Pope's Creole Ancestry Includes Racial Restrictions and Urban Renewal Neighborhood Destruction

 

The Augustinian cardinal Robert Prevost, just elected as Pope Leo XIV, his chosen name as Bishop of Rome, is the first American pope and the first of African descent since the fifth century. The pope is from Chicago, a Great Migration destination city, and was born in Bronzeville, a Black enclave once known as “the Harlem of the Midwest.” All four of Pope Leo XIV’s maternal great-grandparents were “free people of color” in Louisiana based on 19th-century census records, Jari Honora, a New Orleans, a historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a French Quarter museum, has found. As part of the melting pot of French, Spanish, African, and Native American cultures in Louisiana, the pope’s maternal ancestors would be considered Creole.

Creoles, also known as “Creole people of color,” have a history almost as old as Louisiana. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color. Many Louisiana Creoles were known in the 18th and 19th centuries as “gens de couleur libres,” or free people of color. Many were well educated, French-speaking and Roman Catholic.

Honora and others in the Black and Creole Catholic communities say the election of Leo is just what the Catholic Church needs to unify the global church and elevate the profile of Black Catholics whose history and contributions have long been overlooked. While it’s not known how Leo identifies himself racially, his roots bring a sense of hope to African American Catholics. “When I think about a person who brings so much of the history of this country in his bones, I really hope it brings to light who we are as Americans, and who we are as people of the diaspora,” Kim R. Harris, associate professor of African American Religious Thought and Practice at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said. The Pope's official Vatican biography has nothing about African American or Creole ancestry, and his brother, John Prevost, said that the family does not currently identify as Black.

Leo, who has not spoken openly about his roots, may also have an ancestral connection to Haiti. His grandfather, Joseph Norval Martinez, may have been born there, though historical records are conflicting. Martinez’s parents - the pope’s great-grandparents - were living in Louisiana since at least the 1850s, he said.

Andrew Jolivette, a professor of sociology and Afro-Indigenous Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did his own digging and found the pope’s ancestry reflected the unique cultural tapestry of southern Louisiana. The pope’s Creole roots draw attention to the complex, nuanced identities Creoles hold, he said.“There is Cuban ancestry on his maternal side. So, there are a number of firsts here and it’s a matter of pride for Creoles,” said Jolivette, whose family is Creole from Louisiana. “So, I also view him as a Latino pope because the influence of Latino heritage cannot be ignored in the conversation about Creoles.” Most Creoles are Catholic and historically it was their faith that kept families together as they migrated to larger cities like Chicago, Jolivette said.

The former Cardinal Robert Prevost’s maternal grandparents - identified as “mulatto” and “Black” in historical records - were married in New Orleans in 1887 and lived in the city’s historically Creole Seventh Ward. In the coming years, the Jim Crow regime of racial segregation rolled back post-Civil War reforms and “just about every aspect of their lives was circumscribed by race, extending even to the church,” Honora said.

The pope’s grandparents migrated to Chicago around 1910, like many other African American families leaving the racial oppression of the Deep South, and “passed for white,” Honora said. The pope’s mother, Mildred Agnes Martinez, who was born in Chicago, is identified as “white” on her 1912 birth certificate. The pope’s grandparents’ old home in New Orleans was later destroyed, along with hundreds of others, to build a highway overpass that obliterated much of the largely Black neighborhood in the 1960s.

A former New Orleans mayor, Marc Morial, called the pope’s family’s history, “an American story of how people escape American racism and American bigotry.” As a Catholic with Creole heritage who grew up near the neighborhood where the pope’s grandparents lived, Morial said he has contradictory feelings. Morial said the new pontiff’s maternal family’s shifting racial identity highlights “the idea that in America people had to escape their authenticity to be able to survive.”

Shannen Dee Williams, a history professor at the University of Dayton, said she hopes that Leo’s “genealogical roots and historic papacy will underscore that all roads in American Catholicism, in North, South, and Central America, lead back to the church’s foundational roots in its mostly unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of Catholic colonialism, slavery and segregation.” “There have always been two trans-Atlantic stories of American Catholicism; one that begins with Europeans and another one that begins with Africans and African-descended people, free and enslaved, living in Europe and Africa in the 16th century,” she said. “Just as Black history is American history, (Leo’s) story also reminds us that Black history is, and always has been, Catholic history, including in the U.S.”

Harris said the pope’s genealogy got her thinking about the seven African American Catholics on the path to sainthood who have been recognized by the National Black Catholic Congress, but haven’t yet been canonized. Pierre Toussaint, a philanthropist born in Haiti as a slave who became a New York City entrepreneur and was declared “Venerable” by Pope John Paul II in 1997.

Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic university, said he was “a little surprised” about the pope’s heritage. “It’s a joyful connection,” he said. “It is an affirmation that the Catholic Church is truly universal and that (Black) Catholics remained faithful regardless of a church that was human and imperfect. It also shows us that the church transcends national borders.”

Read the May 10, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the May 8, 2025 New York Times article.

Read the May 9, 2025 Word in Black article.

(Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik.com.)

New United Way Worldwide Report Finds Rental Housing Costs Rise Sharply as Help for the Lowest-Income Renters is Slashed

 

Several just-released studies have found that the current economic decline, fueled by increasing prices, poses a significant threat to household necessities, including housing, utilities, and groceries - and could lead to business contraction and job losses. This growing risk is underlined by new data from United Way Worldwide, which provides support to 211, a critical and free service connecting people to local programs and resources.

The 2023-2024 Annual Report from United Way highlights that financial instability is overwhelming the most fragile people in our communities. United Way Worldwide’s president and chief executive, Angela F. Williams, said that the 211 network is an essential part of America’s infrastructure because it’s a lifeline between people in need and the resources available to support them. Last year, the 211 network responded to 16.8 million requests for help. The United Way report emphasizes this amounts to 32 calls, texts, or chats per minute. People were asking for assistance with basic needs, which mostly fell into three categories: housing assistance, utility bills, and food. 

In the case of housing support, the volume of referrals nearly doubled, from 2019's 2.9 million to 5.6 million in 2024. Local 211s “are dealing with calls from people because their landlords are literally increasing rents by 20%, 30%, 50%,” Williams said. “People who are on fixed income or seniors can’t meet those increased rents and then have to leave or are evicted.”

The cost of housing for both renters and homeowners went up slightly in March, by 0.2%, compared with February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll conducted after the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs found a record-high 53% of Americans said their financial situation is worsening.

A report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found the U.S. has a shortage of 7.1 million affordable rental homes, resulting in only 35 affordable homes for every 100 households with extremely low-income renters. No state has an adequate supply of affordable and available rentals for the lowest-income households, according to the coalition. As a result, three-quarters of these renters spend over of their income on rent. When such a high percentage of income goes to housing, there is not much left to cover other expenses.

During the same time, the current administration has been dismantling government agencies whose mission has been to serve struggling families. Federal funds to nonprofits are being choked off or canceled. Programs to serve the poor are under attack. Last month, for example, the entire staff administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program - which provides financial assistance to help people pay their heating and cooling bills - was fired as part of the federal workforce culling. The current administration wants to eliminate funding for the $4.1 billion program, which assists over 6 million through block grants to states. The program provides funds to states, which then use the money to help people pay to heat and cool their homes and prevent utilities from shutting off the air or heat.

The bleak outlook can also be seen in reports like the New York Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, which it released recently. Consumer sentiment regarding current personal finances has fallen sharply since the tariff wars began. The New York Federal Reserve has highlighted a troubling trend: More households now expect slower income growth, anticipate greater difficulty finding new employment if they lose their current jobs, and an increased risk of missing minimum payments on debts such as credit cards, mortgages, and student loans.

Williams argues that the core problem lies not in discretionary spending but in systemic issues leading families into significant financial distress, the effects of which could persist for generations. She said she sees a “perfect storm” if significant inflation because of tariffs coincides with government benefit reductions or eliminations - combined with defunded community groups and nonprofits supporting the most financially vulnerable.

Read the May 9, 2025 Washington Post article.

(Image by storyset on Freepik.com.)

Obituary: Eve Kugler, Child Survivor of the Holocaust and Educator, 94

 

First in the U.S., and later in her adopted home of England, Kugler became a devoted memory-keeper for the victims of the Holocaust, speaking indefatigably to schoolchildren, traveling with students and others to Nazi concentration camps, and offering herself as a living witness to the dangers of ethnic, religious, and racial hatred.

“Her story is both exceptional and symbolic of a larger movement of children who survived the Holocaust and who have sought to bear witness,” said Laura Hobson Faure, the chair of modern Jewish history at Université Paris 1 and the author of Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children Who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2025). (See upcoming book review in this blog.) Through her book about her family’s Holocaust history, Shattered Crystals, her website, her many public speaking engagements with students in the UK, and through her participation in the March of the Living, Eve educated thousands of young people about the history and lessons of the Holocaust. In 2019, Eve was a recipient of the British Empire Medal.

After World War II broke out in 1939, Kugler’s father was arrested in France because of his German nationality. With no means of supporting her daughters, her mother entrusted Kugler and her sisters to the Children’s Aid Society - the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) - which put them in several children’s homes while employing her as a cook. In 1941, the U.S. government granted permission for a group of refugee children to enter the country. The U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, working with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker aid group, began arranging transports with the help of OSE. In total, about 320 refugee children were evacuated from France in 1941-1942 via Spain and Portugal to the U.S., said Hobson Faure. Kugler and her sister were on the second transport. 

Kugler said that she remembered nothing of the journey through France and Spain and across the Atlantic Ocean, and that any detailed memories of her childhood began with her arrival in the U.S. The refugee children wore lanyards with numbered cards - Kugler was Number 24 - and were placed with foster families. In the following years, Kugler lived in three homes, her sister in four. “They were difficult and lonely years for me,” she wrote in a memoir, Shattered Crystals (C.I.S. Publishers: Lakewood, NJ, 1997), co-authored with her mother Mia Amalia Kanner.

“Emotionally damaged and traumatized by the Holocaust, I came to America with a hidden disability,” she continued. “With the best will in the world, the members of my foster families had no way of grasping the reasons for my deep unhappiness. How could they comprehend my feelings of isolation, my realization that I was different from other children. How could I explain to them my awful, never-ending feelings of guilt at having been saved at the expense of others, those unknown children who, the day before departure, became too ill to travel?”

In her 40s, Kugler begin to address what she described as a form of “amnesia” surrounding the traumatic events of her childhood. The experience of writing her memoir with her mother allowed her to better understand her family’s story. She started speaking at schools, synagogues, and other venues, committing herself to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust. Kugler’s death came one day before she was scheduled to participate in the International March of the Living (MOTL), an annual gathering at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. “I feel grateful and somewhat guilty,” she once told an interviewer, “for having survived.”

MOTL Global CEO Scott Saunders said, “Eve had been a part of the March of the Living UK since the very beginning. She was a wonderful, inspiring lady who taught all of us the resilience and positivity of life. She was my friend, my mentor and i and the whole March of the Living family will miss her.” Eve’s legacy will live on in the hearts of minds of the thousands of young people who were privileged to hear her testimony first hand on the March of the Living and in many other educational programs and settings. May her memory always be for a blessing.

Read the May 7, 2025 Washington Post obituary.

Read the April 23, 2025 MOTL article.

(Image Credit: Sam Churchill, motl.org.)

