How to desegregate New York City? Start local, these authors say.

New York City consistently ranks among the most segregated urban areas in the U.S., despite passing the country’s first fair housing law over 60 years ago.

The New York City region ranked second nationwide in Black-white and Latino-white segregation, and fifth in Asian-white segregation, according to a Brookings analysis last year of 2020 Census data, based on how evenly two groups are spread across a metropolitan area.

A new book, "Just Action," offers policymakers and community leaders a playbook on how to reverse segregation in an era of abundant discussion about antiracism, though often with little to show for it. “Placing ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs is not enough,” reads a hint from the end of the book's introduction.

"Just Action" is the brainchild of daughter-father duo Leah and Richard Rothstein. Richard Rothstein is a housing expert whose debut book "The Color of Law" topped reading lists about racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in 2020.

In his first book, Richard Rothstein argued that segregation isn’t the product of personal preference and choices, but the result of decades of government policy — and ongoing neglect — from city planners to federal agencies.

New York City received several mentions in “The Color of Law,” from the local public housing authority’s separate Black and white complexes to the state Supreme Court’s approval of racially restrictive covenants on housing deeds long ago, which both furthered segregation.

The Rothsteins' latest release argues that only a deliberate change of course will reverse segregation and the unequal life outcomes it creates.

Gothamist recently sat down with co-author Leah Rothstein, a former activist and local policy consultant, to discuss their work. The conversation was edited for clarity and length.

Why has residential segregation in New York City, but also all across the country, so stubbornly persisted?

There's a lot of reasons. One is it's hard to change. A lot of the policies that created racial segregation set up those patterns, and then those patterns are self-perpetuating.

We now have policies that say you can't discriminate in the sale of rental of housing. [Like the Federal Fair Housing Act, passed in 1968.] But prohibiting discrimination in the future doesn't do anything to address the wealth disparity that exists between whites and African Americans because of that past policy.

Some people associate integration with gentrification and displacement of existing residents in mostly non-white neighborhoods. Why, from your vantage point, is integration so important?

We're not just talking about a benign separation of people. Whites have been allowed to live in neighborhoods that are called high-opportunity neighborhoods. They're areas with well-resourced public schools, open space, access to jobs, transportation, grocery stores. Segregated African American communities have been divested of those resources. They're closer to pollution, to highways, fewer grocery stores, poorly resourced public schools.

If we want to remedy the effects of segregation, we want to increase the resources in those under-resourced African American communities. So that those areas can be areas of higher opportunity for the people who live there. We believe that when that happens, it's sort of inevitable that it will racially integrate. People with higher incomes, often white people, will want to move into those neighborhoods because now they have better resources. The only way to prevent that is to not invest in those communities, and that's not an acceptable solution to us. So that's why we argue that the increased investments should be coupled with anti-displacement efforts.

Why do you say it’s so important to not just advocate on behalf of the poorest among us and focus on the “missing middle,” as you put it?

It’s always a balance of where we're going to put our resources. The lowest-income families who would qualify for low-income subsidized housing, they need housing. We should invest in that housing to meet that need.

But there's also a huge gap [for] working families. What we call the “missing middle” – people who earn too much to qualify for low-income subsidized housing and earn too little to be able to afford market-rate housing.

And there are very little subsidies to build housing for that “missing middle.” But without housing that missing middle, we're not meeting the full needs of everybody in our communities. We’re missing a huge swath of the population that can't afford housing now. And that’s in a housing crisis themselves.

To challenge segregation, we really have to focus on this missing middle as well. Because most African Americans are not poor. Most are working families who fall into this missing middle category.

In terms of creating effective integrated developments where people get along and learn to live together and learn about each other, it's important to have the middle income as well.

In “Just Action,” we give some examples of development that have had market-rate units for affluent families and then subsidized lower-income units. The people in those developments didn't really get along. They didn't understand each other. Often developments that have the middle-income [group], they sort of serve as a bridge to create a healthier relationship.

