house and policy looks like today and how different parts of the country addresses, and this is live coverage here on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] please welcome -- [applause] >> good morning, everyone, i'm the managing director of atlantic live and i'm pleased to welcome such a great group this morning. atlantic live is the live events division of the atlantic and we're proud to bring this great publications journalism to life on stage with in depth coverage of the most consequential issues of our time. today's program builds off of decades of reporting and commentary by the atlantic on an issue that undoubtedly is deeply personal to nearly everyone, housing. housing is a basic human need, but it's also a commodity. one that is still not available to everyone in fair measure. we'll talk today about the legacy of the fair housing act with i came at a pivotal moment

in the civil rights movement of the 60's. once signed into law in 1968, the act made it illegal to refuse to sell or rent a dwelling to any person because of his race, color, religion, or national origin. the language embodies the pursuit of justice and equity for all in all people in the united states and as we look back today, we ask how the fair housing act's original-- original intent in housing and what remains to be done. we'll hear the stories of people pursuing solutions on local and national levels and thinking through the big questions that impact us all. before we begin, i'd like to thank our underwriter, fannie mae, for making today possible. before we jump in a few housekeeping notes, if everyone could silence your cell phones,

but keep them out using the hash tag #atlantic building equity. and we'll take questions at the panel's end. let's jump in. we'll look at what was happening in many of the american communities in 50's and 60's when segregation was the norman discriminatory practices were not yet outlawed across the country. many americans faced grave challenges trying to purchase a home of their own. the following atlantic video introduces the buyers contract league, a group of residents in chicago who banded together to fight discriminatory housing practices in their neighborhood. let's take a look. ♪ >> the question of housing is one of the major problems this country faces.

by and large, blacks live in substandard housing. and those who manage to get out frequently pay a large penalty. ♪ >> i came from birmingham, alabama, but i came to chicago for better living and a job. here in this house in 58. it ain't nothing to brag about, but it's mine. >> i've from mississippi and i bought this house in 1958. >> i moved in this house in 1957. it was mostly a white area and when they said that the-- were coming, they didn't say blacks, they said--

was coming and they just started moving away. mostly everyone that was black, they had been sold a contract. if you missed a payment in three months, they could take the property back. no lawyer, no nothing could help you. that was it. >> there are blocks like this scattered throughout the lon dale section of chicago's west side ghetto. the people who live here bought their homes from real estate speculators at double or triple their value and bought on contract because they couldn't get conventional or fha mortgages. under the contract the buyer makes installment payments at

high interest, money bills, no equity. and if they default at any one time during the contract he loses the contract and everything he paid into it. >> and hours was about 12,000, that means i was overcharged quite a bit and the contract situation was so bad until, whenever something broke down, you had to fix it. you had to pay your water and gas and electric and taxes and everything else, but you've got ownership. >> how can you be charged like that if that was the law and how would the law let them do this because they said it was their property, they had no choice to sell it at whatever price they wanted to and if you bought it, then that was on you. >> worked three jobs. i worked at--

four, five years. a and-- when they did see me on the weekend, i tell them, their mama say should i do it, should i not? who is this guy, you know? i was a stranger in my own home because of that contract. i said this is not going to work. >> these people who cheated us out of money. we have been cheated out of the right to be human beings in society. we've been cheated out of buying a home at a decent price. we have a chance now. the contracts finally presented a chance for people in this area to move out of this crippled society.

to move up stand on your own two feet. fight for what you know is right. fig fight. ♪ . >> i really believe that ultimately what we're after is some kind of communication among human beings that can only be affected when people can approach each other and basic equality. >> and even though they're within the law, this is really war, isn't it? >> yes, it is. >> the college students and i went up and down the streets and asked people if they bought on contract and we discovered that the average overcharge was $10,000 and then computed, the monthly payments so that we knew that black folks were paying a race tax of about $20,000 per family.

>> to continue the story of the contract buyers league, please welcome to the stage, ralph blessing, who volunteered at the contract buyers league as a student organizer and sandra york, a daughter of ruby and robert york, who bought a home in north lawndale, and whose decision to participate in the contract buyers league helped the organization make history and to lead the conversation, please welcome atlantic staff writer van newkirk. van, please take it away. [applaus [applause] >> so, ralph, we in that video, you know, we just saw that race tax of $20,000 per family. you got involved with the contract buyers league after they found that out. what were the contract buyers league-- what were their objectives and how did you meet those objectives?

>> well, the objectives originally were of the organization, were to discover that type of data, which in today's dollars doesn't sound like a significant amount, but at the time, if you saw those housing prices on that list, imagine what that would be in today's dollars. it amounted to roughly a 75% markup on average between what the sellers paid for the property, often just days earlier, and turned around and sold it to a black family at an inflated rate. so, this took a while to get that information out of the community because there was a hesitancy to basically admit that you were taking advantage of, but when you're desperate for housing and desperate for a place to raise your kids and,

people do desperate things and sometimes you may not think it's a viable solution, but you sign on the dotted line and you had had a house. only later did they find out that they, and their neighbors, were really the result of a-- if not illegal, certainly unethical campaign by blockbusters and people who were willing to take advantage of them because of the color of their skin. >> so, you had a house, but you weren't building equity, right? >> exactly. >> and so how were people, when the contract buyers, they decided to act against it, were they withholding their payments, correct? >> that was not the initial step, but the effort-- the documentation was made of what the--

the difference between the buying and selling price and presented to them through the sellers, i guess. and requesting that they renegotiate the contracts and make them closer to a mortgage, if not, in fact, an actual mortgage. except for one individual, apparently, who had a come to jesus moment and woke up and-- or his wife convinced him that they had overcheated-- or charged, that they had cheated the buyers. and the rest of the real estate folks said, uh-uh, it's not -- it's legal, they signed it, tough nails, if you will. and so when they resisted any effort to renegotiate, that is when this tactic came up of, we

will withhold our payments, our monthly payments. we will make them into an escrow account so the money is there, it's not that we're trying to avoid paying the money, but we will not give it to them and that eventually enticed a number of the others to enter into negotiate-- renegotiations of the contracts. >> essentially, this was considered to be a legal practice. you did take legal action, correct? there was a lawsuit? >> there were -- there was a lawsuit, actually two of them, one from the west side community and later on for a group of home owners on the south side, but after years working its way through the system, these cases were dismissed. so, that they did not resolve the matter. but i think at renegotiations

ended up benefitting over 300 home owners in the lawndale community over the course of the years that this process was underway. >> sandra, we talked about your family history yesterday. we had lunch. you're telling me about the roots of your family in mississippi and how they come up and get this home that's, you know, considered a part of the american dream. >> correct. >>, but it's on contract. what have you learned from your parents about their story, about the motivation to buy a house how they felt after realizing this contract was just disadvantageous? >> remember, i also indicated that my parents actually hid us from a lot of what was going on, but in asking questions later on and, you know, just

the unfairness of of what happened, they just always told us to fight for what you believe in and that's what they did, and they came out on top. >> and from -- do you think there was a sense of -- in north lawndale community, a sense of maybe shame that they had been-- >> oh, absolutely, absolutely. i mean, my dad even, he just told my mom, did know the go to those meetings. and she was like, no, i'm going. this has to be done. >> she went anyway? >> she went anyway. >> and how did the situation, what was the resolution? what was the course of the events there? >> they actually did do the renegotiating and they actually came out on top, i think it was like in the range of like $8,000 or something like that. >> $8,000. >> and you were growing up, now with this $8,000 returned to your family, what was your sense of how it impacted your

family's sense of belonging, your sense of community and your love for north lawndale? >> i loved the community. i loved being there. you know, the family-- and other families there as well, i mean, just the pride that they had in the community and we just, you know, we felt like we could really stand tall, you know, because of what my mom and you know, eventually my dad, who did come along, you know, they stood up. we were very proud of that. >> what was it like watching that video and seeing those folks who were in it with your parents, going through all of this and i think the line that gets me is the woman who says it's not much, but it's mine. >> correct. >> that's heavy, isn't it? >> it is, but they made us feel like we were rich. i mean, we had everything. i mean, everything that we needed and that was the love and strength and you know, their determination.

that's what we had. >> ralph, contract buyers league was an interracial effort, right? there were lots of people were lots of places, races, class basis involved in this. what about your own background, your own family background gets you to go and volunteer for this organization that's doing something really risky? >> actually, i was only in-- with the other students for a two week period during the summer of 1967. i went to work straight out of high school and was working at an insurance company and my brother was part of that student group recruited by jack mcnar-- mcnamara. and i thought what better way to spend my time off. i went in the peace corps later

on and after returning contacted jack and said, i'd really like to spend time working with cbo, and by that time a fund raising foundation had been established and so i ended up working there, in effect, as a paralegal with the legal teams that were doing pro bono work on behalf of cbo. so, it allowed me to interact with the buyers on a regular basis, interviewing them, getting the kind of data that would be needed to argue the case in court, but what motivated me? on. i don't know. i was a child of the '60s, maybe that as much as anything. >> it didn't stop with you with cbo. you live in a community in d.c. that's gone through similar changes, through similar instances of segregation.