May is National Mental Health Awareness Month!

 

Mental Health Awareness Month (also referred to as Mental Health Month) has been observed in May in the U.S. since 1949. It is observed with media, local events, and film screenings. The theme "Turn Awareness into Action" was chosen for 2025 with the goal of celebrating “the progress we’ve made in recognizing the importance of mental health - and challenging us to turn understanding into meaningful steps toward change." The Month was presidentially proclaimed on May 5, 2025.

Mental Health Awareness Month was started by Mental Health America (MHA) (then known as the National Association for Mental Health). Each year in mid-March MHA releases a toolkit of materials to guide preparation for outreach activities during Mental Health Awareness Month. During the month, MHA, its affiliates, and other organizations interested in mental health conduct a number of activities which are based on a different theme each year. The Mental Health Month ribbon is green, symbolizing Hope, strength, and emotional support for those affected by mental illness.

MHA’s National Prevention and Screening Program is a collection of free, anonymous and clinically validated online screening tools, with 11 tests in English and two in Spanish. People who complete a screening test are immediately connected with resources to support their mental health journeys. Since its 2014 beginning, over 32 million people have taken a screen to check on their mental health concerns. It is the nation’s largest ongoing, real-time mental health early identification program.

The purpose of the Month is to raise awareness and educate the public about: mental illnesses, such as the 18.1% of Americans who suffer from depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder; the realities of living with these conditions; and strategies for attaining mental health and wellness. It also aims to draw attention to suicide, which can be precipitated by some mental illnesses. Additionally, the Month strives to reduce the stigma (negative attitudes and misconceptions) that surrounds mental illnesses. The month came about by presidential proclamation.

In addition to MHA, many other similar organizations choose to host awareness observances that coincide with Mental Health Awareness month. National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day is one such campaign. This event is sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in partnership with other non-profit and advocacy organizations.

Other months and weeks throughout the year are designated to raise awareness around specific mental health conditions or the mental health of different demographic groups - such as Minority Mental Health Month (July), sometimes referred to as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) Mental Health Awareness Month; Mental Illness Awareness Week (Sunday, October 5, 2025 - Saturday, October 11, 2025); National Depression Screening Day (October 10), etc.

Remember that mental illnesses can affect anyone, regardless of their background or circumstances. No person should have to face these challenges alone. Recognizing the signs, encouraging open dialogue, and showing compassion are essential steps in addressing mental health challenges and supporting those who face them.

Study of Class Segregation Finds Poor and Especially Rich Americans are Isolated in Their Daily Activities

 

"Rubbing shoulders: Class segregation in daily activities," by Maxim Massenkoff & Nathan Wilmers, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 244, 2025, 105335, ISSN 0047-2727, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105335. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272725000337). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105335.

It was found:

• Poor and especially rich Americans are isolated in their daily activities.
• Distance from home explains one-third of class segregation in activities.
• Casual restaurant chains like Olive Garden foster more class mixing than civic spaces.
• Cross-class encounters strongly predict Facebook friendships across economic lines.

The authors used location data to study cross-class encounters. Low-income and especially high-income individuals are socially isolated: they are more likely than other income groups to encounter people from their own class. Counterfactual exercises suggest this is explained largely by residential segregation and firms. Among firms, casual restaurants make the largest positive contribution to cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and libraries isolate visitors. Our local measure of encounters is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships, which have been previously shown to correlate with intergenerational mobility.

Growing research has shown that places rub off on you (Wilson, 2012, Sampson, 2012). When children move to better neighborhoods at a young age, their adult outcomes improve (Chetty et al., 2016, Chetty and Hendren, 2018), and children growing up in the presence of inventors are more likely to innovate in that area (Bell et al., 2019). The sources of these exposure effects are unclear, but one possibility is that areas that boost mobility have more opportunities for interaction, friendship, and mentorship across class lines (Chetty et al., 2022a).

This article measures opportunities for such cross-class interactions, providing the first national estimates of economic segregation in activities. It is done using intuitive metrics and geolocation data from SafeGraph, which allows for granular income proxies based on the small neighborhoods where people live. A neighborhood’s exposure to others is defined by the other people in the stores, restaurants, shops, parks, and libraries that its residents frequent.

How much do Americans of different income levels mix with one another? Who is exposed to a broad cross-section of income levels, and who is disproportionately exposed to others like themselves? It was found that the most isolated Americans are not the poor, but the rich. Households from the top 20% of neighborhoods by income are twice as likely to encounter other high-income people as would be expected by chance. The bottom 20% of neighborhoods is also isolated, but at about half the rate. Middle-income residents in the US are exposed to a more representative assortment of people. The cross-class encounters that we register in our data are also highly correlated with a measure of cross-class friendships constructed using Facebook data (Chetty et al., 2022a).

How much isolation is due to high- and low-income households frequenting different industries from others (high-end dining rather than fast food) or staying local at residentially segregated neighborhoods? In a counterfactual reweighting exercise (DiNardo et al., 1995), we find that there is only a small role for industry. High-income residents frequent different types of places - e.g., museums instead of libraries and full-service restaurants as opposed to fast food - but equating industry shares across classes would barely shift levels of isolation. On the other hand, people are most isolated when they are closest to home, and the tendency to stay close can account for around one third of the isolation we observe. This suggests that activity segregation partially reflects residential segregation. But even adjusting for distance from home, the majority of activity segregation persists.

The article next examines which specific firms contribute to socio-economic mixing and which exacerbate segregation. Some very poor-serving national chains, like discount general merchandise stores, contribute to segregation. But, consistent with the importance of distance in the reweighting analysis, so do chains that have many local branches: while residents from all income quintiles shop at CVS (the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.), they shop at CVS stores in their own neighborhoods.

In contrast to these market segmented or highly local businesses, some chains contribute substantially to socio-economic mixing. Specifically, low-price full-service restaurants are frequented by a diverse range of residents: the rich and poor rub shoulders at Olive Garden and Applebee’s. Indeed, the most socio-economically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools and parks, but affordable, chain restaurants.

This study expands on recent literature that uses data from mobile phones, social networks, and financial transactions to examine economic segregation (reviewed in Appendix F), providing the first national estimates of experienced class segregation in daily activities. We focus on an intuitive measure of isolation: the share of encounters with one’s own group members, and provide the first decomposition quantifying sources of social isolation for the rich and poor. Finally, we investigate the types of locations that harbor economic integration, even down to the brand level, offering a unique level of granularity for measuring the role of specific brands in hosting economic integration.

It was found that the core concept is exposure: the chance of encountering someone in a certain group, conditional on membership in a certain group. An encounter is when someone is at a place at the same time as someone else (Athey et al., 2021). A place is typically a business establishment, but also includes entities like parks and schools. Exposure was based on the monthly aggregate visits. The high income group has a relatively lower share of visits to essential retail and a relatively higher share of visits to entertainment and full service dining.

Given the importance of national chains and firms to the isolation of high- and low-income neighborhood residents, the specific industries and chains that contribute to and offset isolation are identified. Our establishment-level data allows us to track particular chains and provides the first assessment of particular companies’ contribution to socio-economic mixing.

Class segregation appears not just where people live (Reardon and Bischoff, 2011) and work (Song et al., 2019), but also in the public and commercial places where people spend time and money. This paper establishes that residents of low- and especially high-income neighborhoods are exposed disproportionately to others like themselves.

(Image by storyset on Freepik.com.)

AJC, USC Shoah Foundation Partner to Document and Map Global Antisemitism

 

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the USC Shoah Foundation (University of Southern California) announced on April 27th at the AJC Global Forum their newly formed partnership to give voice to, document, and map modern-day antisemitism around the world. Harnessing AJC’s global reach and the USC Shoah Foundation’s expertise in testimony collection, AJC will contribute to the USC Shoah Foundation’s ambitious and visionary goal of collecting 10,000 testimonies from across the U.S. and around the world to document incidents of antisemitism post-1945, and bring voice to the worldwide persistence of antisemitism and its many manifestations. This multi-year, international testimony collection is part of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Contemporary Antisemitism Collection.

“We must clearly show to the world - and preserve for the future - what antisemitism is, what it looks like, and the personal toll it takes on Jews around the world. AJC has seen, firsthand, the way antisemitism has morphed and manifested itself in different ways since the end of the Holocaust,” said AJC CEO Ted Deutch. “Through AJC’s work all over the globe combating antisemitism, we have also seen the power of personal testimonies in not only changing hearts and minds but also in winning support for policies that protect Jewish communities. The USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of testimonies will forever capture the personal experiences of thousands of Jewish people, enabling us to tell our story, and share it with generations to come.”

“Our partnership with AJC will enable us to reach survivors of antisemitic violence from all over the globe. In turn, this is a powerful statement that bringing the world’s attention to antisemitism requires partnerships built on a shared commitment to giving voice to the personal histories of those who have and continue to experience one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring forms of hatred. This ambitious project, namely building a Contemporary Antisemitism Collection at the USC Shoah Foundation, will add tremendous value to the study of antisemitism and hate and help Jewish and non-Jewish communities become more resilient against these forces, both now and into the future,” said Dr. Robert J. Williams, CEO and Finci-Viterbi Chair of the USC Shoah Foundation.

During the announcement, Daniel Pomerantz, now executive director of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; transl. "Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, a Jewish Community Center), and a survivor of the July 18, 1994 terror attack, explained, “the [Hezbollah] terrorists killed 85 and injured 300. These were my friends and colleagues. They were Argentinian Jews and Argentinians of all backgrounds. Thirty-one years later, those responsible for orchestrating that horrible day - for attacking my place of work, my community’s gathering place, and for murdering and maiming dozens - have still not been brought to justice or held accountable for their crimes.”

The Contemporary Antisemitism Collection focuses on five categories, including: (1) Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Yemenite Jewish communities, many of which were displaced or left the Mediterranean basin, North Africa, and the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s; (2) Ethiopian Jewish communities, including those which made Aliyah and those that entered the diaspora in Europe and North America; (3) North American Jewish experiences since 1945; (4) The experiences of Jewish communities under communist rule, including Jewish life in the Soviet Union, in Warsaw Pact states, and in the former Yugoslavia; and (5) Victims of antisemitic terror attacks, beginning with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, the worst antisemitic attack since the Holocaust until October 7, 2023. Once completed, the collection will be the largest archive ever assembled of testimonies on contemporary antisemitism. 

AJC, the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people, has long utilized research, policy, and advocacy to address this hatred. The USC Shoah Foundation, the Institute for Visual History and Education, is home to over 61,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, contemporary antisemitism, the Armenian Genocide, and other mass atrocities and genocidal crimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is the largest such collection in the world. 

Read the April 27, 2025 AJC article.

Book Review: "Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality"

Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality by Robin Bartram. University of Chicago Press, 2022. 

This is "a startling look at the power and perspectives of city building inspectors as they navigate unequal housing landscapes." Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of this author's analysis of how individuals impact - or attempt to impact - housing inequality. 

Drawing on her extensive research into code enforcement in Chicago, Bartram shows that building inspectors often make surprising choices about who to cite (and who not to cite) and discuss how these choices underscore the continuing challenge of persistent inequality.

In Stacked Decks, she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to cite for building code violations. These predominantly white, male inspectors largely recognize that they work within an unequal housing landscape that systematically disadvantages poor people and people of color through redlining, property taxes, and city spending that favor wealthy neighborhoods. This book illustrates the uphill battle inspectors face when trying to change a housing system that works against those with the fewest resources.

