just happen in city hall. It happens when your neighbor walks down the street and says, oh, did you see that development site, the construction site down the street?

What’s going in there? How you talk about that makes a difference.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. What’s been the response so far to the book?

Leah Rothstein: It’s been great. Very positive. People are excited. I’ve been excited to see the response of it. It came out two years ago now. Almost the paperback just came out. I have been traveling around the country speaking about it since it came out to all kinds of communities and people in all kinds of communities are.

Engaging with it and trying to figure out what they can start with, how they can start to address these issues, and that’s really exciting. I just came back from speaking at the American Planning Association Conference, which took place this [00:40:00] week, early April, amidst the first few months of the Trump administration, the week that he laid off a bunch of HUD staff.

So in a sort of depressing moment, but thousands of planners committed to talking about equity. The conference, the association didn’t back off from these issues and they all were sent home with a mandate to get in the arena and keep going to fight for these issues and work on them and that is exciting.

Jeff Wood: That’s awesome. The book is just Action, how to Challenge Segregation and Acted Under The Color of Law. You can find it at your local bookstores or wherever books are sold, I imagine. Leah, where can folks find you if you wish to be found? Sure.

Leah Rothstein: You can find me on LinkedIn, Leah Rothstein.

Just action is on all the socials. And we have a website, just action book.org. That’s where you can find where I’ll be appearing to talk about it. You can watch videos of past appearances, [00:41:00] listen to podcasts like this one will be up there and learn more about where to buy the book and links to our Substack column or also there.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Leah, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Leah Rothstein: Thank you so much.