what's your lifelong experience and engagement, interface with housing segregation been like now that we are decades past? what's your -- looking back, what are the trends been? >> it's hard to say. i grew up in a very working class neighborhood where i was told the original settlers were the african-americans who were next door, and a couple of doors up, and that my dad knew growing up and so, it was -- it was sort of that struggle, if you will, between my white classmates at the catholic school i attended and the folks i knew from childhood who were my neighbors and, but i eventually just, as the civil rights movement took hold in

the u.s., it really resonated with me and i just felt that was the way to go from my own pe personal convictions and practices to the extent possible. >> sandra, you've since moved on from your parents' home, from that contract house. what emotion were you having when you bought your own home and thinking about legacy and inheritance, and that same sentiment, that it's mine. >> yeah, the feeling was just, i don't want to get emotional either. i knew that my mom and dad would be very proud that i had the support from so many who, you know, made sure that i didn't go through what they

went through. >> now, we talked about how you were advised when you went through this process. >> i was. >> not to seek an fha loan. >> well, correct. >> coming back in history, right? >> exactly. >> it's coming back. >> it's coming back, yeah. >> ralph, i want to get your sense of, we're sitting here thinking about this now, 50 years on, the impact of the cbl, not just in north lawndale, not just in chicago, but in how we think about this problem today nationwide. >> i guess i wish i could say it had a distinctly positive impact, but just from what you

hear in recent months, years, i guess even during the housing crisis, what -- how people lost their homes to begin with and how properties were gobbled up and resold in some cases on, if not contracts, something very much like a contract. so, i guess the greatest impact would be the awareness that organizations like cbo have helped create in the population as a whole, that the fact that this many people would come out to listen it an event like this, or a discussion like this and it's just two steps forward, one step backwards and it's an ongoing struggle. >> for me, sandra, i think the fact that you're here is optimistic.

we talked about this again yesterday, how you had a chance to talk to and engage with the work. that video was a supplement to his groundbreaking case of reparations, right? so i think that people nationwide are considering even if housing segregation is entrenched, thinking about solutions. how do you see that movement, the impact, what your parents went through and advised you on beyond your own experience to the people you-- the young folks now in your community. >> exactly. >> yes. >> whenever i just even hear of a young person wanting to buy, you know, and it's like, you know, we need to have a conversation, you know, make sure you check all avenues, you know. do your homework. there are resources out there, people who will help. you just need to just say

something, you know? and a lot of times i think from back then that people, they just didn't share, and it wasn't that they didn't want to share, but people just felt like, you know, this was just a bad experience and let me just move on from it, you know? and not share anything. so-- >> want to queue up for questions soon, start thinking about questions. and think about what we passed down, especially black folks. what are you telling young people who are seeking their own home? there's still this very american sense of, that you have carved out your space and done what you need to do as a good american. what are you warning people against? what are you telling them that is the right way to go? how do you pass it on? >> just letting them know, you know, one, keep good credit.

[laughter] >> , but, two, like i say, just knowing your options. knowing what's out there. you know? fha as opposed to conventional. you know, what may work better for you as opposed to, you know, with a worked for me, you know? the particular situations and how much house they want, you know? where you want to move to, you know? so, i mean, i'm having those conversations quite often. >> okay. hi, i used to work in politics in georgia and one of the main things i saw as far as taking housing away from people was the privatization of tax collections. and i was wondering if you all have had any experience with that, if the accountable government officials just outsourced the collection of

past due property taxes, then it makes it easier to avoid accountability for pissing off a big group of people that they screw over. >> i'm not familiar with that myself. >> neither am i. >> neither am i. [laughter] >> 0 for 3. it's a great question and keep it in my back pocket for a story, maybe. anyone else? >> hi, i'm debra cole. i was wondering did that exactly end the contract buying process? were other home owners going forward, were they offered regular mortgages or did it just ease the terms of the contracts and did they continue? >> my understanding, i was no longer in chicago at the time, but is that once this matter

was being resolved for the original group of home owners through renegotiations, that the fha admitted the error of its ways to a certain extent. the banks in chicago were willing to lend a hand in furthering the renegotiation process, making future potential buyers accessible or having standard mortgages accessible to them much more so, at least, than they had been in the past. so, but whether that's-- how far along that-- i mean, did that-- we know it's still not totally a level playing field, so, when you've got wealth that's accumulated generation after generation, when two groups of people are on different tracks,

then the credit worthiness, if you will, is identified in this manner versus that manner, and so-- >> understood to keep good credit, but you're already starting with a deficit as a credit. >> i think so, yes. and again, when -- it's not just the financial aspect as clyde ross said in the video, when you are away from your home 80, 90% of the time, what does that do to family life? if we know how important it is to have a male figure, father figure in the house, and yet, if the kids look at him and said, who are you, you know, so it's -- it's just such a widespread issue and it's more than a dollar and cents matter.

>> i'm an economist at the federal reserve board and this question is mine, not theirs. [laughter] >> as i comment, i quickly adjusted the $8,000 that you got back for inflation and it's about $70,000, depending on when exactly the year we're speaking, which is a sizable amount of the racial cap between black families and white families. i wonder if any of you on the panel reflected on the magnitude for the issues for families and keeping class distinctions and race distinctions in line? >> i certainly didn't. i mean, i benefitted from it in terms of, you know, of course my dad supported us, but he kept it close to the vest. but i'm not --. >> i think you're right, that

70,000 today to today's dollars, it matters a lot, but it doesn't close the gap and so i think we still have lots ahead of us to think about just how big that gap really is and not just in terms of dollars and cents, but in terms of hours missed with your family and other ways that people are involved in closing it. and so, you guys are going to hear more of that later today. good question. >> and 70,000, if you had that inmo back then, you could have grown that money in effect. so it's not just a stable or a static number, which, again, helps explain the disparate, the white-black disparate in terms of accumulated wealth over generations. >> i want to thank you all for your amazing questions. that question was great and thank you to ralph and sandra for coming and for sharing your insights in history. >> thank you, vann, appreciate it. [applaus

[applause]. >> now for a conversation on the legacy of the fair housing act, please welcome howard husik, research of publications at manhattan institute. and a president and ceo of leadership conference on civil and human rights and dave stevens, president and ceo of the mortgage bankers association. here to lead the conversation, please welcome atlantic center editor jillian white. [applaus [applause]. >> good morning, good morning. so i want to start with a little bit of framing question at that that i want to put to all of you. to what extent have the goals of the fair housing act been acleveland in the past 50 years? >> you know, i think it's a mixed story. i think on the one hand, you know, there's clear laws in place that eliminate or at least make it legally culpable to discriminate based on race,

sex, et cetera, sexual preference, but we still live in a world today where the opportunity for home ownership and for safe housing has great disparates in it. so, you know, it's -- it's an area that needs a lot of work and i actually think right now the timing is really important for this conversation, because in many ways we're in a crisis with the cost of housing and who gets access to it, there's disparate between the white, non-hispanic population and minority communities and that is something that needs a lot of focus. >> and i think that the problems in the fair housing act remains to be realized. when it was enacted a week after martin luther king's assassination and there was a long time to try to get it. and it's the right to communities and right to safe and accessible housing is a

core part of how we live, but i think the reality is that there had been a long series of -- decades of federally engineered segregation and we remain deeply segregated in housing, which has impacts on transportation, access to employment, and so, you know, studies show that black home ownership rates today are at levels they were at 50 years ago because despite a lot of progress that had been made the financial crisis wiped that out and recovering has not been felt by all communities. and so, again, we've always throughout our history made enormous progress and the enactment of laws has been a marker and milestone of that progress. the fact remains that when laws don't get fully implemented, and i think actually the fair housing act is one of the laws that's probably been the most subject to political whim of landmark civil rights legislation, and leaps forward and leaps back administration,

to administration, and halted the ability for the act to be implemented with the rigor intended. so there's a lot of work to do to address profound segregation and we have to remember that there's nothing-- there's no naturally occurring phenomena why segregation exists, it's from human beings, and it's an intentional set of policies and practices to be able to address that kind of longstanding segregation. >> well, i think one would have to be incredibly naive not to think and understand that it's more difficult and more complicated to rent or buy a home if one is an african-american. i think that was true when the voting rights act was passed and i think it continues to be true. however, there has been some important changes. colleagues of mine, ed glasier, an economist at harvard and jacob, an economist at university of washington, looked at the census data and

today segregated neighborhoods, as defined by racial concentration, are far less common than they were at the time of the passage of the fair housing act. 50 years ago, 20% of census tracks in the united states had zero black residents. today for every 200 neighborhoods in the united states, 199 are not all white. that is, there are black residents in virtually every census tract, that may not be a lot, may not mean that they're not having a hard time getting a house there, but all white neighborhoods in the united states are effectively extinct. even in chicago, if you look at what's called economist call the dissimilarity index, how different is one neighborhood from another neighborhood, is it all one race or all another race. overall, dissimilarity in chicago known as one.

