Joining Florence Wagman Roisman’s clarion call in End Racial Segregation: Build Communities that Look Like America, recently posted on this page, two other fair housing/civil rights heavyweights urge the social justice community to fully engage in strategic race-conscious fair housing and community development advocacy as the best way to fulfill the promise of the federal Fair Housing Act, now in its 40th year.

In An Unfinished Agenda: Fair Housing and Community Development To Fight the Vestiges of Segregation, recently published in the Black Agenda Report and ShelterForce Online, renown civil rights attorney Betsy Julian calls on social justice advocates to coalesce around and move forward with an agenda that demands implementation of a true anti-segregation approach in housing and community development policy at the local, state and national levels. Like Roisman, Julian reminds us of the direct connection between government-created and sanctioned housing segregation and discrimination and the ongoing “[r]acial disparities [that] exist in almost every indicator of health and well-being.” She rightly asks whether we in the justice community are complicit in maintaining structurally racist systems when we insist on “colorblindness” and “class over race” as paradigms in approaching our work when, in fact, the demographics reveal stark differences in access to opportunity and decent living conditions between poor whites and poor people of color. Citing successful examples, she urges advocates to pursue impact litigation to address disparities in housing and municipal services and to push Congress and other law-making bodies to remove from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, HOPE IV Public Housing Program and other programs the components that perpetuate racial segregation.

In Is local housing really fair? (April 26, Press Democrat), civil rights and land use attorney David Grabill also links racially discriminatory zoning practices to school segregation in the context of a critique of Santa Rosa, California’s “inclusionary” zoning ordinance. The ordinance, states Grabill, fails to live up to its title because it allows developers to pay fees in lieu of building affordable units in affluent high opportunity areas, thus excluding low income people who are disproportionately people of color from such neighborhoods and exporting the inclusionary obligation to poorer, mostly of color areas. Grabill offers workable local solutions such as requiring that inclusionary zoning laws apply in single-family home areas and requiring jurisdictions to match their hunger for economic development with a commitment to fairly house the workers that make such development possible.