The book argues that cities are stacked decks. They are sites of vast disparities in racial wealth, health, education, and well-being. But this stacked deck also motivates. Disparities in the city inspire and organize action. Built environments - and the inequity they embody - motivate frontline workers like building code inspectors. But features of this unequal world also hinder the actions they inspire and work as justice blockers. This tension - between motivation and obstruction - makes inequality particularly stubborn and hard to change. This book is a story of how the stacked deck gets reproduced even when people are trying to do the opposite.

House Committee on Education and the Workforce Grills Universities "Beyond the Ivy League" About Antisemitism

On May 7th, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce questioned three college presidents in a hearing called “Beyond the Ivy League: Stopping the Spread of Antisemitism on American Campuses.” The hearing focused on schools that received F grades from the Anti-Defamation League. While three college presidents apologized for not acting more aggressively to curb antisemitism on their campuses, the president of Haverford College Wendy Raymond was berated by Republican lawmakers on campus antisemitism for when asked repeatedly, Raymond said her institution does not publicize the outcomes of disciplinary processes. 

Some Committee members suggested the school should lose federal funding because of her refusal to discuss student discipline in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests. Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) compared the antisemitism to the racism of the 1960s in the Deep South. “What we’re seeing on college campuses today isn’t activism. It’s intimidation, it’s harassment, in many cases, pure, unfiltered hatred of Jewish people.” “This is not a free-speech issue. It’s a public safety issue. It’s a moral issue. And every school that allows this chaos to continue needs to lose all federal funds.”

On May 6th, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the American Council on Education (ACE) released a joint statement, affirming the seriousness of antisemitism on campus and a pledge from these organizations, representing the full breadth of American higher educational institutions, to “continuing consequential reform and transparent action.” Also co-signing the statement were the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

According to AJC’s State of Antisemitism in America 2024 Report, 35% of current American Jewish college students and recent graduates report having personally experienced antisemitism at least once during their time on campus, with 20% reporting that it happened more than once. 22% of Jewish students report feeling or being excluded from a group or an event on campus because they are Jewish. AJC previously published Confronting Campus Antisemitism: An Action Plan for University Administrators, which includes concrete steps to meet both the immediate needs of Jewish campus citizens and foster sustained, real change that will improve the learning and living environment for all students, faculty, and staff - including Jewish community members.

The statement, which included those representing public universities and community colleges, noted that the federal government had recently taken steps in the name of combating antisemitism that endanger research grants, academic freedom and institutional autonomy.“ AJC, the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people, believes that when these actions are overly broad, they imperil science and innovation, and ultimately detract from the necessary fight against antisemitism while threatening the global preeminence of America’s research universities and colleges,” they wrote.

Reaad the May 6, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the May 7, 2025 New York Times article.

(Image creator: Ethan Pann.)

Lending in the Dark: Local Newspaper Closures and Discrimination in Mortgage Lending

 

"Lending in the Dark: Local Newspaper Closures and Discrimination in Mortgage Lending," by Tran Huynhl. IMPRESSUM Jena Economics Research Papers. January, 2025. Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2025-0002.

This paper examines the extent to which local newspaper closures affect discrimination against minority borrowers in mortgage lending. Following a newspaper closure, interest rate differentials between minority (black or Hispanic) and comparable non-minority borrowers increase by 5.5 basis points, widening the existing gap in mortgage outcomes between the two groups. This effect cannot be explained by differences in credit risk or underlying economic conditions. The findings suggest that the local press plays an important role in monitoring lending practices and reducing information asymmetries in the mortgage market.

Using a difference-in-differences methodology that exploits the staggered closure of U.S. local newspapers between 2018-2021, and a significant increase in discriminatory lending practices following a local newspaper closure. Specifically, the mortgage rate gap between minority (black or Hispanic) and comparable non-minority borrowers increases by about 5.5 basis points (bps) on average in the three years following a newspaper closure. This widening gap in mortgage rates suggests that minority borrowers face higher lending rates when local media scrutiny is reduced. A rich set of borrower and loan controls (e.g. credit score, income, LTV ratio, loan amount, ...) provides evidence that this effect is not due to differences in borrower creditworthiness or loan structure. Local information vacuums created by newspaper closures can lead to costly borrowing decisions by minority borrowers, thereby exacerbating racial and ethnic disparities in mortgage outcomes.

There are two main channels through which newspaper closures could affect discrimination against minority borrowers. First, a fundamental responsibility of the news media, known as the watchdog role, is to monitor local political, economic and social issues (Dyck et al. 2008; Snyder & Stromberg 2010; Bennett & Serrin 2005). Since the early twentieth century, local newspapers in the US have reported on racial segregation and bank redlining in their neighborhoods, where minority borrowers were denied access to mortgages or subjected to unfavorable terms through subprime loan contracts (Rothstein 2017; Carroll 2017). Early newspaper reports of such discriminatory lending practices were the main force driving academic research into the issue (Black 2023).1 As evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in mortgage. The seminal studies by Black et al. (1978) and Munnell et al. (1996) were among the first to use statistical techniques and models to examine lending discrimination on the basis of race. outcomes became more concrete and widespread in the news and in academic studies, several anti-discrimination laws and regulations were enacted, notably the Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) of 1975, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Along with bank examiners and consumer protection agencies, local newspapers help monitor lenders to make sure they comply with the law.

The second channel relates to the information intermediation role of the news media (Bushman et al. 2017; Peress 2014; Gao et al. 2020a). Through comprehensive coverage and timely dissemination of local economic trends, housing market dynamics, and regulatory developments, local newspapers provide valuable insights to both borrowers and lenders, thereby reducing  information asymmetries and facilitating transparency in the mortgage market. For example, with accurate information about mortgage products, interest rates, and lending policies, borrowers can make informed decisions and negotiate favorable terms. Most relevant to this context, by documenting and reporting incidents of lending discrimination, local newspapers help raise awareness among minority borrowers about predatory lending and discriminatory practices by certain lenders. As a result, local information vacuums created by newspaper closures can lead to costly borrowing decisions by minority borrowers, thereby exacerbating racial and ethnic disparities in mortgage outcomes.

Algorithmic Governance and Nondiscrimination Rights in the Workplace

 

"Algorithmic Governance and Nondiscrimination Rights in the Workplace," by Kim, Pauline,  (March 16, 2025). Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Governance and the Law, Forthcoming, Washington University in St. Louis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 25-03-08, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5182525 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5182525.

This chapter analyzes existing legal responses to the problem of discriminatory algorithms in the workplace. As firms increasingly rely on algorithms or automated decision systems, a type of artificial intelligence, to manage their workforces, concerns have grown that these tools can systematically exclude historically disadvantaged groups. One response is to rely on traditional anti-discrimination law. These laws clearly prohibit certain forms of algorithmic discrimination; however, the complex, opaque nature of algorithms makes identifying and proving discriminatory harms challenging. Another response looks to broader frameworks of data protection and algorithmic regulation to protect against workplace discrimination. These initiatives are promising, but much depends on their details. Individual data rights are of limited usefulness because of the systemic nature of algorithmic discrimination, while broad regulatory oversight can help improve transparency and oversight of these tools.

algorithmic management, employment discrimination, workplace rights, discrimination law, algorithmic governance, data protection, algorithms, artificial intelligence, automated decisionmaking, hiring and selection, disparate treatment, disparate impact, indirect discrimination, duty to accommodate, individual data rights, notice, right of explanation, right of access, right of correction, right to contest

Experts Warn Proposed Cuts to Housing Programs Could Affect Millions

 

The President’s proposal to slash roughly 43% of funding for federal housing programs, like Section 8 vouchers, could have devastating effects for millions of Americans, as the country already faces a housing supply and affordability crisis. The 2026 “skinny budget” proposal, released May 2nd, calls for $26.7 billion in cuts to Section 8 and other housing assistance programs. A new grant, the State Rental Assistance Block Grant, would reallocate the remaining funds for these programs to states to develop their own initiatives. The cuts would affect tenant-based and project-based rental assistance programs, as well as public housing, housing for the elderly, and housing for people with disabilities.

The cuts to federal housing programs would affect about 3.8 million people and worsen the country’s housing crisis, said Eric Oberdorfer, director of policy and legislative affairs at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, a professional membership organization and advocacy group. “We are obviously in a significant housing affordability and supply crisis right now, and now is the time to support affordable housing programs,” he said. “Devastating cuts like those proposed in the budget [for] public housing or to Section 8 would directly hurt families, communities and local economies.”

Federal rental assistance programs currently help about 10 million people afford housing, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Of that, 2 million receive Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance. From January 2023 until January 2024, homelessness surged by 18% to the highest level on record, partially driven by increasing rent costs and a lack of affordable housing. 

Katie Fallon, a principal policy associate at the Urban Institute, said the planned cuts could exacerbate a housing situation that is already grim for millions and is likely to affect the number of new affordable housing units available.

Read the May 6, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the 2026 "Skinny Budget" proposal.

(Image by freepik.com.)

Book Review: "Foundations of Injustice: From Slave Codes to AI Bias - How Systemic Racism Built America and How We Rebuild Equity"

 

Foundations of Injustice: From Slave Codes to AI Bias - How Systemic Racism Built America and How We Rebuild Equity, by Kwame Amari Freeman. Independently published: March 24, 2025. Paperback, $18.95.

In this urgent and deeply researched work, Kwame Amari Freeman uncovers how systemic racism has been encoded into America’s laws, economy, education, technology, media, and healthcare - from the slave codes of the 1600s to the biased algorithms of today.

What the reader will discover: The origins of race-based laws and colonial hierarchies, How redlining shaped the racial wealth gap, The impact of algorithmic bias in modern tech, Media narratives and policies that sustain racial disparities, Case studies, legal documents, and historical analysis that expose the architecture of inequality, 

Beyond the Problem - A Path to Change: Freeman offers real-world tools and reform strategies: legal and policy frameworks to dismantle systemic racism, Economic and  educational solutions to promote equity, Tech-based approaches to counter bias, and Community-led initiatives and action guides.

Freeman works at University of Massachusetts Boston.

Bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act (S. 558) Considered by Congress

On February 13, 2025, the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act (S. 558) was re-introduced in Congress  by sponsor Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) to require the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws. On April 30, 2025, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Committee held a mark up session. The legislation is co-sponsored by 41 Representatives, and endorsed by: ADL (Anti-Defamation League), American Jewish Committee (AJC), Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations (COP), Christians United for Israel (CUFI), Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), National Jewish Advocacy Center, Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), Hadassah, The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (OU), The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, and B’nai B’rith. 

On May 2, 2025, the Interfaith Alliance announced its opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA). The Alliance stated that the AAA "would needlessly stifle political free speech and empower the administration’s repressive agenda." The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), American Muslims for Palestine, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Center for Constitutional Rights, Defending Rights and Dissent, Jewish Voice for Peace, National Lawyers Guild, Palestine Legal, and US Campaign for Palestinian Rights also oppose the Act.