most segregated cities in the united states has declined from 1970 to 2010 by 25 percentage points. agreed, work to be done a but mortgage bankers all post that sign gentrycation causing the-- and according housing that's grate creating some of this in certain communities. one thing i look at that's a testament to the challenge that we face is the medium fico score for african-americans is 624. the median fico score for all americans is about 719. if you look the a lending policies, even under qualified mortgage rules, most lenders, even fha, most lenders won't lend in those programs below 620 without adding, with fico scores below 620. the median fico score 624 and once you drop below 620, half

of the population, it's harder to access credit. what's most interesting about that a large percentage of that population that's below 620 has credit, less than two reported credit histories. if you're an uber driver, if uber doesn't report your loan for your car. utilities often aren't reported, your rent payments often aren't reported and your car loan that you got from a used car dealer or subprime auto dealer, those typically are not reported to your credit history and so you end up with a reality that the lack of credit also creates bad credit. and so, the question is, we can talk about the problems, but we need to be talking about the opportunities and when we saw it for. unfortunately, some of the square peg, square hole underwriting mentality that we've created on the one hand eliminates the ability for too much subjectivity which can protect against redlining and those kind of things, on the other hand how do we solve for it if the system used and i'll use the credit score and one is a prime example, ultimately

causes incredible disparities. and i think that all of these focus on. >> i want to ask the question, whose responsibility is it to help fix that? as you said, we have a thin credit file problem that tends to afflict people of color more so. that means they can't get houses, they can't get conventional loans and that's how families build their wealth. so it creates this cycle where it becomes impossible or near impossible to build the kind of wealth, to have a home, someplace where it's going to appreciate in value so whose responsibility is it and how can we fix that? . you're looking at me and i'll answer quickly, everybody has thoughts here. there are tipping points on all sides. when i came into the obama administration in 2009 as federal housing commissioner, there was a program called, i was down payment assistance. and you helped people with down payments and cumulative default rates of 35% and heavily

concentrated in minority communities which i think were preyed upon as an opportunity to use that program and i won't go into all the reasons why it failed, but the outcome was real so we've got to be careful about the tipping points. i do think one of the great opportunities right now is to be looking at the buyer of today who has multiple sources of income in their household. some of which are not reported in traditional ways and multiple family members living with them that support their income stream. we've talked about those who drive for uber and other kinds of self-employed vehicles or rent out part of their homes to many so of the services onhine to generate income. but all of this leads me to start off with, this is something at its base level. why are we still relying on a traditional credit scoring methodology that underscores demographs that may stimuli not have the traditional way of establishing a credit sydor when that's one of the primary drivers to getting a prime rate on a mortgage. by the way, i'm way overlooking

affordable housing stock and wage separation and all of these things that pile on the economics of being able to get access to housing, but what we really need is, we need a universal focus to say, we're in a housing crisis and believe me, when you look at the poverty levels of those who can't even afford minimum rents today, it's dramatic. anyway, so i'll shut up, but i think at the end of the day we've got a lot of work to do. someone's got to declare this as a national priority. >> i think that i agree with a lot, and i think with the fair housing act, some forget there are houge facts that we're at access to credit and a huge part of the life we live. the responsible is a shared one. we don't think feel like we're in a crisis, but the communities of color and certain other communities, it's a profound crisis and remains one. i headed up the civil rights

division for almost the last two and a half years of the obama administration, there were efforts by hud at that point to put out rules that were setting intentional, giving keys to the fair housing act and order, so, there were a number of things that were happening in and around government. the federal government has had a huge role to play because they also had a huge role to play in fueling segregation and segregated housing in access to credit and the like. so you can't undermine that and the role of the federal government that gives meaning to the fair housing act remains still alive, despite the rollbacks that we're currently seeing, both enforcement at the two agencies that enforce, but there's also a great responsibility among banks. and i think that there's, you know, for lending institutions to get engaged in the effort and we see a lot of banks take this under-- take initiative and leadership to drop these issues. there's more of a move to

address how criminal conviction and records, are looking at barring people from accessing everything from public housing to private housing and to credit. and i think there's been a lot of leadership among some key banks recently to kind of deal with that in the absence of a federal government that's made this a priority. and so, you know, there's a lot of shared responsibility here, but i think it's absolutely true that given the importance of housing in our lives and our communities, there needs to be a much, much greater focus on what's happening right now. >> on the credit score issue, i want to link that back to the point about the high foreclosures in the financial crisis and how that's disadvantaged the wealth creation in the community. i couldn't agree more with that. and i think we have to be very careful to the point about, that high foreclosure rate on the experimental hud program, we do not do anybody a favor if we relax credit requirements

too much. all right? asset growth, wealth creation happens when whole neighborhoods remain good. the worst thing i remember in the early case of the housing crisis, in the back of the yard, which is also in chicago and going door-to-door talking to people for a magazine article about what does it mean to have a foreclosed house next to you. decimating. working class people who have the house next door be vacant, that is a nightmare for them. we have to protect them by making sure that good credit is extended to people who are credit worthy, that has always been a protection for neighbors. do we have to be expansive about understanding who is a good credit risk? yes. but when we have affordable housing goals, sometimes we may stretch those too far and we have to be careful not because we're worried about banks, but because we're worried about minority home owners. and in that context of wealth creation, we have to keep in

mind the fha back in the bad old days, redlined and had a lot of the discriminatory practices we heard in the first panel. at the same time when it comes to wealth creation, what a nightmare housing was for minority people. when you look at the project in st. louis, the neighborhoods that were wiped out there, my own census research found that 21% of the homes were owned by minorities. they were torn down to make public housing in which nobody could own anything. we have to be careful to bring in the government to fix the problems because the government doesn't have a great track record of its on. >> i want to talk about what would constitute keeping a neighborhood good because historically keeping a neighborhood good in the ideas has meant making it more white than it is minority hfrjts absolutely not. >> you say absolutely not, but there's a lot of evidence that shows-- >> that was historically true

there's no doubt about it, but that -- the way-- i think we have to make sure, to me, the core of the fair housing act, anybody who can afford to buy or rent must be allowed based on their income to do that that to me is the core of the fair housing act. >> the this gets back to what is the core of the fair housing act. some people would say the core of the fair housing act would be to prevent discrimination. and others say that it's implicit that we focus on integration. >> i think there's a role of the act that we ignore. and there's the principles, individual level, preventing discrimination in individual access. and the fair housing act has often got left behind or ignored or invisible to some of the work done and it's a very crucial mandate that requires kind of a different kind of structure, a look at the structural things that are

preventing communities from true intervention. and one they think i want to add is, we also have to remember the fair housing act was seeking to address and remedy keep racial segregation and it was an important tool for addressing the barriers for people with disabilities, for women, for people who were didn't fit the traditional familial status, gay and lesbian families and the like. when i was at doj, the highest volume of cases we were seeing was from the barriers on disabilities. and i want to add that the integration mandate is actually one, it's a broad mandate. >> well, i'm -- you know, i would just say, look, we -- if you look at the department of labor savings statistic research, the level of

inherited wealth in non-hispanic white families is higher because of generational advantage. i'm not trying to make this a social politics discussion. we've disenfranchised minority communities for decades in this country and i think it's going to take affirmative efforts to create opportunity and i think it raises the economy. to your point, there's no separate, but equal. we've proved that in education and other areas, there's research where you have to create opportunities to-- >> did i say separate, but equal? >> no, but i worry about what efforts we have going forward in terms of making sure there's available, affordable housing stock, that we look at underwriting the way we underwrite families in america today, and recognize that there are differences in diverse communities, versus tradition al underwriting standards of how families were approved and you talked about the banks doing more. you know, almost every bank today doesn't hold their loans anymore. most of them don't have balance

sheets and regulators don't like them to hold their mortgages. so they sell them to freddie mac or fannie mae or insured by fha and mortgage securities around the country and those are established by the regulators involved and you know, you make a very good point. you don't want to go so far as you create another rapid failure, which we saw in communities like detroit and others that were so concentrated with the housing collapse in terms of adverse outcome to minority communities. but at the same time, we collectively can't use that as an excuse to say, hey, we've got a problem here and we need to look at demographics shaping this today. the millennial generation is not white, it's two-thirds minority and our economy depends on thinking differently how we move forward and i think that has to do with fannie mae and freddie mac underwrites credit and focus on efforts on monies being used to build the right kind of housing stock. i mean, all of these have come down to local policies about you to your point, i think it does start at the federal level

and it's going to take a concentrated effort to help identify the areas, which is why people think this is a crisis and we need to focus on have this created and established that way by the president to focus on this area. i've called for this for years that we need someone to focus solly on this issue at the federal level reporting to a president who has teeth and i just don't think that we have that effort in a way today. and it's getting worse. i mean, housing is getting more expensive and the gap is wider. it's an area we need to focus on. >> i want to respond to that, but also going to the point of the dual mandate of integration. i think that is the dual mandate about you we have to think deeply about what makes integration happen and be sustained, and so, affirmatively furthering fair housing focused a lot on, for instance, where it was implemented to its greaters extent at westchester county,

new york, under a court order. let's build affordable, which means subsidized housing in affluent areas. sounds good. it's not a way for renters to establish and build wealth because they don't own anything. i think we are better off focusing on zoning change at the local level. i think we all understand that one of the reasons we have a housing crisis, why is there such a housing crisis in a rich place like san jose, california? because 70% of the community is owned for single family homes. not everybody wants a single family home anymorement we have diverse buyers. we have, at the same time the hardest thing to convince affluent suburban, predominantly white, perhaps, communities, is that they should accept subsidized housing, people who are much poorer than they are. that's the hardest thing. >> i want to stop you for one second and let the audience know we will come to you for questions in just a moment.