How do we create these complexes that are truly mixed developments?

We give some examples in “Just Action” of developers that have found creative financing schemes to be able to do this. The problem is that there's federal subsidies for low-income units. There's profit to be made from market-rate units. But there's very little government subsidies for that missing middle housing.

One thing we can do is advocate our local government [to] start a fund to help finance missing middle housing. We give an example in “Just Action” of a development in Massachusetts. That state has what they call a workforce housing program. We don't like to use that term workforce, but that's the name of that program. And that program helps to finance these middle-income units.

We describe a development there that has both deeply subsidized units for low-income families, middle-income slightly subsidized units, and then market-rate units all in the same development. All of the units are identical. They have social events. And you could see that it's a diverse group. And we've interviewed the people who live in this development and they know their neighbors and know that the development is mixed income, but they don't know the incomes of any of their neighbors. They don't know who falls into what category.

Other developers have used a different financing scheme, the New Market Tax Credit, to be able to help subsidize these middle income units. So it's possible, but there just isn't enough funding out there.

Another way, they call it “naturally affordable” units is to just allow smaller units to be built. This might not be applicable in New York City itself, but in suburbs, [with] single-family only zoning, when they only allow one house per lot, those homes are expensive. If you can allow two or three units per lot, a duplex or a triplex, those units will be more affordable just naturally because they're smaller. And they take up less of a lot.

You argue that policymakers need to increase investment in lower-income Black neighborhoods, and also open up historically exclusionary affluent white neighborhoods. How do they ensure both occur at the same time?

I don't know that we can ensure that they happen at the same time, and we're not necessarily advocating that they have to happen at the same time. Just that they all should happen.

In “Just Action,” we give dozens of policies and strategies that a local group can pursue to redress segregation. But we don't say what any community should start with and which is the right strategy for any community, because they're all very different.

It’s going to take a lot of policies, a lot of actions, a lot of institutions, to undo it and challenge segregation. It's not all going to happen at once. It is going to be an incremental, sort of piecemeal approach, but every little piece helps a little bit to get us there. And every little piece has big impacts on people's lives.

How do communities make this change happen?

Getting local policy change to happen requires an organized group of residents advocating for it. The whole premise of the book is that we need a new activated civil rights movement around the country that is made up of local groups and local communities that are looking at these issues and what they can do in their own communities to challenge and remedy racial segregation.

In order to create these local groups that can advocate for change and to challenge segregation, we do need to build biracial, multi-ethnic groups in our own communities to begin to work on this. And to do that, we have to start to build social relationships with people of different races from different parts of town.

We know that that's challenging. Because we live in such segregated communities, we don't naturally develop those relationships often. In “Just Action,” we gave some examples of communities that have taken these extra intentional steps to bring people together from other sides of town.

What’s an example?

There’s the “map twins” example that we talk about in the book. An artist took the unique layout of Chicago, which is a perfect grid. So when you fold the map in half the north side and south side streets sit perfectly on top of each other. The north side is mostly white. The south side is mostly African American.

The houses that sat perfectly on top of each other, she called “map twins” and she photographed those houses. And did an art exhibit to show the visual representation of segregation — which is that these houses have the same street number, but they're on the north and south side of the same street, and the houses look somewhat similar, but the neighborhoods around them look very different.

Then she introduced herself to the residents of those houses and asked if they wanted to meet their “map twin.” And many of them did, and they started to get to know each other and they took each other on tours of their neighborhoods. And they started to learn about the other side of town and learn that they actually had more in common than they thought personally.

They've developed social relationships. They've gone to form block twins. So whole blocks get together from the north side and south side of town. And have block parties and neighborhood beautification efforts. Then the next step, in terms of the redress of segregation would be these groups working with a local organizer to start to think about how they can take action to address the consequences of segregation in their community.

But that's one example of many groups that have formed by intentionally bringing people of different races together to just start to build some social relationships. And that is an essential first step.