On February 5, 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) applauded the re-introduction of the Act. The bipartisan bill, reintroduced in Congress by Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) will ensure the Department of Education has a  clear framework for identifying and addressing antisemitic discrimination, particularly on college and university campuses. “As ADL data shows, antisemitism is at crisis levels in the U.S., creating the urgent need for decisive action,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL. “The Antisemitism Awareness Act makes clear that antisemitism, including anti-Zionist harassment, has no place in our schools or society and, importantly, reinforces the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism as a critical tool for the U.S. Department of Education. We urge Congress to act swiftly and send a powerful message that combating antisemitism remains a national priority and deeply appreciate the efforts by Reps. Mike Lawler, Josh Gottheimer, Max Miller, and Jared Moskowitz and Sens. Tim Scott and Jacky Rosen to quickly reintroduce this bipartisan bill.”

The AAA would broaden the definition of antisemitism, essentially by defining anti-Zionism as antisemitic for the purposes of civil rights law. The IHRA definition underscores that antisemitism includes denying Jewish self-determination to their ancestral homeland of Israel, holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel, and applying double standards to Israel. The IHRA definition is the most widely recognized definition of antisemitism in the world, having been adopted by more than 40 countries and 35 states across the United States. The bipartisan legislation also provides clear protections for the First Amendment.

Last Congress, the Antisemitism Awareness Act overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 320-91. The Senate subsequently did not consider the legislation. On November 14, 2024, the ACLU urged senators to reject the Act because it would "censor political speech critical of Israel on college campuses under the guise of addressing antisemitism."

“Since the heinous October 7th attacks on Israel, we have seen an explosion of antisemitic violence and intimidation on college campuses and in communities across New Jersey and the nation. Far too many in our community no longer feel safe in their own homes or classrooms,” said Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5). “That’s why I’m reintroducing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which will give state officials and law enforcement a clear framework for identifying and addressing antisemitism to hold harassers accountable. Our bipartisan bill adopts the most widely recognized definition of antisemitism in the world, already used by more than 40 countries and 35 states. Hate and discrimination have no place in New Jersey or the country, and we must act now to protect our Jewish students and families from threats, intimidation, and violence.”

“With Jewish college students still facing unprecedented levels of discrimination, intimidation, harassment, and violence, the need for the Antisemitism Awareness Act remains as urgent as when it was first introduced. CAM has proudly supported the bill from the start, and we commend Representative Lawler for his dogged commitment to seeing the legislative process to the finish and Speaker Johnson for his strong leadership in the fight against rising antisemitism. We urge the new Congress to prioritize rapid passage of the act, and look forward to seeing its positive impact on campuses across the United States,” said the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).

“Hadassah is proud to support the Antisemitism Awareness Act and believes that the Department of Education should leverage the widely used and respected International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism when enforcing anti-discrimination laws. Antisemitism has reached alarming heights and is impacting the lives of Jews young and old. In Hadassah’s recent report, From Fear to Resilience: Women Facing Antisemitism, Jewish women shared stories of how antisemitism is making them feel unsafe and prompting them to drop out of school. We applaud Representatives Lawler, Gottheimer, Miller and Moskowitz for their bipartisan leadership in fighting hatred. We urge Congress to pass this critical legislation,” said Carol Ann Schwartz, National President of Hadassah.

‘We commend Congressman Gottheimer for introducing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which will help states like New Jersey align with more than 35 other states in adopting a clear, uniform definition of antisemitism. Without this standard, institutions and individuals can evade accountability for fostering hostile environments that target Jews based on their beliefs, values, practices, or heritage. This legislation is a crucial step in ensuring a consistent and effective approach to identifying, addressing, and preventing antisemitism,” said Jason M. Shames, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey.

Read the Congress.gov summary of the Act.

Read the May 2, 2025 Interfaith Alliance article.

Read the November 14, 2024 ACLU letter opposing the Act.

Home Price Change and Ethno-Racial Residential Segregation

 

," by Alex Mikulas, Brenden Beck, & Max Besbris. 04/10/2025. Socius 10 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231241261606, (Original work published 2024).

Although rates of residential racial segregation and home prices are undoubtedly related, the temporal nature of the relationship has rarely been studied. Using fixed effects models in a cross-lagged framework, this study examined how prior changes in segregation and home prices at the metro level predict changes in the other. To examine how prices and ethno-racial segregation are related over time, we gathered data on 398 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for the years 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2019. 

The findings suggest that increases in home prices predict increasing racial segregation years later, but increases in segregation fail to predict subsequent change in home values. Metros that experience a 1 standard deviation increase in home prices experience an associated 0.25 standard deviation increase in Black-White segregation 10 years later and a 0.18 standard deviation increase 20 years later. No relationship is observed for Hispanic-White segregation. We discuss implications for understanding the economic underpinnings of segregation. Findings also offer insight into future segregation trends and illuminate how changes in the housing market may drive demographic trends more broadly.

Different strands of research have shown how varying rates of appreciation of property values exacerbate racial wealth gaps. Indeed, racial disparities in home equity are the largest component of racial wealth gap. The racial gaps in home value are also larger in more segregated places, and prior work has theorized the relationship between housing value and segregation as a primary way the racial wealth gap is maintained.

Although Black-White segregation continues to fall at a faster rate relative to other race groups’ segregation from White individuals, it is still at the highest overall level compared to other ethno-racial group segregation from White individuals, and mobility patterns do little to bring Black-White segregation to parity with other race groups overall.

In urban settings, Hispanic residents have had near-stable segregation levels from White neighbors but have increasingly shared residential space with Black neighbors over the same time frame (Iceland and Sharp 2013), and metropolitan Hispanic-Black segregation is decreasing at a much faster rate than Hispanic-White segregation.

The findings provide strong evidence that changes in metro-level home prices precede Black-White segregation levels. This is an important and salient point to consider as home prices soar to historic highs across the U.S., suggesting continued or increasing segregation may soon follow.

Chandan Economics "Research 2025 Report" Finds Consistent Racial Inequalities

 

Racial Inequities in US Housing: 2025 Report. The Chandan Economics Research Team. January 28, 2025. 

The Chandan Economics Racial Inequities in U.S. Housing Report is a multi-themed overview of the contrasting housing and wealth outcomes among commonly referenced racial or ethnic groups in the United States. Our analysis explores the housing outcomes of racial groups within four focus areas: Housing Affordability, Household Wealth, Credit Access and Investment, and Housing and Environmental Quality. The annual report provides a snapshot of the historical intersection between racial disparities in housing outcomes and inequities in other socioeconomic dimensions, such as education, wealth and upward mobility, health, and access to financial markets.

The major findings of the Report are:

(1) Home price and rent increases over the past decade have disproportionately impacted cost-burdened and minority households.

According to a 2022 report from Up for Growth, roughly 92% of Latino [4] Households living in a metropolitan statistical Area (MSA) - 51 million people - live in a market experiencing housing underproduction. Such underproduction can lead to household crowding, resulting in fewer individuals purchasing homes and taking advantage of the home equity appreciation homeowners typically enjoy.

(2) The homeownership gap between White and minority-led households declined modestly during the pandemic years but remains at a 28.5 percentage point gap. Despite the dismantling of many discriminatory lending and underwriting practices over the last several decades, the gap between White and Black homeownership is wider today than it was before the civil rights era. In 1960, the White homeownership rate was 65%, and the Black homeownership rate was 38% - a 27-percentage point gap. Homeownership rates broadly declined across all races and ethnicities in the decade following the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Still, the gap widened as Black and Hispanic households were more than twice as likely than non-Hispanic White households to receive a sub-prime loan during the housing bubble - exacerbating the crisis’s impact in minority-majority communities.

(3) The share of minorities without a bank account has fallen since the Great Financial Crisis but remains measurably above the unbanked rate among White Households. Unbanked rates among Native American and Alaskan Native households have also decreased substantially across this period but experienced an upswing between 2015-2017 and again after 2021. Native American and Alaskan Native households remain the highest unbanked racial cohort at 12.2%.

(4) Several indicators of public health and environmental quality remain worse in historically redlined areas.

(5) The racial gap in credit access is significantly higher when measuring the share of the population that receives prime credit rates. Asian and White Americans have significantly higher proportions of prime borrowers, representing 62% and 51% of their respective populations. The share drops steeply for Hispanic and Black Americans, with 29% and 20% of the population receiving prime rates, respectively. Similarly, just 24% of those identifying as all other racial groups have access to prime rates.

First Edition of "Fair Housing Research Digest"

 

This is the first edition of capsule summaries of recent research on Fair Housing and related subjects.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Discrimination.

Association of Historic Redlining and Present-Day Health in Baltimore.

Obstacles to Inclusion and Threats to Civil Rights: The Many Negative Social Experiences of Service Dog Partners in the U.S.

Fighting Discrimination Against Mothers of Children with Disabilities.

Relationship Between Residential Racial & Economic Segregation and Main Causes of Death in U.S. Counties.

Diversifying but not Integrating: Entropic Measures of Local Segregation in Philadelphia.

Black Exclusion, Racial Segregation, and Spatial Integration in U.S. Municipalities, 1990 - 2020.

Interesting Recent Research on Redlining & Housing Segregation: Part 2: Health Effects.

Interesting Recent Research on Housing Segregation: Part 1: Wealth, Schools, Transportation, Noise.

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Discrimination"

 

"Artificial Intelligence and the Discrimination Injury," by Andrew D., (March 14, 2025). UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 25-10, 78 Florida Law Review. (forthcoming 2026), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5179224 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5179224.

For a decade, scholars have debated whether discrimination involving artificial intelligence (AI) can be captured by existing discrimination laws. This article argues that the challenge that artificial intelligence poses for discrimination law stems not from the specifics of any statute, but from the very conceptual framework of discrimination law. Discrimination today is a species of tort, concerned with rectifying individual injuries, rather than a law aimed at broadly improving social or economic equality. As a result, the doctrine centers blameworthiness and individualized notions of injury. But it is also a strange sort of tort that does not clearly define its injury. Defining the discrimination harm is difficult and contested. As a result, the doctrine skips over the injury question and treats a discrimination claim as a process question about whether a defendant acted properly in a single decision-making event. This tort-with-unclear-injury formulation effectively merges the questions of injury and liability: If a defendant did not act improperly, then no liability attaches because a discrimination event did not occur. Injury is tied to the single decision event and there is no room for recognizing discrimination injury without liability. AI works by using algorithms (i.e., instructions for computers) to process and identify patterns in large amounts of data (“training”), and then use those patterns to make predictions or decisions when given new information.

Researchers and technologists have repeatedly demonstrated that algorithmic systems can produce discriminatory outputs. Sometimes, this is a result of training on unrepresentative data. In other cases, an algorithm will find and replicate hidden patterns of human discrimination it finds in the training data. A 2021 analysis by The Markup of mortgage lenders who used underwriting algorithms found that the lenders were far more likely to reject applicants of color than white applicants: 40% more likely for Latino or Hispanic Americans, 50% more likely for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 70% more likely for Native Americans, and 80% more likely for Black Americans.

This formulation directly affects regulation of AI discrimination for two reasons: First, AI decision-making is distributed; it is a combination of software development, its configuration, and its application, all of which are completed at different times and usually by different parties. This means that the mental model of a single decision and decisionmaker breaks down in this context. Second, the process-based injury is fundamentally at odds with the existence of “discriminatory” technology as a concept. While we can easily conceive of discriminatory AI as a colloquial matter, if there is legally no discrimination event until the technology is used in an improper way, then the technology cannot be considered discriminatory until it is improperly used.