if you can start thinking about them now, condensing them all the way down, making sure they're questions rather than comments, i'd greatly appreciate it and raise those hands high, there are mic runners in the audience. >> i want to quote a dean from columbia, who wrote experience with residential integration in many communities indicates it can be achieved without problem. herb, not a conservative, by the way. if two races at a social and economic level. and that's important, how can we sustain integration and minimize any tension? do i wish that we didn't have to reassure white people, i wish that, but that's a reality. that's what we've had over the many years, and i think what we need to do is to open up zoning, convince these communities, you need more two family homes. you need more three family homes, so that people of more modest means can live in your community. that's different than saying,

let's build a 12-story public housing project. they're not going to go for that. we just saw in california, liberal california a housing bill to override local zoning to build mid rise construction near transit development voted down by the general assembly. >> i think i want to let dave and vanita responds. >> i would just say it's not an either/or proposition, there are multiple tactics that need to be deployed and there's a role, absolutely on the local side on local zoning ordinances where local governments do have a particular role to play in furthering fair housing. so, to me, it doesn't remove the responsibility of the federal government to really seek to enforce the federal fair housing act in the way it's meant to and some of that requires having those kinds of goals to do so. >> quick response. >> look, you know, after-- in 2009 secretary donovan took

a group of us down to new orleans, because it was the response to the hurricane and i visited parish after parish and saw the hardest hit parishes, ones that had nothing left on their land and those were heavily concentrated with minorities and i just think money needs to have a more aggressive way of flowing to communities. and you know, in the end of the day you're talking the westchester county case as an example. you know, if you can go to larchmont high school you're going to end up with a the abouter education, so, i mean, all of this sort of trickles downstre downstream. it's a big problem and you can't solve it in 25 minutes on stage. this needs focus and prioritized by the president and people need to start calling for it not just for the 50th anniversary of that, we need to start talking about it publicly that this is too important for the u.s. economy because in the end of the day, as we look forward and we look at the diversity of the generations that are going to be running this country, you

have to create opportunity or our economy's not going to be what we want it to be. and so, it's an economic discussion more than, as much as it is a sociological one. >> i was going to --. >> can't be observed for a fortunate few. >> that's right. >> thank you. good morning, antwan thompson, real estate brokers. i want to say a quick thing. one is two questions, first, is for the panel. if you all could shed some light on america's historic role in providing access to land for white americans for hundreds of years, to the homestead act, through landis positions agreements for developers and lda's and things like that. and the risks that we often allow for whites to be successful and unsuccessful and

we're a little more critical when african-americans are not. and the other thing i would say out of the great depression, which i think david was getting at, is a lot of programs came into existence to help create suburban america, as we know from books li, that this was orchestrated, the home owner suburbia was created by the federal government and we look 50, 70 years later you know, now we have this massive home ownership gap. what do you say about that? >> sir. >> how do we fix that? the black home ownership. >> we want to make sure that we get other people in, to one person, a question. >> and fha was created for title one loans to rural communities and farmers and ranchers, and i think that's

right. to your point, antoine, you know, as we move forward in this dialog, but the reality is that we do have decades of disparities and it's not a matter of fault, just a matter of reality and we need to be thinking about policy policies that help create opportunity for those that have been neglected in the past and if that's the point. >> yes. >> we're going to go to a question. >> i will keep myself-- >> and john with fannie mae. my question is, do you think technology innovation has an opportunity to be an equalizer in this field? >> so, let me -- maybe focusing on the wrong thing, but we should talk about this because i think right now there are-- we have to also address that the venues for accessing housing and ads and where ads are placed is all playing itself out on-line in a really big way that i think facebook, now i can't remember the

percentage of housing ads that are actually like being placed at facebook right now in terms of really owning the market around some of the issues and there's been a very long, you know, a pretty rich concern about facebook's own ways that they're engaging in racial discrimination, discrimination to prevent certain people-- giving hosts actually the ability to click on who is going to receive the ads and the like. that's the negative side of the kind of changing-- the changing nature of where housing and housing access is playing itself out. and so, i think that that's a huge area that we have to focus on. the leadership conference has been long engaged with a process with air bnb and now with facebook to address the problem because unless we're pretty intentional about it, there's a whole economy taking place that has so far been relatively untouched by the fair housing act and that will become a huge loophole that will have consequences on our economy. >> i'd like to see--

in new york we did a paper that showed a good deal of naturally occurring affordable housing, housing in the private market that was as affordable as subs died housing or low income housing, but people don't know about it. so i think that city governments can work with zillow and organizations like this to say, you may not know that there's a house or an apartment you can afford, but there is. and i think that technology could be a reach-out mechanism this that kind of way. >> i know we could talk about this all day, but please join me in thanking our panel. [applaus [applause] >> for a session produced by our underwriter, please welcome carlos campbell, a key witness for the fair housing act. and jeffrey hayward, executive vice-president and head of

multi-family at fannie mae. [applause]. [applause]. >> well, i'm just delighted to be here today and to have an opportunity to have you all see me ask that carlos campbell a couple of questions. ...

. >> thanks for that question and thanks for this opportunity. a couple of things happened, i was flying in the reconnaissance business. which is very dangerous business. i won't say they deliberately violated their airspace but we were collecting intelligence and when you're in that about, you have migs on top of you like during the cuban missile crisis and you know your butt is on the line during the cold war we lost over 500 aviators in that business. you feel like you were stepped up and you were called. you come back to the united states, you're married and with a baby you're looking for housing. my options were open. i could have had an apartment, townhouse, single family. i'm looking around. i'm being rejected and rejected in uniform. i walked into the lobby and here

is a south vietnamese army officer checking his mail. i said, wow, i hit pay dirt. i walk up to get application. the woman looks at me with impunity. she says we don't practice open occupancy. that kind of like blew me away. i eventually got a place but there were several things that drove me to persist, write letters and get some of the policies reversed. and, because of the help of an attorney like phil herhkop, won the loving case, and a good support system including my father who was close friend of administrator robert weaver, we were able to get some traction and turn things around. i want to point out also, once i moved into the area near mount vernon off the memorial parkway, the places where we lived immediately, the people could not have been nicer. but when i go out in the

morning, i was still on flight status to do my morning run at crack of dawn, the police would stop me. they would say somebody reported a suspicious person in the neighborhood. well if i find anybody looks suspicious i will let you know. [laughter]. i'm lieutenant campbell. at the defense intelligence agency. so that, and thin the other thing is, that the community of african-american aviators in the navy was a very small and close-knit community and we lost one of our superstars, joe enriquez, when his wife called me to tell me what happened, i rushed over to the house in southeast to try to console her. another friend, ben cloud, he was a fighter pilot, he came over and so we consoled her and we walked out to leave and his kid came up to the passenger side of the car. he said, mr. campbell, why did

my father die? i couldn't answer that. i never answered that question. so when carol received a flag at arlington she was eight half months pregnant. i looked at her, i looked at her face, it was in "ebony" magazine, the funeral, i said she could not walk out of that cemetery buy or rent a house without any hassle. that just really kind of like drove me to the edge. so i couldn't let this rest. when i had to move two years later, i thought if i could get a place at river house next to the pentagon i could at least stop off to have dinner with my family. i was going to graduate school at night. i walked into the lobby again. i'm told with impunity, before the act was passed, i'm sorry sir, we don't practice open occupancy. so i wrote a letter to secretary of the defense mcnamara, one-page letter, asking him to desegregate the river house which was 1661 units.

i said it would be inappropriate to do any business with the company unless they capitulate. he called in the people, not e, but assistant secretary jack moscowitz and they decided to capitulate. so all total, with just a few letters and a lot of support from people that had their hearts and heads in the right place we got several thousand units desegregated. i was driven because of the hostility, the hair salon on the road wouldn't do my wife's hair. the woman, you know, refused, and my wife would not leave. the woman called the police. and the police said, you have to do mrs. campbell's hair because there is a public accomodations act. the white police knew the '64 civil rights act.

my daughter, wouldn't let her wade in water at private pool, they shut the power off. we got through all the stuff but that was what the environment was like. >> fast forward a little bit. right before the act, you testified in front of congress. you were still in the navy. >> right. >> and talk about kind of what your superior officers thought about that, and kind of sacrifice to be able to go to testify? >> let me put this in context. after the the after bus boycot in montgomery alabama, dr. king came up to michigan state university and spoke to reverend ralph abernathy, he told the people in washington they had a choice between riding in humiliation or walking in dignity. so i remember that. so that was one of my personal drivers. the other thing, i worked for

very interesting admiral from georgia. admiral steve morrison. his son, was jim morrison of the doors. admiral morrison told me in no uncertain terms, he did not want me using my position as a naval officer to advance civil rights. so i said, you're talking to the wrong guy. so, normally i wouldn't wear my whites in the summertime. so i put on my whites and my little bitty gold wings and went up and testified in front of the committee and told senator mondale, what i had to deal with. it was not about carlos campbell. it was about ben cloud and miss resistance. it was bill norman, the resistance he ran into. it was about frank peterson. we all had to adapt. this is not just the washington area. when you traveled across the country, you slept in your car

because you're black. you didn't know what hotel was segregated. i didn't want to stay in any segregated places. those were kind of things that drove me. >> so fast forward, you go. the act is passed, thank god. you're working, you're working at hud under romney as secretary. talk about what kind of environment that was like and what fueled you to try to get some things done once you arrived there. >> well, excuse me. i worked for a very progressive and committed assistant secretary, samuel c. jackson from kansas, topeka, and he was a republican. i had no affiliation at all but he convinced me to come and work for him. and he was determined to be very aggressive and turning the place around as he used to say and secretary romney from michigan

had been the neighbor of my first boss out of michigan state, dr. john schnell, i had a side channel to the secretary who was totally committed and he tried to use the law to integrate various communities, most famous of which was warren, michigan, and he had john mitchell on board, the ag, the attorney general. but the president of the united states, richard nixon, he came out with this term, he said, he did in the like the idea of forced integration. nobody is talking about forced integration. we're talking about the law, the law of the land. you take an oath, defend the constitution, all the laws, et cetera, but the president -- so i was out of hud. hud was a very, it was an agency in transition. i'm not going to say it was a racist agency but culturally it was a racist age i. [laughter]. -- agency. okay? hud built the ghettos of

america. and i had been in, i mean, my ex-wife now, she grew up in public housing and i know a lot of great people who, physicians, attorneys, that came out of public housing. so the housing -- >> just so you know, i came out of public housing. >> i'm setting you up, bro. i know that. i know that. and i think because of that experience you have the empathy of what you need to turn the whole system around. hud, i'm looking at the regulations, and they talked about, fha regs, maintaining neighborhood stability, which are the black folk, okay? so it is an education. but, i'm convinced that secretary romney was probably, and i knew about half of the secretaries over the years. i worked with jack kemp was a

good friend. jim lynn, we were on the city council together. excuse me. so, i'm sorry, everybody wanted to do the right thing but very few people did. secretary romney i think went way out, went as far as he could go and i respect his legacy but the rank-and-file people, they were committed to the status quo, and hud is a tough bureaucracy. and, let me say this i've been in washington a few years. there is a force if this town, they're called lobbyists, there are over 10,000. they generate 6 billion a year in revenues. and i was correctly quoted once because i said at its worse government is about deception and abuse. you don't see change in the

demographic pattern because the desire for the change is not there. there are not enough black people in the united states to scare all the white people that are scared. we don't have enough black folk to scare each other, okay? so i don't get it. i never quite understood the resistance to change. a lot of people move into communities because they don't want to raise their children in a segregated environment. they want diverse communities. but, you look at the resistance. >> let me ask you a question about leadership and going forward. so what you did, at least in my view, i think in the view of many folks is that you at the moments where you could make a difference you took that opportunity to do so. if you're advising us who, we're housing practitioners, this is the work we do every day, how

would you advise us as leaders to make more progress, and live up to what the fair housing act aspired to do? >> well i will have to put my hat on as an aviator. first thing when you go into a target, you want to know what the resistance is, what are the countermeasures you're going to need and a lot of, the great leadership challenge comes from edmund burke. all it takes for the triumph of good over evil is for good men to do nothing and you have to commit yourself is, and i come from a family of a lot of ministers and in micah, it says we're here to pursue justice, embrace mercy and walk humbly. two of those i got right. [laughter]. so, in the navy you are taught that the first principle of leadership is setting the

example and what you do, for example, you obviously, you have a well-earned outstanding reputation, which is the case with fannie mae and every day you have to be challenged. the great psychoanalyst, erick erickson said without a challenge you regress. you challenge yourself every day. life was a lot different. if you wake up in the morning and you say what is my challenge today? the challenge may be to hire two or three people or to make sure that the system is not clogged up. so applications get through and make the world a better place. so you feel like i think king wrote his dissertation on tilock, said the great anxieties of life, death, guilt and meanfulness. how can you become meaningful? what challenges do you want to take on? i mean if people did one

10th of what you're doing the world would be a better place. >> i will actually stop us there. [laughter]. why not? >> that is what you wrote. >> thank you very much, carlos, for being here. >> thank you, sir. [applause] >> up next for a conversation on national challenges and local solutions, please welcome rob breymaier, executive director of the oak park regional housing center and maria torres-springer, commissioner of new york city's division of housing preservation and development. back to lead the conversation, "the atlantic"'s gillian white. >> thus far we've been able to talk about the fair housing act at bird's-eye view. we had personal stories. i want you to talk about your

role in thinking about fair housing, implementing that in your cities? >> you want to start? >> sure. good morning everyone, i'm commissioner of the new york city housing preservation and development. our work is to advance the housing plan in new york where we set really ambitious goals to build and preserve affordable housing. it is about 300,000 homes through 2026. really the work that we do in the agency, together with many different sister agencies reflects in many ways what the story is of new york and so on one hand, it's a story, that continues to be one of growth, all time population high. all-time high in terms of jobs, continues to be a city that has an embarassment of riches in terms of cultural institutions et cetera, but it is also a story of too many inequities. of incredible rent burden, for instance on the part of too many

new yorkers. and it's a story that reflects a story of many cities across this country shaped by a history legacy, decades of inequities and discrimination. and so as we 50 years, it has been spoken a lot about today, after the passage of the fair housing act we believe that our work has to be not just about reflecting on that history, the good and the bad, but really about taking it as far as we can, advancing the work as far as we can, in order to create inclusive communities, to promote choice, to make sure that we're really increasing access to opportunity for new yorkers. and it is, and it is grounded, really in a balanced approach, making sure we're doing from a housing policy perspective all of the things that we need to do in order both to give people the

ability to reach a little bit higher, to access opportunities in neighborhoods across the city. we do that through a number of programs, changes in zoning that insure we have affordable housing in higher income neighborhoods while at the same time looking at place initiatives building affordable housing, pairing that with investment in infrastructure, in parks, in schools. and a lot of work to combat displacement. part of the choice we want to make sure exists in new york, is the choice to be able to stay and live and thrive in neighborhoods that new yorkers have really built. and they were there, in good sometimes -- good times and bad times and really in combination of those tools we hope we don't squander this opportunity we have to further this important challenging work. >> talk a little bit your work?

>> sure, i run a non-profit organization that exists in oak park, illinois, and we got started a little over 50 years ago. the work we do based on mission to achieve meaningful and lasting racial diversity in the community. oak park, if you don't know it, right next to the city of chicago. we border it directly to the west. it is 52,000 people, four 1/2 square miles. moderately dense community. it still feels like the city. the l goes to it. we had to make sure we came up with a plan as city of chicago changed on west side, from 9% white to 90% back in a very quick period, people in oak park recognized that would happen there too. instead what we could do figure out a way to embrace integration, so what that means we not only have people from all sorts of diverse back ground, at that time it was mostly about

black and white, but today it is about every racial group. we build a community where they all live together. in other words, we don't have a segragated part of our community where one group lives and another group lives somewhere else. that helped us build a community culture around the idea this should be a place inclusive, that we should try to build more equitable structures. and that everyone has a place to, to, everyone has a way to become part of our community. >> maria, like to move ahead with affirmatively fair housing despite current administration decision to kind of push that deadline back. i want to talk a bit about why new york chose to do that and what it means to be doing it despite of a lack of a federal push to do that. >> so we, the original deadline for our sub pigs of assessment of fair housing was 2019. we learned earlier this year that hud has chosen to delay the implementation of the rule. we in new york are moving

forward because, for two main reasons. one is, real recognition on the part of leaders of the city and the community and certainly us at hpd that this work of furthering fair housing, that this is, it is certainly a marathon. but it really what it is it is a relay and that we have now me in my role, i've been given at the time, i'm not going to drop it the work takes a long time. the decision to delay implementation of the rule we think is irresponsible decision that really rolls back a lot of the progress and a lot of commitment. not the time to put brakes on this work. the work will not be easy. we just launched as fair housing

comprehensive planning process, where we live, and it will be two years of not just policy analysis but really engagement with the community because part of what i think really needs to be central to this work as it has been in so many communities but for us in new york it is of course a very different context. the neighborhoods in new york are very different from each other and very different from neighborhoods across the country. we need to engage real human beings what it means for them to live where they live, what that means in terms of access to opportunity and what they want and what they believe needs to be done given that experience, not just by local government, local, state and federal government, in order for to us make sure we have as much as we can diverse and liveable neighborhoods. so we're moving full steam ahead with that work. we've already launched the

engagement process. and at the end of the process, in 2019, the original deadline, our commitment is to make sure that we will not have just run a robust and meaningful process but we will have recommitted ourselves to very specific goals, very specific strategies to continue this work. as i mentioned we have a balanced approach right now. it doesn't mean we have all the answers but it's critical to us that we are really engageing our citizens and are as grease sieve as possible in -- aggressive as possible furthering work. >> you talked about integration and requires proactive versus reactive i think is happening in a lot of communities. talk to us how you feel about being proactive and what those conversations actually look like on the ground. >> this is the genius what we

