2022:
This report is one of four reports completed for the Homes for Equity Initiative. These reports were all coauthored with Nancy S Lee and Marcos Luna. The Homes for Equity Initiative is a restorative justice housing program that aims to address the racial homeownership gap and associated racial wealth gap in Boston.
You can access all four reports by clicking on this link: https://zenodo.org/record/7310947#.Y8Di6-zMI-R.
The aim of this research was to document the policies and practices of historic and ongoing racial discrimination in the homeownership market in Boston, as well as the ongoing impacts of such discrimination, with a specific focus on the neighborhood of Roxbury. The racial disparities in homeownership we see today are not simply the outcome of past discrimination; these disparities are evidence of the persistence of White supremacist systems that prevent too many Black and Brown households from owning their own homes. Indeed, Boston engaged in its own form of Jim Crow. This series is part of a modest effort to begin to uncover a history that has been buried or dismissed by a society that does not want to confront the injustice and harm of past and ongoing racial discrimination.
The Fair Housing act explicitly creates the duty to redress historic racial discrimination in the housing market. As such, we do not focus on documenting the intent of public or private actors that produced racially disparate treatment or outcomes. Where we find it, we present it but documenting the intention of individual actors is not our goal; individual intent is irrelevant to the legal and moral duty to take meaningful action to dismantle systems of racial discrimination and segregation.
Given that our goal is to disturb Boston’s willful blindness to its own history, we do not take a colorblind approach to analyzing the history, the policies, or the current impacts of racial discrimination. The entire history of the United States, including Boston’s history, is specifically color-conscious. A color-blind approach would prevent us from seeing the racially disparate impacts in the policies that were created and the ways in which discretion was used in practice. We also do not take a values-neutral approach to this research. The duty to redress historic racial discrimination requires that we presume that racial discrimination, however it happens, and the racial disparities produced are inherently unjust and indefensible.
The other three reports available at the link below are:
- The City of Boston’s Role in Racial Discrimination in Home Buying
- The Role of Banks and the Real Estate Industry in Racial Discrimination in Home Buying in Boston
- The Federal and State Role in Racial Discrimination in Home Buying in Boston
You can access all four reports by clicking on this link: https://zenodo.org/record/7310947#.Y8Di6-zMI-R.