The analysis leads to two ultimate conclusions. First, while the applicability of disparate impact law to AI is unknown, as no court has addressed the question head-on, liability will depend in large part on the degree to which a court is willing to hold a decisionmaker (e.g. and employer, lender, or landlord) liable for using a discriminatory technology without adequate attention to the effects, for a failure to either comparison shop or fix the AI. Given the shape of the doctrine, the fact that the typical decisionmaker is not tech savvy, and that they likely purchased the technology on the promise of it being non- discriminatory, whether a court would find such liability is an open question. Second, discrimination law cannot be used to create incentives or penalties for the people best able to address the problem of discriminatory AI - the developers themselves. This Article therefore argues for supplementing discrimination law with the application of a combination of consumer protection, product safety, and products liability - all legal doctrines meant to address the distribution of harmful products on the open market, and all better suited to directly addressing the products that create discriminatory harms.

Read the September 13, 2024 Brookings article.

Read the August 25, 2021 The Markup article.

(Image by storyset on Freepik.com.)

Labels: AI discrimination, applicants of color, artificial intelligence, discrimination law, discriminatory terms, mortgage lenders

"Association of Historic Redlining and Present-Day Health in Baltimore"

 

"Association of historic redlining and present-day health in Baltimore," by Huang SJ, & Sehgal NJ (2022).  PLoS ONE 17(1): e0261028. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261028.

In the 1930s, the government-sponsored agency Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) - created as part of the New Deal in 1933 - categorized neighborhoods by investment grade along racially discriminatory lines, a process known as redlining. Although other authors have found associations between HOLC categories and current impacts on racial segregation, analysis of current health impacts rarely use these maps.

A study released in 2018 found that 74% of neighborhoods that HOLC graded as high-risk or "hazardous" are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64% of the neighborhoods graded "hazardous" are minority neighborhoods today. "It's as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty," said Jason Richardson, director of research at the National Community Reinvestment Corporation (NCRC), a consumer advocacy group.

Fifty-four present-day planning board-defined community statistical areas are assigned historical HOLC categories by area predominance. Categories are red (“hazardous”), yellow (”definitely declining”) with blue/green (“still desirable”/”best”) as the reference category. Community statistical area life expectancy is regressed against HOLC category, controlling for median household income and proportion of African American residents.

Red categorization is associated with 4.01 year reduction (95% CI: 1.47, 6.55) and yellow categorization is associated with 5.36 year reduction (95% CI: 3.02, 7.69) in community statistical area life expectancy at baseline. When controlling for median household income and proportion of African American residents, red is associated with 5.23 year reduction (95% CI: 3.49, 6.98) and yellow with 4.93 year reduction (95% CI: 3.22, 6.23). 

The primary policy implication is that discriminatory public or social policy - whether or not such a policy is intentionally discriminatory - in a realm such as housing can potentially have long-lasting, disparate, and large impacts on health. Additionally, contemporary African American activists and organizations in the 1930s presciently recognized the discriminatory impacts of how HOLC made its policy decisions: members of marginalized and/or impacted communities should have control over every major policy-making process.

Since many of these issues are structural and historical, health interventions that do not focus on disparate health outcomes risk being “weighed down” by structural problems that predispose a population to worse health. If we take health equity and disparities research seriously, we should be examining the possibility of interventions that attempt to tackle some of these structural factors, including the possibility of reparations. What Link and Phelan propose as “fundamental causes” of health disparities - such as a lack of flexible resources of money, knowledge, social connections, and political power - may have even more fundamental causes rooted in power hierarchies such as racial, class, and gender subordination.

Results add support that historical redlining is associated with health today. Even time-limited urban changes can have long-lasting cumulative effects. Michaels and Rauch found that the differential collapse of Western Roman urbanization in Britain and France in the 6th century CE differentially impacted the spatial efficiency of urbanization even 1500 years later in the 21st century. Similarly, evidence supports that redlining still has cumulative impacts on various social factors today. Aaronson et al. found that living in close proximity on two sides of differently graded borders - as represented in the 1930s HOLC security maps - is strongly associated nation-wide with increased residential racial segregation from the 1930s to today. The effect on residential racial segregation was particularly strong from 1930-1970 and the effect size began to decrease after 1970. Aaronson et al. provide additional support that maps were likely drawn with race in mind: only areas marked category D had a primarily Black population in the 1930s. In addition to increased segregation, Aaronson et al. found support for reductions in home ownership, house values, and credit scores throughout the 20th century that are maintained even today nearly a century later. They also found evidence of “yellow-lining”: areas marked as category C also had disparate current outcomes when compared to higher rated areas. Using a different methodology, Appel & Nickerson found that redlined neighborhoods had lower home prices in 1990 compared to surrounding areas, and that these discriminatory effects remained even after nearly 60 years. The presence of these discriminatory effects can be compounded across time: Massey et al. found that Black residents of redlined neighborhoods face greater barriers to residential mobility than white residents that negatively impacts Black residents’ social and economic well-being.

Read the full-text report.

"Obstacles to Inclusion and Threats to Civil Rights: The Many Negative Social Experiences of Service Dog Partners in the U.S."

 

"Obstacles to inclusion and threats to civil rights: An integrative review of the social experiences of service dog partners in the United States," Leighton SC, Hofer ME, Miller CA, Mehl MR, Walker TD, MacLean EL, et al. (2025) . PLoS ONE 20(3): e0313864.   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313864. Editor: Laura Hannah Kelly, Public Library of Science, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Copyright: © 2025 Leighton et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/hj9nb.

Service dogs, trained to assist people with disabilities, are known to impact their human partners’ social experiences. While service dogs can act as a “social bridge,” facilitating greater social connection under certain circumstances, many service dog partners also encounter challenges in social settings because of the presence of their service dog – despite legal protections. Among the most common challenges reported are experiences of stigma, discrimination, and access or service denials. 

This review sought to synthesize empirical, theoretical, and legal literature to understand better the social experiences reported by service dog partners in the United States, including (1) civil rights experiences; (2) experiences of stigma and discrimination; and (3) broader social experiences. Following database searches and article screening, a total of N = 43 articles met the eligibility criteria for inclusion. Analyses were conducted in two stages: first, synthesizing quantitative and qualitative findings to explore the magnitude of social experiences reported by empirical articles and second, narrative synthesis to integrate findings across all article types. Analyses identified three themes: Adverse Social Experiences, Contributing Factors, and Proposed Solutions. Overall, we found consistent reports of stigma, discrimination, and access denials for service dog handlers. Additionally, these adverse experiences may be more common for service dog partners with disabilities not externally visible (i.e., invisible disabilities such as diabetes or substantially limiting mental health conditions). 

This integrative review highlights a pattern of social marginalization and stigmatization for some service dog partners, exacerbated by inadequate legal protection and widespread service dog fraud. They experienced social marginalization in the form of stigma, discrimination, and access denials. Moreover, service dog partners with invisible disabilities may be at higher risk for adverse social experiences. The lack of adequate legal protections at federal and state levels and the high prevalence of service dog fraud contribute to these issues. These findings have implications for the individual well-being of people with disabilities partnered with service dogs and highlight a need for collective efforts to increase inclusion and access.

In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was created to safeguard the civil rights of people with disabilities by establishing “clear, consistent, and enforceable standards". The ADA was born out of the disability advocacy movement, which aims to counter the ableism and historical marginalization that people with disabilities have long faced. It was enacted after decades of activism and advocacy by individuals with disabilities who fought to raise public awareness of the barriers they faced; these barriers included inaccessible environments, inequitable medical treatment, barriers to self-determination, and obstacles to economic participation. Ultimately, the ADA was signed into law on July 26, 1990 (42 U.S.C. § 12101). However, despite the legislative safeguards put in place by the ADA and related laws, people with disabilities in the United States continue to face various systemic barriers that impede their access to healthcare, education, employment, and community involvement.

One of the legal rights afforded to individuals with disabilities by the ADA is the right to be accompanied by a trained service animal, defined as a dog or miniature horse that is “individually trained to do work or perform tasks” directly related to the person’s disability and for the benefit of the individual (28 CFR § 36.104). In legal terms, service animals are akin to assistive technology like wheelchairs, prostheses, or hearing aids [8] and can be acquired through a professional organization or “owner-trained.” The legal right of a person with a disability to be accompanied by their service animal applies in most public spaces, regardless of any existing companion animal restrictions and provided that the animal is under the handler’s control. Under the ADA, employees of businesses may ask people with service animals (i.e., service animal partners) two questions to determine whether a dog or miniature horse is a service animal (1) “Is this a service animal required because of a disability?” and (2) “What work or task has the dog been trained to perform?” Service animals are not required to wear a vest or identification or to be “certified” as an indicator of legitimacy. However, public access rights for service animal partners do come with contingencies. For example, service animals may lawfully be denied entry in spaces where their presence would fundamentally alter the business or entity, such as sterile environments in a hospital or certain parts of a zoo wherein seeing or smelling a service animal could disrupt the resident animals (28 C.F.R. § 36.302). However, even in these contexts, the person with a disability must still be allowed to stay and use the facility without the dog present. It is also important to note that service animal regulations may not apply to certain entities, such as certain federal or religious organizations exempt from adhering to the ADA.

While service dog partnership was associated with increased quantity and quality of the human partners’ social interactions in some respects, concerns for the social well-being of service dog partners were also noted. Some service dog partners reported routinely encountering inconvenience, unwanted attention, and rude or poor behavior from others when with their service dogs in public settings. Moreover, there were numerous reports of service dog partners experiencing stigma, discrimination, and access denials in public settings – so much so that these are suggested to be defining experiences for members of an “assistance dog sub-culture” within the broader disability community. This sub-culture – the service dog community - offers empathy and essential support to its members who have faced various challenges, from microaggressions and intrusive questioning to outright access denials or service refusals. Beyond community support, legal cases have also arisen from access issues in various settings, with varying outcomes.

While it seems that most instances of stigma and discrimination towards service dog partnerships came from non-disabled people, this was not always the case. Stigma against service dogs can also exist within disabled communities themselves. For example, some Deaf and blind people may hold cultural stigmas against hearing or guide dog partnerships due to concerns that (1) the partnership might make them appear “disabled,” whereas not all members of these communities identify as disabled in the first place, and (2) service dog partnerships could potentially generate further barriers to equal societal participation for those individuals both with and without dogs.

(Image by prostooleh on Freepik.com).

"Fighting Discrimination Against Mothers of Children with Disabilities"

 

"Discrimination that Requires a Remedy: The Case of Mothers of Children with Disabilities," by Ewa Rejman (2025).  Mercer Law Review: Vol. 76: No. 2, Article 4. https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/jour_mlr/vol76/iss2/4.

International human rights law devotes particular attention to the protection of vulnerable groups owing to their special needs and distinctive challenges which should be adequately considered. Building upon this premise and stressing the importance of gender approach, the Article describes particular vulnerabilities that mothers of children with disabilities face and explains how addressing them remains contingent upon safeguarding, in particular, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the right to social security, the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to family life. Through the analysis of the responsibility for the omission in international law, as well as binding positive obligations in the area of economic, social and cultural rights, it identifies states’ duty to remedy discrimination that mothers of children with disabilities experience.