created, and when oak park started this week and community was created and it was 99% white we knew the change would happen and how it would be beneficial for the community as well as people moving into the community. so what we decided to do instead of come up with the typical only have an enforcement mechanism, right? so we do have enforcement mechanisms. if people are discriminated against, there is way to make the complaint to remedy the situation but what we do in ad decision to that, the housing center is critical to this, we enpeople when they're searching for housing. in the beginning of our time we did it in the homeownership and the rental market. now basically we trained our real estate agents in the community to take on the homeownership part for us and we basically dot rental side. in the rental situation, oak park, it is middle class, upper

middle class community, it is 45% rental as well. we have a lot of rental apartments to work with. when people want to move into the community they can come to us and talk to us what they're looking for. all the landlords work with us. they give us the listings and tell us all about the apartments. almost like we know exactly what is happening in the apartment. so we can connect people really quickly. get them exactly what they're looking for, what they can afford, put that together. in that process what we have to do is deal with implicit bias and what research shows, something kind of like a racial blind spot where even today, 45 to 50 years after we started this process, people still move to oak park. when they first move they have this idea it's a diverse place. because most places in america that are diverse are segregated, they assume oak park will be segragated as well. they race it go where they should belong in oak park and where they should avoid. that is constantly happening to

us. we have people help them, here are the listings, thank you very much. we actually talk with them for half an hour and work through the process and reservations are and where they are trying to avoid, that type of things. we can talk them into looking at those parts of oak park as well. this is almost always racially-based. it has a lot to do by more modeled segregated places. the neighborhood to our east 90% african community. there is community to our west is 85% white. there are two communities south, 60 to 90% latino. everybody thinks we must have the pattern within oak park as well. that is not the case. we can talk that through and explain it to them. their initial hesitation or ignorance of the parts of oak park they are avoiding goes away. we can add to number of options they would have thought about in the first place, get them to think about moving in a way that

we could sustain our integration or improve it. we're always trying to improve it. we're figuring out ways for people to figure that out all the time. just really quickly. if we do that, we know that about 68% of the time they will make a move that will either sustain or improve our integration. it keeps it going. it keeps improving. if they don't use us, partly from the data when an an owner rents to somebody we didn't provide to them. we let them know the unit closes out. it happens less than 50% of the time. if it happens under 50% of the time segregation continues. we have to have an intention mechanism in place to keep it going. >> before i ask you guys a more questions, i will come to you in the audience. think about them. you know my spiel. make sure they're questions. you can have your mics up and we have runners in the audience. i talk about the issue of affordability.

we would be remiss leaving that out. there is a ton of debate out there what affordable housing that works both looks like in sustaining actual after for thability and integrating communities. i wonder how you guys think about that moving forward and what you think the most successful models are? >> what we're pursuing in new york, like with many cities the affordability crisis is quite dire. we've been in a housing emergency for three decades. it continues with 30% of our renters are severely rent burdened, paying more than 50% of their income on rent. and so we have, as i mentioned earlier, what we believe to be the most ambitious plan to create and preserve affordable housing. i get asked all the time, affordable for whom? what does that really look like? so there is, the plan is intended to meet the needs of a

wide variety of families from different incomes levels. because the need is really dire, not just for extremely low income families but for working-class people in new york city. the firefighters. the nurses, the teachers who built the city, and foal like they are losing their grip on it. so thus far a third of the units, the homes that we have produced, it is about 88,000 so far, are for people who are extremely low and very low income families. in the last year it is actually close to 50%. we certainly understand that we have to provide the types of hopes for those who are most rent-burdened. there is a big piece of this given the commitment to fair housing that is making sure that the homes are built in all of the neighborhoods in new york. and so, there are places where we have land or where the land costs are reasonable enough,

such that those are, projects get assembled by our development partners. we provide subsidy and build affordable housing there but one of the key policy initiatives of the de blasio administration which we really believe will pay dividends into the future, our new mandatory inclusionary housing policy. so now anywhere in the city that is zoned for new residential growth you have to provide affordable housing, 20 to 25% permanently affordable housing this is anywhere in the city. and of course this means that we're able to get affordable housing in higher-income neighborhoods. so that is a key policy. it pairs with all of the work that is happening in other neighborhoods in the city and an important part of this is where, where we're building in lower income neighborhoods it is not just the housing. i think a big part of this work is understanding we have to connect the dots, connect the

dots between housing and health and jobs and safety and parks. and the last thing i'll say because the affordability crisis in new york is of a particular type there is a lot of work, anti-displacement that we really have been focusing on. providing, for example, free lawyers, if you're a low income resident in housing court. insuring that we're combating harrassment against landlords who are using unsavory practices. so all of those tools come together. it is not, it can't work everywhere. i'm sure there are things we still need to do in new york but those are the main levers that we're pulling. >> talk a little bit. >> the affordable housing issue in oak park is something of a more recent phenomenon. over the last 10 years for sure it is something much more top of mind to residents in the community and the reason for that is, going back it our

racial integration strategy that actually is a situation in which as we became less white and more diverse and more integrated we started to see our property values go up. so and they went up at a fairly rapid rate. it is because we were creating community that there was much more demand for than we had supply of. so, in other words, there are a lot more people who want to live in a place like oak park, then there are oak parks in the world. there are no other oak parks. there are couple communities in the chicago region, much smaller than oak park. only 10 to 12,000 people. there is not a whole lot of people to find a community like oak park. so we have way more demand than we have supply to deal with. what that means our property values went way up. that created some affordability issues. we've put into place though a lot of things that actually very similar to new york city in this case, as far as the folks who

we're dealing with, as far as feeling displacement pressures are folks really working class to lower middle class folks, right? people that make between $40,000 a year and $80,000 a year because they will not get subsidies or any help in our affordable housing tool box, that starts with the federal government and works its way down. people of both those incomes are able to afford to live in the community. we have to figure out how we do things that will help the folks in that middle. we actually have our own housing authority, even though it is only four 1/2 square miles. that housing authority has 520 voucher holders which is 6% of our rental market. that is really high number for a middle class community. it is usually under 1%. so we have these mechanisms we put in place for the very low income folks in the community. to try to figure out what we'll do around middle income is much harder. there are not really federal ways to fund that.

you have to come up with local and private ways to do that. and it is a bigger challenge than even the lowest income affordable housing issues. >> we want to go to the audience. p. >> linda white, independent researcher at washington, d.c. we keep hearing this integrated neighborhoods are better neighborhoods. i'm an integrationist but we had a lot of all black communities that have thrived such as right here in washington, dean wood, river park, but in some locations historically the black towns have been destroyed with the support of the u.s. government. and secretary campbell said even government built the ghettos. my question since the federal government so so responsible for inequity with housing what do you think is the case for reparations for housing? >> does one of of you want to take that? >> i'll try. first i will say yes, integrated neighborhoods are a really great

thing but they're not the only thing. we're not trying to say every neighborhood has to look exactly like every other neighborhood. there can be variations what integration looks like. that sort of thing, i think we all feel a lot more comfortable in sort of civil rights field about a neighborhood that is majority black and we're figuring out how to make that thriver sus a neighborhood majority white -- that always happened, right? doesn't feel as hefty of a lift. doesn't feel like as big of a win in the civil rights arena. whether it is intigrated or not, what we need to figure out, not only are we bringing people together, helping them live among one another but are we putting structures in place that will make sure that we all get the full benefit of that too, right? so even at oak park after 50 years we're still working on that. it is not a utopia. we're working hard to continue to improve on our strategy. in most of america, if you have

segregation you also have two separate entities all together. you have way different levels of resources, way different levels of opportunity, way different levels of power and influence. that really sets us up for disaster essentially. it doesn't hurt only people in the communities that don't have all resources. it hurts us all. we end up paying for even bigger structural things that cost much more money and create much more disharmony and pain than working together to figure out how to build that back. reparations in my point of view, two-ways to look at that. one, can we do that because we're actually, that is not only moral victory but economic victory for the country. we'll make things work out better. but we can do this for integration too, trying to share and leverage the privilege that white people have, bring other people into that community so they can take advantage of what sort of natural for white people, make it natural for everybody. >> i think reparations is where

we'll end it today. i want to thank our panel. ♪ [applause] >> now for a conversation on measuring the ripple effects, welcome, sheryll cashin from georgetown law, allison silberberg, mayor of alexandria, virginia, sherrilyn i've fill, director of the naacp legal defense and educational fund. to lead the conversation, welcome back "the atlantic"'s vann newkirk. [applause] >> we get to wrap up our conversation on housing equity, what segregation means. what i want to talk about in this panel, sort of what we

really mean, what the real effects are of housing integration and inequity. i want to start by asking everyone on the panel, one question, when we're talking about housing equity, what are we talking about? start with sheryll. >> today, 2/3 of african-americans live in what would be described as low opportunity settings. 40% of black children live in very low opportunity settings, and they don't have much in the way of economic mobility because they're living in a place where there's, tends to be disinvestment. majority of black kids are in segregated schools. what we have in this country, what i call opportunity hoarding. direct horizontal competition between high opportunity, medium and low opportunity places and

we tend to disinvest, overpolice, we have a lot of black kids in schools where, no one says this out loud but, let's disinvest in these schools, give them the weakest teachers, often teachers who are not certified to teach what they have. so everywhere you turn, if you're in a low opportunity setting, you are constrained in terms of access to jobs, access to education, access to networks. so that, that's what i mean by housing inequity. >> we put a lot of this on black students especially. we say the way out is to get a good education and to get through all of these things but you're saying, this is the end result? >> well, the combination of segragated housing and segregated schooling, we are ordered ourselves in a way, particularly where schooling is not an engine of opportunity, it

is an engine of a caste system in this country. we like to believe about the schiff rally of america, but america has rising economic inequality, we have not ordered up our so you sight in a way that lives up to our values. >> mayor silberberg, i want to follow up, when we talk about housing inequities especially in the context of alexandria, what are we talking about and what does it mean to your office and your policy. >> affordable housing, is this on? can you hear me? affordable housing is a top priority in alexanderia. it's a core value of the city. we're talking about how to increase affordable housing in the affordable housing fund which existed for some 15 years.

