Building Community and Purpose: Leah Rothstein on Just Action

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[00:00:50.340] - Michael Brown, AICP

Planners are familiar with the incredible book, The Color of Law by Richard Walthee. In it, he exposes how racial segregation has been intentionally perpetuated through governmental policies and regulations, bringing to light the economic and social disparities between white and black Americans. The book left many asking, what's next? What do we do? Thank Actually, Richard and his daughter, Leah Rothstein, co-wrote a follow-up book called Jess Action: How to Challenge Segregation and acting Under the Color of Law. The follow-up is a guide for anyone to be an advocate for change. I'm Michael Brown, Chair of the National Planning Conference Committee. Joining me on this APA podcast is co-author Leah Rothstein. Leah has worked on public policy and serve as a consultant to nonprofit housing developers, cities, counties, and towns on topics of community development, affordable housing policy, practice, and finance. Leah will be speaking at NPC 25 as the closing keynote speaker. But we are grateful to have an opportunity to offer you a sneak preview. Leah, thanks for joining us. I was instructed to keep this more conversational than an interview, so my Southern sensibilities kicked in and said, Hey, the first thing you do is make space for an individual to share who they are with your audience.

 

[00:02:22.580] - Michael Brown, AICP

I'll do that with this question. Can you tell us your journey to this work? I imagine for many, the fact that you share this field with your father leads to assumption about how you got here. But in your own words, how did you arrive at this work you are engaging today?

 

[00:02:43.220] - Leah Rothstein

Yeah, sure.

 

[00:02:43.960] - Michael Brown, AICP

Well, how long do we have?

 

[00:02:48.220] - Leah Rothstein

Let's see. I did grow up with two parents who were very active in civil rights and unions and women's rights, all I had a lot of issues throughout my life. I grew up knowing that if something doesn't seem right, it's up to us to do something about it. That was in my blood. Then I went to college and I started getting involved in student organizing to defend affirmative action in California. From there went on to work as a community organizer in Oakland for working on protecting and building leadership and advocacy capabilities in lower income communities of color in Oakland to work on issues like environmental justice, police accountability, stuff like that. And then I got frustrated with losing a lot and wanted to figure out ways to be on the other side, not the other side, philosophically or ideologically, but be on the inside to be able to figure out how we can enact change that sticks and that we can actually win. I got a degree in public policy and focused on community development, housing issues, land use, planning. I took a lot of classes in the planning school. I came to that because working as a community organizer, I found that so much of the issues around equity that I cared about and that I was working on came down to our communities, the built environment, how those communities were designed and planned, and the impacts that that has on our life outcomes, and the disparities that we see between different communities because of those decisions that that seemed to be made behind closed doors.

 

[00:04:47.200] - Leah Rothstein

That's how I came to work on these issues. It wasn't a given that my dad and I's careers would, collide like this. He worked in education policy, He did a lot of research and writing around the black-white achievement gap in primary and secondary education. That led him to look at racially segregated schools as one of the primary drivers to the differing achievements for black and white children because their schools are segregated. He dug deeper, why are schools segregated? Well, it's because neighborhoods are segregated. That's how he came to write The Color of Law, answering the question for himself, why do schools look like this and why do neighborhoods look like this? Is it really a de facto result, de facto segregation which is what we're told, that it's personal preferences or it's an accident that our neighborhoods and schools are so segregated. That's what led him to the Color of Law. I was doing my life. The Color of Law became very widely read, and a lot of people asked him after reading it, Well, what do we do about this now that we understand correctly the real history of how we came to be segregated?

 

[00:06:10.560] - Leah Rothstein

What can we do? He felt like he's more of a historian, a journalist, not a housing policy person. So he asked me to help him answer that question. To be honest, it took a little while before I agreed to embark on this project with him, but I did, and I'm not sorry. Together, we brought our many areas of expertise together to write Just Action.

 

[00:06:40.360] - Michael Brown, AICP

Oh, that is so hilarious. You jumped my other question because I am a father of two daughters, 12 and 13, and I was wondering whose idea it was and who had the apprehension of doing this.

 

[00:06:57.120] - Leah Rothstein

Well, there you have it. I could tell you at I would have never predicted. I would write a book with my dad. He probably wouldn't have either.

