Homeownership in America has long been a broken system. A decade ago it tore our economy in two and reminded us just how central a role housing plays in the nation’s racial and social inequality. Today, amid the battles for affordable housing that haunt many major cities, an attentive pedestrian in New York will find graffiti claiming “THE RICH KILLD NYC” stenciled onto many a public facade. The writing, quite literally, is on the walls.
Since the last recession, most studies of America’s flawed housing system—from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” (2014) to Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017)—have focused on how the government directly segregated the country for most of the 20th century prior to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. In this narrative, the government created spatialized inequality, using devices such as zoning, redlining, urban renewal, and the disproportionate construction of public housing in Black neighborhoods.
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