we just opened up a new building for 93 affordable housing unit and the building is stunning t was created by a non-profit developer in partnership with the city of alexanderia. if you drive by the building, you don't drive to say oh, there is the affordable housing building. that is not what i want for our city. we must have a place that is noble, really, and is appropriate you can't drive by and say there's the the affordable housing building. that is not right. this is a really a crisis for the country. and in terms of equity, it is really about fairness, that people need housing. and for those 93 units, some 2,000 signed up. in the past 20 years, we have

lost something 90% of our market rate affordable housing units in our city, over 12 or 14,000 market rate affordable housing units because of redevelopment. what we're really doing, we're reaching out, i've been committed to this for quite a while. we're partnering with non-profit developers. we can take funds from that affordable housing fund, which i want to increase, and it is sort of like a lockbox. and that is what other cities need too, i hope. so, that was created so long ago, 15 years ago. and so now the community embraces it. as far as education, i mean, clearly through the fair housing act, it was signed into law and late '60s, we're still feeling

effects. we are still feeling, the legacy of segregation in this country. but we have an ability to right that wrong and it has taken a long time. it is a shame. it's a dark chapter of our country but now as a country i think we're moving forward. in the city of alexandria is fully committed, and the council i serve with is committed as well. where the community has kind of a little bit of friction with some of these redevelopments is making sure that those buildings understandably fit in to the community architecturally, or that, it doesn't, you know, overwhelm in height and density. that it fits in. so you can use, you can do things architecturally like, making sure it looks similar to

the architectural around there. making sure there is a set back at the very top it doesn't seem as high but and affordable housing building that i was mentioning to you, vann, in the green room, it has 40 mers ami, 50, 60% ami but it is all affordable housing. what is coming across the way from this building, 50 feet away, nothing, a building a market rate building. and there is shared amenities. so anyway. >> sherrilyn i wanted to follow up with you, i'm following your work, following the work of your organization for a while and it seems fair housing, housing inequity are the root of what you do. what are we you can talking about? >> i want to go back to sheryll,

i want to put in context thinking of this as an investment. you heard earlier panels and history of kind of the role in the federal government in creating segregated america. this massive investment in creating public housing and requiring really restrictive covenants to provide mortgage insurance and red lining, so for the. what that represents is massive investment in creating the landscape of america that we now see and that we now accept as though it is inevitable, right? if you think even just about investment in the interstate highway system which made the white suburbs possible, $25 billion invested in that $230 billion today's money, right. just interstate highway. that is massive investment. think about all the massive invests went into creating landscape, the physical landscape that essentially expresses racism of the early 20th century, right?

we get to 1968, we pass the fair housing act, by the way by one vote. a week after martin luther king is assassinated, right? it is passed in shame by one vote, right? so it is not like there is this well-spring of desire to break down segregation, right? that, there is blood on that fair housing act, right? so we get there. now it is 1968. how do you respond to the investment i just talked about? well you file lawsuits against active discrimination. you sue donald trump and his dad for not renting to black people. you create some of the measures that we talked about. but you don't do a commensurate investment that balances the investment that was expended to create the landscape that really made this kind of segregated america. we still to the day, not met the investment that is required. so the first thing is to think

about, what would it mean if we wanted to invest in truly deseg a gating america? if the federal government wanted to put money where its mouth is. i think there are measures that can be done. some being executed. some are being rolled back but we're pushing back against them but there issue of segregation. the second thing we can't look at housing separate from everything else. housing actually is connected with almost every other issue we're talking about. cheryl talked about housing and education. if we didn't have segregated housing we wouldn't have segregated schools. we now how that happened. we know the supreme court reinforced it in 1973, with two case, san antonio school district versus rodriguez, the court endorsed idea to use property taxes to fund schools. and miller versus bradley, you could not require interdistrict

busing to deal with integration. if you wanted to engage in white flight you could engage in that what about transportation? the mobility to move around a community. once you get out of the large cities in america, and go to places like baltimore where we expend a lot of our energy and work there isn't a rapid transit system that would get african-american community which lives along the east/west corridor, back and forth out to the jobs at johns hopkins. johns hopkins largest employer to the state. to their credit actually employs ex-offenders. can you get to the job from west baltimore? can you get there on time? can you get back home to see your kids after school? no. there is no real rapid transportation system in that town. issues of water. we've all seen what is happening in flint. that is about water poetability. there is also about water affordability. a lot of work we're doing now looking at relationship between water affordability and homeownership and loss of homes.

water tax liens are becoming one of the highest causes of african-americans being foreclosed on because they have these water tax liens. then your house is sold at foreclosure. they're auctioning homes. we moratorium last year sale of 1500 houses. flint, if you can believe it, regularly races issue of foreclosing on homes for water tax liens and there is not even potable water there. the question of munitional services, relationship between that and really having communities of integrity, what does it mean to be a homeowner? what does it mean to have the services you need to be able to conduct your home? in lagrange, georgia, we filed and a meek discuss brief in case involving challenge in lagrange, georgia, attaching municipal services paying court costs and fees. now we attach it to the justice system. if you haven't paid court fees

the municipal utility will turn off your water and lights. how they bear on equity in housing. you can not consider it alone. tough connect it to all the things you need to be able to insure that you can pay for your home, that your home has service is, that you can get to and from your job. your children can be educated. that lies at heart of what we do. >> i want to follow up with you, especially about an issue that is on lots of peoples mind now, that is starbucks. you will be participating in the next month's, the trainings people are doing. i don't know if people are sort of understanding that there is a housing element to thinking about starbucks phenomenon nationwide. who has access to our increasingly privatized public spaces. who has access to amenities. who is considered to be in group and out group, when it comes to our justice system. can you give us maybe a preview

of what you're going to be telling to folks? what is your sense of how this -- >> the reason that i agree to try and help support the effort of starbucks to do what i think it is their intention to do, really address issue of racial discrimination, this goes, because of fair housing act, you have to add to it the civil rights act of 1964 which allowed racial discrimination in public accomodations. we don't think enough about the reality of that law. first of all the fact that we need ad civil rights act of 1964. that today, i'm looking out at this room, we all, we all gathered here, we all came here in ways that would have been very different in 1960, right? like where you could go, what hotel you stayed at, what nice outfit on, whether you as african-american could have tried on the outfit in the store that you bought it from. at what restaurant you could eat at. whether you could eat in the

airport restaurant wherever you came from. we don't even, we just moved through it. we accept it like air but that had to actually be created. and that too is unfinished work, right? the question of who black people are in the public space and the ways in which your citizenship and dignity are implicated by your belonging in the public space really lies at the core and heart of the whole struggle around civil rights. and so to see what happened to those young men and, obviously we've done this work for a very long time. numerous cases, denny's and shoney's and we sued abercrombie & fitch and wet seal. you could do it that way, right? this was opportunity with a business that i think sincerely wants to try to grapple with this. think about what if we compelled or expected corporations to take responsibility themselves for the public space? the public space by the way, which goes to your question is

not just about what happens inside of your store but also what happens outside of your store. how do people interact with this business that exists in 8,000 communities? when you create a public space, because that is what starbucks created a public space, right? you come in. you're supposed to be able to sit there for a really long time. you write your paper. you finish writing your screenplay. your roommate makes too much noise at college. you want to finish your paper there and have business meeting there as these young men were attempting to do. that is community space, that is public space. we have been contesting about the role of black people, place in public space forever. it implicates all of those questions. just lastly, what does it mean when a starbucks comes to your community? it means for african-american community it means change is coming. i was talking with my colleague about what it means to see a starbucks.

