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federal Fair Housing Act—disparate impact—is uncertain .14 Some highly notable examples of state litigation can be cause for optimism, but the remedies are often decades in the making due to lack of political support .15
Community organizing may be more fruitful for achieving fundamental change over the long term . Law can shape social and cultural expectations that, over time, shift social norms .16 But such outcomes also depend on mobilizing support at the grassroots level and building social movements that can leverage the power of legal discourse .17 Place advocates, in other words, need a ground game . Movement-building and a sophisticated communications operation are especially important for conveying the significance of place . Explaining why place-based equality matters and how it connects to an individual’s lifelong opportunities—the shoe stories—takes some unpacking . Therefore, we require a language that is user-friendly .
Community organizing is critical for another reason . A key political barrier to neighborhood equality is that it depends on the approval (or acquiescence) of the very people who want (and benefit from) segregated neighborhoods . Law tends to facilitate segregation by enabling higher- income communities to exclude outsiders,18 effectively forcing poor people of color to live in places of concentrated poverty and deprivation . Governments that serve these communities rarely have the fiscal wherewithal to fund policies and programs that can meaningfully improve the lives of local residents . Nor do they have the legal leverage to force their wealthier neighbors— who have helped to create the problem—to share the burden .
Without law to intervene in the political processes that reinforce these racialized boundaries, we default to segregation . The problem is so longstanding that we have come to regard our separateness as natural . It appears that the only way to upset this equilibrium is through organized social action—carried out by affected communities and people of good will—that pressures state and local legislatures to dismantle the systems that created, and perpetuate, this mess .
All this suggests that redressing place-based inequality may be decades beyond us . But the problems demand our dedicated attention now . Our divided neighborhoods continue to divide us as a people and as a nation . They sap our talent and deplete the human spirit . We should treat the “right” to place—the right not to have geography determine one’s destiny—as the new “civil right .” And we should commit ourselves to this project so that future generations can fully realize the promise of meaningful racial equality . •
14 See Emily Badger, The Supreme Court May Soon Disarm the Single Best Weapon for Desegregating U.S. Housing, wash. posT (Jan. 21, 2015), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/21/the-supreme-court- may-soon-disarm-the-single-best-weapon-for-desegregating-u-s-housing/ (discussing most recent challenge to disparate impact standard under the federal Fair Housing Act).
15 See, e.g., Sheff v. O’Neill, 678 A.2d 1267 (Conn. 1996) (declaring de facto racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional under state constitution); Southern Burlington Cty. NAACP v. Twp. of Mt. Laurel, 336 a.2d 713 (n.J. 1975).
16 See, e.g., michael W. mccann, righTs aT work: pay equiTy reform and The poliTics of legal moBilizaTion 48-91 (1994) (describing role of “’legal rights discourse” as a catalyst for social change in the context of a movement for pay equity).
17 Id.
18 See Vill. of Arlington Heights v. Metro. Hous. Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977); Richard Thompson Ford, Geography and
Sovereignty: Jurisdictional Formation and Racial Segregation, 49 sTan. l. rev. 1365 (1997).
Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality