POLICY SEMINAR: We Built This: How Federal Policy Segregated America

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POLICY SEMINAR: We Built This: How Federal Policy Segregated America

October 23, 2020
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
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The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University hosted Jacob Faber for a Poverty & Social Policy Seminar. Professor Faber’s research focuses on segregation, spatial inequality, and racial geography.

While there is a rich literature exploring the geography of opportunity, there remain many unsettled questions about the causes of segregation and its effects on the residents of urban ghettos, wealthy suburbs, and the diverse set of places in between.

Professor Faber discussed his most recent work on the racial outcomes of New Deal housing policies that still persist today. His presentation was followed by a discussion with federal housing policy expert Alicia Mazzara, a senior research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.


 

About Jacob Faber

Jacob Faber is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service at New York University. His research and teaching focuses on spatial inequality. Dr. Faber’s scholarship highlights the rapidly-changing roles of institutional actors (e.g. mortgage lenders, real estate agents, check cashing outlets, and police officers) in facilitating the reproduction of racial and spatial inequality. 

Dr. Faber’s past work ranges from research on unequal banking costs in America to how race and segregation play a role in the outcomes of complaints made against the police. His most recent work focuses on the racial outcomes of New Deal housing policies. Pulling from census and housing data, he measures the impact that these policies had on the racial makeup of specific cities that are still the most segregated areas of the country today. His work has been published in American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Demography, Social Forces, and Housing Policy Debate. More of Dr. Faber’s work can be found here.


About Alicia Mazzara

Alicia Mazzara is a Senior Research Analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She works on the Housing Policy team to protect and expand access to affordable housing for people with low incomes. Her expertise includes evaluating the degree to which federal rental assistance programs serve marginalized populations, particularly people of color, and to which people receiving rental assistance are segregated into communities that have historically experienced underinvestment. Mazzara uses her work to advocate for future affordable housing investments.


 

Dr. Faber referred to the following resources and articles during his presentation:

Further reading and resources:

  • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
  • Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson
  • A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly
  • The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement by Stephen L. Ross and John Yinger
  • Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 
  • Video: Urban Renewal...Means Negro Removal. ~ James Baldwin (1963) 

Center on Poverty and Social Policy related research