 

[00:07:07.550] - Michael Brown, AICP

Well, that gives me hope.

 

[00:07:10.430] - Leah Rothstein

Yeah, for sure.

 

[00:07:11.940] - Michael Brown, AICP

The book is your first collaboration together?

 

[00:07:15.560] - Leah Rothstein

Correct.

 

[00:07:16.760] - Michael Brown, AICP

Oh, great. Great. Wonderful. I know you get a lot of requests to speak about this work. And, joining us in Denver, you have the opportunity to speak to the largest gathering of American planners. People who are in the know and industry insiders to some of the issues that you've covered in your book. What excites you about being able to speak to this particular audience?

 

[00:07:45.810] - Leah Rothstein

Well, a few different things. One is it's exciting to speak to a room of people who already understand that those decisions that many people think are just bureaucratic, like zoning code decisions that cities make that have no impact on regular people's lives. This is a room full of people who understand intimately that those decisions, what many people maybe think doesn't affect their lives actually has real impacts on people's lives, their life outcomes, their health, their job prospects, their educational prospects, how we plan our communities and how we zone them, the building regulations. Those have real impacts on our community's health, our personal health, our family's ability to thrive. Speaking to a room full of people who understand that from the get-go is great. I can skip, cut to the chase. I think it's also interesting. I've spoken to a lot of planners and people in that profession and adjacent professions who have been in the field for a long time When the Color of Law came out, really learned a lot of new things about their field and the history of how planning contributed to segregation and racial disparities. I'm not saying that just because someone is a planner, I assume they know all of this history.

 

[00:09:18.940] - Leah Rothstein

It's also interesting and exciting to speak to people who might be getting a new view of the impact their profession has had and the potential it to have a different impact in the future. Now, the other reason I'm excited to speak to this audience is because it's a room full of planners, but those folks, every planner is also a resident of a community. Every audience I speak to, whether they're lawyers or planners or housing developers or real estate agents or church groups, whatever they do in a professional capacity, they come home to a neighborhood. There's things that happen in our neighborhood that have a huge impact on whether our neighborhoods remain segregated, whether we remain separate racially in our communities where we don't interact and we don't learn about each other. Then we don't champion issues to help create more equity across the board in our cities. While it's a room full of planners who have a lot that they can do in their professional capacities, there's also a lot that they can do in their personal capacities as residents of their own communities, how they talk to their neighbors, who they vote for in city council elections, what issues they champion in their own communities outside of the workplace.

 

[00:10:42.790] - Michael Brown, AICP

Yeah. No, that's excellent. Planners are people as well. That's right. We should do the job at work and at home. I love the challenge. As you rightly point out, most planners recognize the harm that our profession has played in perpetuating past harms including racialized zoning and redlining. While now an illegal practice, studies indicate, and it's also pointed out in your book, that people now living in these once redlined communities still experience negative impacts. What recommendations do you have for planners interested in making lasting positive change?

 

[00:11:27.980] - Leah Rothstein

Yeah, great question. I think embedded in that question is the truth that these past policies may have changed, but the long-going repercussions of those policies don't go away unless we address them head-on. I think for planners and anyone interested in these issues, we have to be cognizant of the history that got us here. We can't just look to the future and think we can correct all of the disparities that exist today without addressing the harms of the past. We have intentional and explicit about the efforts we take to create more equity, to challenge segregation in our communities. We can only do that if we recognize how we got here, that it wasn't an accident, that it wasn't a matter of personal preference. Policies like red-lining, even though they're no longer in effect, they have long-lasting impacts. I like to reference Isabel Wilkerson in her book, past. She uses the metaphor that says, If you move into a house with a cracked foundation, you don't move in and say, Oh, well, I didn't crack it, so I'm just going to go on with my life. You have to fix the foundation if you want to live in a safe and stable home.

 

[00:12:45.050] - Leah Rothstein

That's what our obligation is in this country and in our own communities is to address and fix those harms of the past so that we can create healthy, sustained, equitable communities going forward. We give in Just Action dozens of examples of what we can do locally in our own communities to address those issues and explicitly challenge the disparities that exist because of past government policies. Anything from zoning codes to reforming how the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program is implemented locally, to working with landlords to accept Section 8 tenants in higher opportunity community areas, to supporting community land trusts, to protecting tenants from unfair evictions, any level of policy or programmatic change can be undertaken in our own communities that can have an impact on these long-lasting consequences of segregation.