To this end, the article argues that these mothers suffer from associative discrimination on the basis of disability and indirect discrimination on the basis of sex. It relies on the definition of discrimination provided by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, according to which the discriminatory effect, even in the absence of intent, suffices to establish the existence of discrimination if other conditions - distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference or other differential treatment nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of rights on equal footing - are fulfilled. In doing so, it critically discusses the relevant jurisprudence on discrimination of vulnerable groups of the European Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Justice, the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights, and treaty-monitoring bodies by deducing the underlying principles and applying them to the protection of these mothers. 

As a remedy, the author proposes the introduction of “special measures” - instruments already recognized in international legal treaties - explaining that in cases concerning disability, unlike those involving race, measures should not be necessarily described as “temporary.” Considering the rights of mothers of children with disabilities, it is crucial to focus on indirect discrimination. The most relevant difference for our considerations is the presence of discriminatory effect on certain groups even in the absence of discriminatory intent, for example, “when the agent is simply unaware of and indifferent to the effects” of the act.

Associative discrimination is the legal term that applies when someone is treated unfairly because either someone they know or someone they are associated with has a certain  protected characteristic. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) explicitly prohibits “excluding or otherwise denying equal jobs or benefits to a qualified individual because of the known disability of an individual with whom the qualified individual is known to have a relationship or association.”

Mothers of children with disabilities have to be treated differently from other people because their situation is significantly different.  These individuals simply have different needs that have to be addressed differently in order to enjoy opportunities as close as possible to those available to others. The same logic should be applied to caregivers, in this case, mothers of children with disabilities, whose needs also change because of situations in which they find themselves.

"Relationship Between Residential Racial & Economic Segregation and Main Causes of Death in U.S. Counties"

 

"Relationship Between Residential Racial and Economic Segregation and Main Causes of Death in US Counties." by Gong, R. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-025-02367-z.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between residential racial and economic segregation and main causes of death at the county level in the U.S. Residential racial and economic segregation quintiles were determined using the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE). Linear mixed-effects model was applied to calculate adjusted mortality rate ratios (aRR).

The ICE for race + income outperformed the ICE for race and the ICE for income. Among 3142 counties, the average age-adjusted all-cause mortality rates were 980.25, 919.82, 844.37, 781.82, and 703.01 per 100,000 across ICE for race + income quintiles, from the most deprived to the most privileged, respectively (p for trend: < 0.001). The corresponding aRRs for all-cause mortality were 1.32, 1.23, 1.17, 1.10, and 1 (p for trend: < 0.001). Furthermore, both mortality rates and aRRs for all 11 main causes of death showed a significant decrease from the most deprived to the most privileged counties (p for trend: < 0.001).

There is a strong association between residential racial and economic segregation and age-adjusted all-cause mortality as well as the 11 main causes of death in US counties, with a clear decreasing trend observed across ICE for race + income quintiles. These findings underscore the urgent need for policy interventions to reduce residential segregation, including equitable urban planning, investment in underserved communities, and improved access to healthcare and education in disadvantaged areas. Addressing these structural inequities could be an effective strategy for reducing mortality disparities and advancing health equity.

Read the National Library of Medicine summary of the research article.

Diversifying but not Integrating: Entropic Measures of Local Segregation in Philadelphia

"Diversifying but not Integrating: Entropic Measures of Local Segregation," by Kramer, R.,  & Kramer, P. (2019),  Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 110: 251-270. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12306. 

Scholars of segregation have struggled to adapt indices designed to model two-group segregation for cities with large populations drawn from more than two racial/ethnic groups. 

Considering segregation as a social form of entropy resolves that struggle and introduces a family of related measures that offer means of analyzing segregation at both the local (neighborhood) level and the greater (city/region) area. A case study of Philadelphia's level of segregation from 1990 to 2010 illustrates the benefits of the new measures. While Philadelphia has diversified, it remains racially segregated. 

Further, the new measures show the growing importance of Hispanic segregation and a shift from segregation being visited upon the city's Black residents to being driven by a White population that grows more segregated as its population share shrinks. Integrating measures of segregation and diversity into studies of residential racial patterns enhances our understanding of racial segregation patterns in a multiracial context.

Black Exclusion, Racial Segregation, and Spatial Integration in U.S. Municipalities, 1990 - 2020

 

"Racial Segregation in a Multiracial Society: Black Exclusion and Spatial Integration in US Municipalities, 1990–2020," by D., Lichter, D.T., Ambinakudige, S., & Scott, C.K. Population, Space and Place, 31: 1, e2870. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2870.

America's municipalities, as political actors, have become the cultural arena for changes in Black social integration and inclusion. Growing racial diversity presumably offers new opportunities for residential inclusion, resulting in less segregation, in an increasingly pluralistic and multiethnic society. This study examines patterns of Black segregation from Whites and non-Blacks across America's increasingly multiracial municipalities over the last four decades. Our results reveal high, yet steep decline in Black segregation from Whites since 1990, as measured by the index of dissimilarity (D), decreasing from 77 to 64. However, Black-White segregation remains exceptionally high compared to other racial groups. Black segregation from Hispanics has also declined since 1990, but segregation from Asians has changed very little. 

In metro municipalities, fringe suburbs pose serious challenges for Black integration, suggesting new bastions of segregation. Nonmetro municipalities, particularly county seats, still show higher levels of segregation, reflecting enduring social structures that impede racial mixing. Fixed-effects models that control for unobserved municipal-period effects indicate that observed changes in the predictors cannot fully ‘explain’ the differentials in Black segregation or the large downward trend since 1990. 

Racial inequalities - in income, housing, and labor market opportunities - nevertheless continue to reinforce persistent Black municipal segregation from Whites and other non-Black populations. It remains to be seen whether Black segregation will continue to decline indefinitely in a multiethnic society or evolve in new and unexpected ways as racial diversity penetrates the American landscape.

These data were derived from the U.S. Decennial Census, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020. [Census.gov]. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association America, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 12-15, 2023. The co-authors acknowledge the helpful comments of Richard Alba and Sigrid Van Den Abbeele. Direct correspondence to Domenico Parisi, Data Science Academic Institute, Mississippi State University, 133 Etheredge Hall, Mississippi State, MS 39762.

Read the Wiley Online Library summary of the research article.

Di: "Pangd Presst angital nient M Redliningd Present Motivations

 

Abrams, K.M. (2025). "Digital Redlining: Past and Present Motivations," by Arai, K. (eds). Advances in Information and Communication. FICC 2025. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol. 1284. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85363-0_3.

This paper aims to bring about an interdisciplinary examination of the motivations behind digital redlining. Digital redlining is a form of violence that can impact marginalized groups in many different aspects of life. Digital redlining manifests in various ways, primarily through unequal access to technology and online services, and discriminatory advertising practices. Examples include internet service providers offering lower quality or more expensive services in low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Advertisements targeted based on personal data can further exacerbate existing inequalities, especially when used by housing providers to target renters or homeowners by zip code, which is a proxy for race, according to the ACLU. 

While there are other examples of digital redlining that will be mentioned, the case of Facebook is a very developed one. It shows how many different organizations come together to challenge digital redlining and the results of those actions. These organizations have their own ways of challenging Facebook, whether that be through investigations of Facebook’s advertisement system, lawsuits, or charges brought against Facebook with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. 

This paper reveals that the motivations behind redlining and digital redlining match the assumed justifications for why a major company like Facebook would perpetuate systemic biases such as redlining through their social media platform. This paper will add to the current literature surrounding digital redlining, presenting a new perspective that combines technical and sociological perspectives in the analysis.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) combines grassroots community engagement with technical knowledge, research, and coalition building to advocate on behalf of people working in their communities for digital equity.

Read the March 5, 2025 Springer Nature Link research report summary.

"You don’t Need Zoning to be Exclusionary: Manufactured Home Parks, Land-Use Regulations, and Housing Segregation in the Houston Metro

 

"You don’t need zoning to be exclusionary: Manufactured home parks, land-use regulations and housing segregation in the Houston metropolitan area," by Andrew Rumbach, Esther Sullivan, Shelley McMullen, & Carrie Makarewicz, Land Use Policy, Volume 123, 2022, 106422, ISSN 0264-8377, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106422. 

Manufactured home parks (MHPs), businesses that are “designed, developed, operated and maintained for the placement and occupancy of manufactured homes on a long-term basis,” are an important source of affordable housing in the U.S. and other countries1. The social and spatial stigma surrounding MHPs has been widely documented, and the location of these communities is a key feature of their marginalization.

This study examinea the how land use regulations contribute to the spatial distribution and segregation of MHPs in Greater Houston, a fast-growing urban region in the southern U.S. At the local-government scale, we collect land-use regulations from the 134 jurisdictions in the Houston MSA to analyze how jurisdictions shape development, expansion, or improvement of MHPs within their boundaries, and how the regulation of MHPs varies across jurisdictions. At the scale of the individual MHPs, we draw a random proportionate sample of 400 MHPs and collect data from primary and secondary sources including tax parcel records, local zoning maps, remotely sensed imagery, and a proprietary real estate dataset. 

The study discusses four key findings. First, local governments use a variety of land-use tools, not just zoning, to exclude, limit, or condition the placement of MHPs within their respective jurisdictions. Second, we show that these land-use regulations have widely varying requirements for the (re)development of MHPs. Third, we find that a significant number of MHPs are already located in unincorporated areas and that new MHPs will be less likely to be in incorporated areas. Finally, the study finds that local governments often treat MHPs as something other than housing, which introduces important uncertainties about the future of MHPs.

Read the December, 2022 Science Direct article.

Black Immigrants and Changing Black Neighborhoods in Minneapolis

 

"Who Is Black on the Block? Black Immigrants and Changing Black Neighborhoods," by Nima Dahir. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Jan. 2025, 11 (1) 110-131; DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2025.11.1.06.

In recent decades, the U.S. has seen a significant rise in Black immigration, reshaping Black neighborhoods and the landscape of Black America. Using census and American Community Survey data, this article examines the relationship between an influx of Black immigrants and changes in neighborhood racial composition and segregation. Findings show an increase in Black immigrants relates to a decline in the Black native population and an increase in White residents within a Black American neighborhood. Furthermore, the presence of Black immigrants relates to native-born Black-White integration by preceding Black entry into White neighborhoods and White entry into Black neighborhoods. This study elucidates intra-racial spatial dynamics between Black people, emphasizing the intersecting roles of race and nativity on neighborhood change in a diversifying U.S.

In 2000, a neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was home to over 70% native-born Black residents. By 2020, the neighborhood was far more diverse, with only 39% native-born Black residents, nearly 20% non-Hispanic White, and 13% Asian residents. Over that same period, the foreign-born Black population grew from nonexistent to almost 10% of the neighborhood. Now, replacing vacant lots, African, Caribbean, Asian, and American restaurants all line the same streets. Although the neighborhood grew more diverse overall, Black residents, foreign- and native-born, still made up a near majority of the neighborhood, far more than any other group. For all intents and purposes, this neighborhood remains a Black neighborhood but its racial and ethnic character has transformed over these twenty years as its Black immigrant population has grown.

The influx of Black immigrants to this Midwestern neighborhood is not a unique scenario in the U.S.; over the past few decades, the size and diversity of the Black immigrant population across the country have considerably grown (Hamilton 2019; Tamir 2022; Tesfai 2019). Now, 20% of Black people in the U.S. are an immigrant or have at least one foreign-born parent (Tamir 2022), making Black immigrants and their descendants a sizable share of the category we call Black in the U.S.