taking responsibility for that, who you are in that space. >> going to ask one more question. i think i want everybody to queue up their questions in the audience. sheryll, you talked in your first answer about this chain, the cycle of disinvestment, how it affects children downstream. it seems to set every generation back a little more. how do you break that chain? how do you conceptualize breaking that cycle when each sets back each generation some more? >> we put to bed an anti-black institution, we seem to create a new one. slavery, jim crow, ghetto. these are intentional institutions. and the fair housing act had two norms. anti-discrimination norm and an

integration norm, which required dismantling of segregation. the good news is that there are 400, more than 400 local jurisdictions like yours that are actively promoting integrated housing. you know, the good news is despite the fact that the secretary of hud is trying to delay the further, affirmatively furthering fair housing rule, there are a number of jurisdictions that understand that integration, when it is achieved actually works. it works, you get higher rates of social mobility for children. you get lower rates of prejudice. you actually create spaces where people interact with each other, more based on familiarity than fear, right? how do you break it? each generation we have to keep fighting the good fight for this

idea, perhaps a utopian idea that it is possible to have a robust, multiracial, multiclass community that includes rather than excludes, right? but we need constituents to organize. there is a constituency out there that likes diversity, wants it for their kids in their neighborhood and schools but the constituency for integration is not organized. meanwhile, when you try to do things without the organization, them nimyism, that is stereotypes people carry in their heads. this is not just about starbucks, right? everywhere you have gentrifying neighborhood, i have students written about this, this is kind of frightening. you have in groups, people who moved into formally majority

black and poor spaces without a lot of cultural comfort. what we're seeing increasing calls for police, mainly by white people, who are not comfortable, you know, frankly with a dark-skinned black man sitting there, with you know, i thought it was a fly hair do just like yours, a lack of comfort. right? the good news there is expanding group it what i call culturally dexterous whites that is, getting experience with difference, liking it, sees it. actually getting comfortable with using the "r" word, saying that is racism, i disagree with it. which have to create, keep fighting to create these kind of intigrated spaces. black folks have allies. we need more of them. >> i might just add something,

since 1990 we've been very proactive about testing with regard to the fair housing act. we have a great office, office of housing in the city of alexandria and, i'm really proud of that. second, i often asked myself, should i, a rhetorical question, what would dr. king say? what would dr. king say what happened in charlottesville? what would dr. king say about this conversation? and, from my part, in late november, sift -- 2016 i initiated and wrote alongside with our human rights commission office a statement on inclusiveness in the council. i signed it, it is on a poster all across alexandria. it is very short. it is in english, spanish,

arabic. it has been embraced by city. not just posted in libraries schools, rec centers, people facilities and homes and businesses. it is in the city hall for free. basically what it says, we're talking about which is fairness, inclusiveness, equity, and people want to live in a city that is inclusive. businesses want to place their workers and run their businesses in such a city. but it is the right thing to do. i'm very proud of our statement on inclusiveness. i'm encouraging other jurisdictions to write their own version of it. basically what it says, it says alex we're a city of kindness and compassion and we're tolerant and not just tolerant we're embracing and accepting. we denounce all hate speech and hate crimes and bias and discrimination in all forms. and that people, and that

everyone has a place at the table and background, race, gender age, disability, ability, religion, immigrant status, on and on. it is very simple and really crucial to create that core foundation, and housing is a part of that. school is a part of that jobs. access to transit. in fact, when you were talking about transit i totally agree with you. that is one of the first questions we as a council look at when we are looking at redeveloping a side and there is bus rapid transit going to be right near that new building that we just, ribbon cutting for. >> can i say one of the reasons why transportation is so important is because we're really operating on dual tracks in terms of work we're doing at the legal defense fund. of course, committingting to the importance of enat that freighted housing. . .

the reason we work on the water tax lien issues because want to make sure african-americans can hold onto their homes. there's two parts of this and so it's not just about creating integrated communities but it's also about ensuring african-american to live in african-american communities have the tools and the opportunity to have those communities be strong, economically found, environmentally sound, have good schools. we consider the part of our education work because at the end end of the day the school is threaded by us as a committee. the strength of that community determines the strength of that school. we have to be able to keep those two things in her head at once that people have a right to live

in the way that is dignified where they are, and also to work to dismantle the segregated landscape that was created by decades and decades of federal policy. >> one good question back here. >> hello. my name is barbara moreland. i'm a volunteer with the arlington, virginia, partnership for affordable housing. years ago when i became aware of commercial affordable housing being offered in our area, i was told that those affordable units would only be restricted to affordable housing for a certain time and i'm interested to know if that's generally to if commercially developed properties include affordable housing? and if it is, how jurisdictions address the need, continue have that many or more affordable units in their areas? and third, what happens to a

person who is living in an affordable unit that gets transition to commercial value? >> well, in alexandria first of all we have housing national planet talks about these issues. we have a replacement that if something should be developed, we need to provide a space for the person who has to leave that site for redevelopment and we have to find a place for them or give them a voucher if they would choose to go elsewhere. and then finally it used to be we required a developer would only keep the units for, say, 20 or 25, maybe 30 years. but now it's 40 or longer years. i think he was 20 years and now it's 40 or 50 years. it's just -- it's just for the asking. we have voluntary contribution

when someone is going to redevelop just a regular site, let's say right near summer off jeff davis highway or something, which is the name will be changed actually, but a separate issue. [laughing] after 50 years of conversation. that site is, when they're building let's say just the commercial property, nothing to do with housing, but we ask those developers, we can't require virginia but we can ask, and we have standard voluntary contribution formula for asking them to make a significant, financial contribution, and that money goes into the portal housing fund. they can also alternatively provide come if their building dealings with units, let's say, as housing, and he can provide a few units. either way they are participating in this process. i think we should get more for them -- do i think we should get

more from them? frankly, yes. >> thank you so much for the question. we have one more, very quickly. >> bob woodson. the question that i have for the panel, in fact, the old day has been on race, the question of the civil rights veteran myself, why if we now have 10,000 black elected officials operating in most of the cities, most of the school systems, healthcare systems, judicial systems are run by black people. the challenge, the question is why are our children and our people failing and systems run by our own people? if racism where the issue. washington, d.c., we lead the nation in per capita expenditures on poverty, and the greatest income disparity is between low income blacks and upper income blacks. if racism with the culprit, why are not all blacks suffering

equally? >> another conference. would love to participate. [laughing] i would say my brief answer is, i mean, i reject out of hand the theory that because you have black mayor, that means that you now can ameliorate racism because i just described to you the structural nature of racism and the deep investment, , the part we don't talk about. we actually don't talk about white supremacy and racism as an investment. and so to the extent those investments to become embedded, and then you have things like what i talked about, supreme court decision that aid and abet the kind of movement that happen as a result of people not wanting to ten integrated schools. you're constantly fighting this rearguard action. and until we face that come until the face the investment nature and the structural nature

that's actually built into the physical space, i always say we think about racism in the past like white water fountain signs and it was physical, we removed all that but it is still in a a physical landscape because it was created based on those principles. until we are prepared to talk about what would it take to dismantle it, whoever is the mayor of your local town, i'm thinking about baltimore, right? it's not in the individual mayor that i can say is responsible for what has happened to baltimore. i'm not saying all have been great but if we begin to really give back the structural onion of baltimore, you should want to know not why did freddie gray just get arrested, what happened in that band, but why was living in that particular part of west baltimore and we been able to get the job even if you wanted to get you a job on the other side of town? and why was he and his sister so let poison in the 1990s even though we know anything about lead poisoning? you have to ask all those questions and i think until we deal with that we will continue

to think a black face is a way we that racism doesn't exist when, in fact, that's not true. [applause] >> can i add one word to that? the word that's not there is ghetto. the coroner commission said we need to dismantle the ghetto. concentrated poverty is a government institution, and if you look -- what's happening, the inequality talk about between upper income people, black people and low income people, the structural thing, the structural consequences of concentrated black poverty, a situation with excess is aberrational. only 1% of concentrated poverty school succeed regardless of race. if that structure exists, and yet sometime upper income black people are participating in

others. our supporting, this is what the book is about, so that is a class dimension, but if you got that structure, concentrated poverty and you're not actively dismantling it, or actively giving the ghetto communities access, you're going to get more of the same. >> on going to invite you to our next conference. [applause] [inaudible] >> i thank you so much and for the question, and will continue dialogue. thank you all for your questions, thank you. please give a round of applause for our panelists. [applause] >> thank you to all of our speakers today, and for sharing what is i think been an incredibly powerful conversation and for edwin sharing their stories. i'd like to get to thank her underwriter fannie mae for making today possible. and your time is valuable with us. if we go one request.

we have an email survey that will come out from you later today workers also copies in the room. we would really appreciate your feedback. it is important to us. thanks again for being here and we hope you stay a little bit longer and get to know the great people in this room. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> a look at some of our prime time programming coming up tonight.

>> also coming up in unity with principal deputy white house press secretary raj shah who talked about his family, growing up in connecticut, his early beginnings in politics. the relationship between the media and the white house as well as what it's like working for president trump. that will air tonight at 9:30 p.m. eastern also on c-span. the supreme court heard oral argument tuesday in south dakota versus wayfair, the case concerning online sales tax collection. the court will release the oral argument today and you will be able to hear it tonight at eight eastern here on c-span2. video earlier of the casket of barbara bush insights it mountains episcopal church in houston where she will lie in repose beginning at 1 p.m. eastern. public in the last until about .

she passed way earlier this week at the age of 92. [background sounds] >> services for barbara bush include the public visitation from saint martin's episcopal church in houston. that's today at 1 p.m. eastern available on c-span and c-span.org. the funeral service for barbara

bush is saturday at noon eastern. eastern. speakers include her son jeb bush, friend susan baker, and historian jon meacham. watch our coverage on c-span and c-span.org, or listen on the c-span radio app. >> up next the reserve bank of clinton president and ceo loretta mester on monetary policy and the economy. she dresses the federal funds rate inflation and employment numbers and a federal monetary policy seeks to achieve financial stability. this is hosted by princeton university. [applause] >> thank you very much for the kind introduction. i appreciate and a t