 

[00:13:51.250] - Michael Brown, AICP

Yes, the book does outline a series of strategies and recommendations. I think you describe at some point, this system has been built up over time and it's going to take a lot of undoing. What recommendation do you have for those planners that believe the wait has been long enough and want to see immediate action or results from actions?

 

[00:14:20.550] - Leah Rothstein

I mean, I agree. But the only way to do that is to keep pushing for those changes, to keep working on these issues, and I think also to be aware of how far we have come and what victories we have had. We aren't as far as we should be, for sure. The Fair Housing Act was passed in '68. It's a very long time ago, almost 60 years ago. The Black-white wealth gap, the homeownership gap between African-Americans and Whites are larger than it than they were when the Fair Housing Act was passed. We certainly have a long way to go. But what we do in Just Action is we talk about all these strategies we can implement locally. For each one, we give an example of a local community that has implemented that strategy successfully. I think it's really important, especially today, when all we hear about is what's happening on the federal level and all of the chaos and mess that's happening on that level. We don't hear about other communities like ours who are making these positive changes. I think it's important to, at moments, take our attention down to our own communities and look at what we can do here and what other communities are doing because we have to find hope somewhere and being emboldened to know that we're not alone working on these issues.

 

[00:15:54.500] - Leah Rothstein

I've traveled all over the country speaking about Just Action in the last couple of years, all regions of the country, all types of communities, there are people working on these issues and having success. I think that's important to remember.

 

[00:16:09.230] - Michael Brown, AICP

No, that's great. The book does a lot of highlighting those successful stories to create and engender more hope that we can make a change in our lives and world today. Staying with the same vein of questions, I don't want to leave anybody out. What recommendations would you have for planners that do not acknowledge the harms of our profession or this historical past outside of read the Color of Law and Just Action? Would you have any other insights to maybe open someone's eyes to view these issues in a different way?

 

[00:16:55.280] - Leah Rothstein

Well, I would say the Color of Law is the easiest way to get all that information in one place, but the evidence is everywhere. In the Color of Law, my dad talked about Levittown as an example of a suburban community that was developed with subsidies from the federal government on the condition that the homes had restrictive covenants in their deeds, which said that those homes could only ever be owned or occupied by Whites. This was federal government policy. This was how suburbs and subdivisions were developed all over the country in the mid-20th the mid-20th century. You can find those deeds, those restrictive covenants on deeds of homes in neighborhoods all over the country. For people who say that, Oh, my neighborhood wasn't segregated by race, by public policy or by intentional action. It was just an accident. It was just because people like to live around people who look like them. Then they see these restrictive covenants on the deeds of their own home or their neighbor's homes. It's impossible to deny that this was a policy action, an intentional action that created the community to look the way it did, and that those repercussions have long-lasting consequences.

 

[00:18:10.830] - Leah Rothstein

Anyone who wants to understand the true history of why communities look the way they do can dig just a little bit. They can find it in the restrictive covenants. They can find it in the zoning code history. Many cities, as you all know, and many listeners, I'm sure know, before they zoned for single family only zones in most residential communities, many cities zoned by race, where they said, In this neighborhood, only Whites can live. In the zoning code, it said this. When that became unconstitutional, they replaced the White zones with single family-only zoning to ensure that those neighborhoods stayed expensive and inaccessible to anyone but white, more affluent families. You can act like, you can choose to believe that segregation was de facto was just private practice, personal preference, an accident, a magical occurrence, however you want to believe it. But if you look at any of the evidence, if you just look at the history of how our zoning codes were developed at the restrictive covenants in homes in many communities all over the country, we can see that our communities were developed intentionally to be racially segregated. Dig a little deeper and you can see how those policies and the lines created, the racial lines in our community still often exist because those policies, when they were put in place, they have long-lasting repercussions and implications.