Other articles in this double issue address the changing racial and ethnic classifications of Americans revealed in the 2020 Census, prompting a reconsideration of all ethnic, racial, and nativity-based classification categories. In this article, the author contends that Black nativity is an unexamined source of heterogeneity within Black America and Black neighborhoods. As Black immigrants become more prevalent and diverse in the U.S. in this decade and beyond, it argues for a reconsideration of the theories linking immigration, neighborhood racial composition, and residential segregation to include the role of Black immigrants.

Existing research highlights the important role that immigrants play in neighborhood racial composition and trajectories. In particular, immigrants alter neighborhood racial composition by affecting native-born residential patterns (Crowder et al. 2011; Ellis and Wright 1998; Frey 1995). Furthermore, the influential buffering theory in urban sociology highlights the more complex role that immigrants may play in neighborhood racial trajectories (Ellen 2000; Farley & Frey 1994; Frey & Farley 1996; Logan & Zhang 2010; Santiago 1991). Buffering suggests that immigrants contribute to stable neighborhood diversity by “reducing] the salience of Black neighbors to Whites, even when they live on the same block” (Logan & Zhang 2010, 1072) or diminishing the importance of the Black-White residential dichotomy (Iceland 2004). Although buffering somewhat explains the emergence of stably diverse neighborhoods that other theoretical approaches cannot accommodate, it remains limited by a focus on the residential preferences and choices of White householders (Wright & Ellis 2021) and agnostic about the role of Black immigrants. Given that they are both Black and immigrants, how Black immigrants may change the racial composition and trajectory of a neighborhood remains theoretically ambiguous.

This article tests how an influx of Black immigrants relates to future changes in the racial composition of a neighborhood. Using the 2000 Census with the 2008-2012 and 2016–2020 American Community Surveys, it first tests whether there is Black American in- or out-migration with increases in the Black immigrant population in a neighborhood, taking a particular lens to Black native majority neighborhoods given the relatively high integration of Black immigrants and Black Americans (Crowder 1999; Cutler, Glaeser, & Vigdor 2008; Freeman 2002; Iceland 2009; Scopilliti & Iceland 2008; Tesfai 2019). Next, changes in the number of White and non-Black immigrant residents as Black immigrants move into a neighborhood are considered, thereby examining how Black immigrants may modify our understanding of the role of race and immigration in neighborhood integration. Finally, it tests the expectations of the buffering hypothesis as Black immigrant presence increases in a neighborhood.

Results demonstrate evidence of Black native out-migration with an increase in the Black immigrant population, driven by neighborhoods in which native-born Blacks were a majority in the baseline year. In addition, the study finds that an increase in the Black immigrant population in baseline majority Black native neighborhoods is related to a substantial increase in White residents. it also finds increases in the non-Black immigrant share of all neighborhoods with Black immigrant influx. Finally, it demonstrate that Black immigrants, like other immigrants, can play a buffering role in a White neighborhood, preceding the entrance of other Black people (Logan & Zhang 2010). This suggests that nativity alters racial hierarchies in residential patterns and that all immigrants, regardless of race, can mitigate White flight as native-born Black households move in. It also finds a new pathway to Black-White co-residence, which I call reverse buffering, wherein Black immigrants precede the entrance of Whites into Black American neighborhoods.

Altogether, these results suggest that Black immigrants contribute to the diversification of a Black American neighborhood. This article examines intra-racial spatial dynamics between Black people and the role that Black immigrants play in neighborhood change as the Black immigrant population grows in the U.S. The implications from this study are not limited to Black immigrants and Black neighborhoods, however. the study concludes with a discussion of the findings and their implications for the theoretical contours of race and immigrant status and the future of spatial inequality in Black neighborhoods.

Read the January 1, 2025 RSF Journal research report.

(image: City of Minneapolis.)

How Census Undercount Became a Civil Rights Issue and Why It Is Increasingly Important

"How Census Undercount Became a Civil Rights Issue and Why It Is Increasingly Important," by Lisa Neidert, Reynolds Farley, & Jeffrey Morenoff. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Jan 2025, 11 (1) 26-43; DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2025.11.1.02.

This article traces the history of census undercount and its importance to civil rights. The Constitution mandates a census and calls for Congress to use the results to apportion seats in Congress and the Electoral College. A substantial undercount in the census will misallocate congressional and electoral college votes. More recently, census-derived statistics are used for the geographic allocation of federal and state funds. This linkage of the census count to the distribution of federal and state funds puts the undercount on the radar for states and municipalities. Closely tied to the undercount and becoming a more central issue to the Census Bureau is the difficulties in reaching hard-to-count populations. Is the Census Bureau up to the task? We end our story with a discussion of Detroit’s experience with the 2020 Census, including its unsuccessful challenge to its housing count.

The census is the only federal statistical program mentioned in the Constitution. Every ten years the census enumerates the total population so that this nation will have a democratic government in which each state has political power reflecting its population size. James Madison wanted the first census to be expanded beyond bare enumeration. He wished to collect information about the population so that Congress could be more informed when they enacted laws and spent tax dollars.

From 1790 to 1940, all respondents were asked a series of questions about their demographic and economic status. From 1940 to 2000, a sample of households received a long form that asked such questions; most respondents, however, filled out a short form asking their address, name, race, sex, and age. Since 2001, the collection of detailed information about economic and demographic characteristics has been collected not by the census but by the annual American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS does not enumerate the population. Instead, it gathers data about the characteristics of residents of places whose official population size is ascertained by the decennial census. The current sample size for the annual ACS is roughly 3.5 million housing units. The population for each place is updated every year by the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates program. Communities use these data for operational purposes by analyzing the characteristics of neighborhoods to deploy programs. Researchers use the data for analyzing social and economic trends, investors and nonprofits to make decisions about where they will locate their facilities. In all cases, the accuracy and completeness of the census enumeration is critical.

Census under- and overcounting is a civil rights issue. If some states are significantly overcounted and others undercounted, some states may be over- or underrepresented in Congress. If areas with many black and Hispanic residents are undercounted while areas with white and Asian residents are overcounted, legislative seats within a state may be erroneously assigned, and federal and state dollars may flow to overcounted areas rather than to the locations that were intended to receive such funds. Although census errors are important, other forces are often more important to civil rights, including gerrymandering and voting rights issues. With the rapidly increasing distribution of federal funds tied to the census counts and characteristics drawn from the ACS, census undercount looms large in importance. Although undercount is a national issue, its impact is often local. We close this article with an illustration of a city that has in the past and most recently challenged the Census Bureau concerning its apparently substantial undercount. This undercount costs the city state and federal monies and diminishes its influence in the state legislature. Thus we end our story with Detroit’s experience with the Census 2020 and its formal challenge to the 2020 housing and population counts.

Read the January 1, 2025 RSF research report.

Interesting Recent Research on Housing Segregation: Part 1: Wealth, Schools, Transportation, Noise

 

The following are some recently-published academic studies of housing segregation with the authors' summaries. If available, their section snippets, full-text, other summaries, and publishers are available online via the links.

"Racial Segregation in Housing Markets and the Erosion of Black Wealth," by Prottoy A. Akbar, Sijie Li Hickly, Allison Shertzer, & Randall P. Walsh. The Review of Economics and Statistics (2025) 107 (1): 42–54. https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/logan.155/pdf/logan-and-parman_segregation-jel-final-updated-after-replication.pdf.

This paper studies how the expansion of segregated neighborhoods eroded black wealth in prewar American cities. Using a novel sample of matched addresses, it found that over a single decade rental prices soared by roughly 50% on city blocks that transitioned from all white to majority black. Meanwhile, pioneering black families paid a 28% premium to buy a home on a majority white block, after which their homes lost 10% of their value. These findings strongly suggest that segregated housing markets cost black families much of the gains associated with moving north during the Great Migration.

Residential segregation is a central factor in explaining socioeconomic gaps across race and ethnicity in the U.S. Place of residence directly impacts access to schools, jobs, and healthcare. There is an ever-evolving literature across the social sciences disciplines documenting the general patterns in residential segregation as well as the causes and consequences of those patterns. This article reviews key parts of that literature. The study provides an overview of the measurement of segregation and the general evolution of segregation patterns over time and at different scales. It then reviews the literatures on both segregation’s determinants and its impact on a range of socioeconomic outcomes. The potential for new insights to be gained from new approaches to quantifying segregation and new frameworks such as stratification for understanding its complex roots are highlighted.

"The Diverging Paths of Black-White Segregation in Urban America, 1970–1990," by Richard Sander & Yana Kucheva. American Journal of Sociology: Volume 130, Number 4. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/733012.

Measures of Black-White housing segregation show striking uniformity across metropolitan areas in 1970 and very uneven - sometimes quite large - declines in the 1970s and 1980s. Thise study argue that after 1970, Black households were more likely to move into neighborhoods far from existing Black enclaves and that when they did so in substantial numbers, metropolitan-level segregation declined significantly. It is further argued that the volume of Black migration to outlying areas depended on a few key demographic characteristics of metropolitan areas-hence, the variation across these areas in the rate of desegregation. 

Using internal census data at the household, census-tract, and metropolitan levels, the study shows that framing desegregation as an interrelated process of intra- and inter-metropolitan migration flows and demographic structural constraints can account for changes in Black-White residential dissimilarity during the 1970-1990 time period with considerable precision. The analysis also sheds new light on the likely role of national fair housing policies in changing Black residential patterns.

"Eroding Integration: 21st Century Segregation Trends in U.S. Public and Charter Schools and Implications for the Enduring Promise of Brown," by Erica Frankenberg, Caprial Farrington, & Kathryn A. McDermott. Urban Education 2025: 1–35. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00420859251329310.

The article examines major patterns of national, regional, and urban school segregation over the last two decades (2002-2021) in the context of resistance and legal challenges to Brown. These decades  included ongoing housing segregation, isolation of urban schools by rigid school district boundaries, and funding disparities that have shaped racial segregation since the mid-1970s. Within this period emerged several policy factors that undermined full implementation of Brown: limitations for race-conscious student assignment policies, rapid proliferation of market-oriented policies like charter schools and high stakes accountability, and the gentrification of cities alongside growing racial diversification and segregation in the suburbs. Drawing on E.C. Boddie’s adaptive discrimination framework, this article analyzes changes in demographic trends from 2002-2021. 

The findings reveal a continuation of several longstanding trends, including increased racial/ethnic diversity in public school enrollment; deepening racial isolation within districts; persistent, high isolation for Black students; high but declining isolation for white students; growing isolation for Hispanic and Asian students; and substantial variation across regions. The growth of charter school enrollment and segregation since 2002 is striking, with substantial increases in many urban areas. Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, these trends reveal the continued effects of adaptive discrimination via privatization.

"Rental deserts, segregation, and zoning," by Airgood-Obrycki, W., Maaoui, M., & Wedeen, S. Journal of Urban Affairs, 2025: 1–20. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/rental-deserts-segregation-and-zoning.

Restrictive zoning and NIMBY attitudes have left nearly a third of neighborhoods across the United States with few options for renters. The concentration of rental housing in some neighborhoods and the exclusion of rental options from others reinforces enduring patterns of residential segregation by race and income. Neighborhoods with a lower share of rental housing are disproportionately suburban, higher-income, and white. 