 

[00:19:43.040] - Michael Brown, AICP

Let's talk about what's happening in our world today. You mentioned the federal government and all of the exciting things that are going on. We've seen the pendulum swing again. Just a few years ago, there was this national energy and focus on commitment to advancing equity. Starting last year and gaining momentum through just the last few weeks, we have witnessed significant national rollback of DEI efforts across public and private sectors. I've seen a description of this time. Actually, it was on LinkedIn this morning when I was scrolling through, describing this time as a new moment of sorrows as efforts are being made to divide Americans, make distinctions about who does and does not benefit from the full rights and privileges of citizenship, and threaten care for those most burdened by structural oppression. Over the course In the course of your research and work, I'm sure you've studied similar swings. We can go back to the reconstruction period, on to Jim Crow, on to the civil rights movements, and see those swings in our history. What are your thoughts on keeping a steady forward momentum for advancing equity in our communities during this new time?

 

[00:21:11.980] - Leah Rothstein

Well, there's no denying it's a challenging time to be advancing these issues. I've only been alive as long as I've been alive, but I think that most people involved in advancing issues of civil rights and equity have I've experienced setbacks. Any time advances are made, there's pushback and the pendulum swings backward. I was talking with my mom the other day about if it's I've never felt this way in this country before. She talked about what it felt like after JFK and RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. And Malcolm X were all assassinated in short order and how it felt so dark and the issues that they were all working on, it felt like they were fundamentally challenged or stopped. That's not what happened. There were huge advances. I think keeping it all in perspective, and I do note that it is hard to do right now because it's unclear where we're going exactly. But there's always pendulum and they happen after we make some advances. The fact that DEI efforts are being attacked now, I think, is because they were having some impact and gaining traction. That doesn't mean that the backlash against it is going to be permanent.

 

[00:22:51.420] - Leah Rothstein

I think there's a lot of people whose eyes have been opened to issues of equity, racial equity, structural racism in this country that will continue to work on those issues. Again, I think now more than ever, working on these issues locally is what is going to keep us moving forward. The DEI efforts funded by the federal government may be stopped right now, but I know a lot of communities around the country who are still, they're not backing down from their own efforts in their own local governments and the spheres where they do have influence. I think we keep Keep that in mind and keep pushing ahead where we can.

 

[00:23:34.140] - Michael Brown, AICP

I guess sticking with that, given the actions of the past few weeks, are there any immediate fears of yours that you have of new barriers or challenges that you see propping up that you didn't see before?

 

[00:23:51.920] - Leah Rothstein

Yes. Everything feels challenging right now. I think part of it is just the feeling of despair and discouragement and polarization. I think a lot of people who care about issues of racial equity and housing equity and community equity feel like there's an us and them in this country. That is discouraging in and of itself, because I don't think that these issues have just one constituency. I I think creating more equitable communities lifts us all up. As long as we're divided and think that it's an us and them issue, it's going to be even more difficult. I find in the face of the despair and the discouragement and fear of what's coming, some days I don't know what to do about it. Some days I remember that it's continuing to build relationships and to find where we can have influence in our spheres of influence, to do what we can to advance these issues. There's always something we can do, even as that pie might get smaller of what we can do, there's always something. To focus on those things and to keep going. I heard this in a podcast recently that was quoting Vivek Murthy, who was the surgeon general who recently left his appointment.

 

[00:25:34.670] - Leah Rothstein

At the end of his tenure, he gave a speech and he talked about the three pillars of what he said will keep us engaged in the world, not discouraged, not shut down, how to stay connected and stay human. That was to engage in relationships and service and purpose. To keep building relationships and keep connected interacting with each other and being engaged individuals together to find places we can be of service in our own communities and to find our purpose in the corner of the world where we have some influence and to understand that it might be our neighborhood, it might be our city, it might be our family, but we can always do something to advance these issues, and focusing there, I think, is important.

 

[00:26:27.800] - Michael Brown, AICP

What an excellent way of ending this conversation. Thank you for giving us and our listeners a sneak peek. You can hear more from Leah Rothstein  at NPC 25. I'm Michael Brown, and this has been an APA podcast.

 

[00:26:44.100] - Leah Rothstein

Thank you. Thank you so much.

 

[00:26:47.840] - Michael Brown, AICP

Thanks for listening to another episode of the APA podcast. You can hear more from Leo Rothstein at NPC25 in Denver or online. To hear previous episodes, visit us at planning.org/podcast. You can also subscribe to APA podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.