The study uses the concept of rental deserts to highlight places with few rental opportunities for households and define these as neighborhoods where rental units make up less than 20% of the housing stock. It examines the characteristics of rental deserts, arguing that uneven geographies of rental opportunities bolster patterns of socioeconomic and racial segregation because renters are disproportionately lower-income and people of color. There is an investigation of variations in the spatial distribution of rental deserts across and within metropolitan areas as well as resulting segregation by mapping divergence indices that measure the unevenness of rental housing within metropolitan areas. The study finds an association between rental deserts and a lack of neighborhood-level racial and economic diversity. It also finds that restrictive zoning and land use regimes are associated with the presence of rental deserts, a finding that generally holds in cities and suburbs alike.

The study concludes by recommending zoning changes that pave the way for multifamily housing and rental options in exclusionary communities, to confront inequities in where people can live. While zoning changes have the potential to increase housing options for renters, creating socioeconomically integrated, mixed-tenure communities will also require building more homes at lower price points, increasing access to homeownership, and expanding housing subsidies.

"Historical Redlining and Community-Reported Housing Quality: A Spatial Analysis," by Salvatore Milletich, Andres Manrique, Sonia Karsan, Tamara Spikes, Anuj Nanavanti, Jared Bailey, Eric Coker & Christine C. Ekenga. Journal of Urban Health 2025:102, 49–60. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39777711/.

Historical redlining, a racially discriminatory practice implemented by the U.S. government in the 1930s, has been associated with present-day environmental outcomes. However, there is limited research examining the relationship between historical redlining and contemporary housing quality. The objective of the present study was to investigate the relationship between historical redlining and contemporary housing quality in Atlanta, Georgia. Spatial patterns of housing code violation complaints from 2015 to 2019 were examined using point-pattern and spatial cluster analyses. We used Bayesian hierarchical models, accounting for spatial autocorrelation, to estimate associations between historical redlining and housing complaints, after adjusting for contemporary neighborhood characteristics, such as poverty, median structure age, vacant and renter-occupied properties, and residential racial segregation. A total of 48,626 housing code violation complaints were reported during the study period, including 6531 complaints deemed “hazardous.” 

Historical redlining was a statistically significant predictor of housing complaints. The study observed a 167% increased risk (IRR = 2.67, 95% confidence interval = 1.49, 4.77) of housing complaints for historically redlined neighborhoods compared to neighborhoods historically graded as “best” or “still desirable,” after adjusting for neighborhood characteristics. Redlined neighborhoods also had an increased risk of “hazardous” housing complaints (IRR = 1.94, 95% confidence interval = 1.11, 3.40), after adjusting for contemporary neighborhood characteristics. Historically redlined neighborhoods exhibited disproportionately higher rates of housing code violation complaints. Spatial analysis of housing code violation complaints can provide insights into housing quality and inform interventions targeted at addressing the environmental legacy of structural racism.

"Race, historical redlining, and contemporary transportation noise disparities in the United States" by Timothy W. Collins & Sara. E. Grineski. Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology 2025: volume 35, pages 50–61. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38760532/.

Legacies of discriminatory federal housing practices - e.g., racialized property appraisal by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and institutionalized redlining by the Federal Housing Administration - include disparate present-day environmental health outcomes. Noise pollution is health-harming, but just one study has associated contemporary noise with redlining in some HOLC-mapped U.S. cities, while two national studies found associations between greater neighborhood-level people of color composition and increased noise. No studies have examined noise pollution exposure disparities across all HOLC-mapped cities or based on the intersection of race/ethnicity and redlining.

The study addresses three objectives: (1) Assess disparities in fine-scale, per person transportation noise exposures by historical redlining status across all HOLC-mapped cities;(2) Quantify disparities in noise exposures by race/ethnicity nationwide; and (3) Explore interactions between redlining status and race/ethnicity in noise exposures.

It was found that there was an approximately monotonic association for excess transportation noise with HOLC grade, marked by a pronounced exposure increase (17.4 dBA or 3× loudness) between contemporary residents of grade A (highest-graded) and D (lowest-graded) neighborhoods, a pattern consistent across HOLC-mapped cities. People of color experience ~7 dBA greater (2× louder) excess transportation noise exposures than White people nationwide, a pattern consistent across U.S. counties. Noise exposure disparities are larger by HOLC grade than by race/ethnicity. However, contemporary racial/ethnic noise exposure disparities persist within each HOLC grade at levels approximating those disparities existing in ungraded areas, indicating that historical redlining is one of multiple discriminatory practices shaping contemporary national soundscape injustices.

"Historical Redlining and Current Neighborhood Social Vulnerability in the United States," by Oluwatosin Ogunmayowa, Alicia Lozano, Alexandra Hanlon, Natalie Cook, Frederick Paige, & Charlotte Baker. Environmental Justice 2025: Vol. 18, No. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381210910_Historical_Redlining_and_Current_Neighborhood_Social_Vulnerability_in_the_United_States.

This study examined the association between historical redlining, a government-sanctioned racial discriminatory practice of the 1930s, and present-day neighborhood social vulnerability in the U.S. The 2018 social vulnerability index (SVI) data was obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, linked it to 1930s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps, and assigned U.S. neighborhoods to one of four HOLC grades (“A: best,” “B: still desirable,” “C: definitely declining,” and “D: hazardous/redlined”).

Using multilevel models, it was found that there was significant association between historical HOLC redlining grades of neighborhoods and present-day overall, socioeconomic, minority status, household composition, and housing type/transportation vulnerability. Neighborhoods formerly assigned less favorable grades by the HOLC in the 1930s showed significantly greater vulnerability presently than those that were graded more favorably (i.e., “D” > “C” > “B” > “A” in SVI). For instance, neighborhoods that were formerly graded “B: still desirable,” “C: definitely declining,” and “D: hazardous/redlined” were 0.068-, 0.107-, and 0.114-unit greater in present-day overall SVI score, respectively, than neighborhoods previously graded “A: best” (mean score of 0.477). Also, it was found that the relationship between HOLC security grades and all present-day neighborhood SVIs, except the household composition SVI, varied by city.

This study indicates that historical redlining, an indicator of structural racism, has a lasting impact on neighborhood social vulnerability.

"Economic Inequality and the Geography of Activity Space Segregation: Combining Mobile Device Data and Census Data," by Siwei Cheng, Yongjun Zhang, & Jenna Shaw. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, January 2025: 11 (1) 132-152. https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/11/1/132.full.

This article combines daily mobility data collected via mobile device and the American Community Survey to create comprehensive measures of activity space segregation across geographic areas in the U.S. It uses extended conventional measures of spatial segregation to incorporate exposure in individuals’ routine activities, weighted by the flows of individuals between census block groups. The analysis reveals three key findings:    metropolitan areas vary significantly in the degree of activity space segregation; individuals exhibit a lesser degree of income and racial segregation in their activity space than in their residential space; income inequality at the metropolitan statistical area level is associated with greater isolation for both lowest and highest income groups; and economic inequality exerts a more substantial influence on activity space isolation than residential segregation.

The empirical analysis reveals substantial variation in income and racial segregation of activity spaces across metropolitan areas. Although the mobility-based isolation both income and racial groups experience tends to be lower than distance-based isolation, racial boundaries impose a more significant constraint on individuals’ daily activities than income disparities do. Income inequality at the MSA level is associated with greater relative isolation for both advantaged and disadvantaged racial and income groups. Moreover, although individuals tend to offset some of the residential segregation based on income and race through their daily activities, segregation within their activity space responds more sensitively to economic inequality compared to their residential space. The results call attention to activity space as an especially pivotal domain of socioeconomic segregation in times of rising economic inequality.

"Housing as an engine of inequality and the role of policy," by Cody Hochstenbach, Icon,Justin Kadi, Sophia Maalsen, & Megan Nethercote. International Journal of Housing Policy, 25(1), 1–17. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2024.2444043.

Recent years have seen a steep increase in studies, also published in the pages of International Journal of Housing Policy, seeking to chart and theorize housing-based inequalities. These studies pay ample attention to homeowners’ wealth accumulation prospects, with many homes –particularly those located in the center of popular cities– recording house price increases exceeding the annual salaries of middle-income workers. Or, simply put, these homes have come to ‘earn more than jobs’ (Ryan-Collins , J., & Murray, C., "When homes earn more than jobs: The rentierization of the Australian housing market," Housing Studies, 2023, 38:10, 1888–1917).. Rocketing house prices help generate stark wealth divides between homeowners and tenants, who are excluded from these capital gains (Pfeffer, F. T., & Waitkus, N., "The wealth inequality of nations," American Sociological Review, 2021, 86:4, 567–602), as well as other outsiders such as young adults who see no option but to prolong their stay in the parental home. A further stratification exists among homeowners, between heavily mortgaged, equity poor homeowners and the (sometimes outright) owners of valuable property in coveted locations seeing the values of their properties inflate.

The literature on housing classes thus directs most attention to the economic dimension of class stratification and to property owners and their capacity to generate market returns (i.e., capital gains and/or rent). Conversely, other literatures home in on a wider array of social inequalities rooted in housing and, in doing so, they typically zoom in on the ‘centrality of housing for the urban poor,' shifting attention from one extreme to the other, from the property-rich to the property-poor. For the property poor, academics have long conceptualized housing as a potentially important source of precarity. Crucially, the concept of precarity moves beyond opportunity to generate market returns from one’s home, or lack thereof, to instead focus on a broader range of potential disadvantages impacting the precariously housed. Those disadvantages represent types of residential precarities that include, for instance, disproportionally high housing cost burdens relative to their incomes, short-term and insecure rental contracts, weak tenant protections overall, substandard dwelling quality and overcrowding. Even if these precarities disproportionally impact renters, they certainly do not impact all renters, let alone equally so. Likewise, marginalized homeowners may also be confronted with specific precarities, such as problematic debt levels, risks of mortgage defaults and evictions that may follow.

"Flood Risk Impacts from an Unlikely Source: Redlining Efforts of the 1930s in Houston, Texas," by Behrang Bidadian, Michael P. Strager, Peter Butler, & Hodjat, Ghadimi. Environmental Justice 2025: Vol. 18, No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2023.0027.

In recent decades, urban areas have faced increasing flood risk, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. The 1930s redlining practices in the United States have had socioeconomic and environmental impacts in multiple cities. However, there remains an incomplete understanding of the relationship between redlining and urban flood risk. This study addresses this need by investigating the spatial distribution of green infrastructure (GI) and impervious surfaces, as influential factors in mitigating and exacerbating flood risk, respectively, in the flood-prone redlined zones in Houston, Texas. Census blocks that intersected with floodplains and redlining map categories were identified, assigning redlining classes based on the overlap percentages. The proportions of impervious surfaces and GI elements were extracted from land cover data. Their median ratios were compared across redlining categories, and significant clusters of high imperviousness and low GI were mapped. 

The study found higher imperviousness and lower GI median ratios in redlined zones with strict housing loan restrictions categorized as “Hazardous” and “Definitely Declining.” In addition, the significant clusters of high imperviousness and low GI were mainly located within these redlining zones. The spatial and temporal resolution limitations of available data are acknowledged. Higher-resolution land cover data spanning different periods and comprehensive flood hazard datasets including future climate change scenarios are recommended for more accurate analysis. This study linked prior research on flood risk disparities and historical discriminatory practices, revealing significant spatial relationships between Houston’s redlined zones and the distribution of GI and imperviousness in flood-prone areas.