Should We Trust the Government to Combat Racism in Housing?

I worry that Strahilevitz takes too rosy a view of the government's ability and desire to foster racial heterogeneity in housing.  It seems like for every exclusionary strategy foreclosed by government prohibition, several other possibilities spring up in its place, and it's hard to see why this wouldn't always be the case.  This section of Strahilevitz's book would be more salutary, I think, if it were accompanied by convincing evidence that government-led, top-down attempts to ameliorate de facto segregation are actually effective.  I fear that the (predominately white, predominately privileged) government is less interested in actually promoting racial equality than it lets on, and that the fact that it always seems to be a step behind racism may be a feature of the system, and not a bug.

I also think Strahilevitz doesn't talk enough about how government prohibition of exclusionary strategies can amount to substantial deprivations of liberty in themselves.  Surely some people who prefer to live in a golf course community are not secretly racist; so barring them from fulfilling that desire could actually create racial animosity in those people where there was none before.  My (perhaps overly-cynical) suspicion is that using top-down control to fix de facto segregation can never work without a change in the culture, and could in fact be counterproductive until then.

I think it's especially curious for Strahilevitz to focus on command-and-control methods to ameliorate racism in the context of a tech policy class, because if there's one salient feature of the ongoing tech revolution, it's that it provides significant opportunities to devolve power.  Instead of asking how better technology can help the hierarchicy that is government combat racism, I think we should instead ask how better technology can assist grassroots efforts by disadvantaged communities and their allies. Perhaps burgeoning information technology would make it easier to organize boycotts of establishments run by racists.  Our culture is generally at the point that it's not okay to be explicitly racist; so maybe the government could make publicly available the racial composition of neighborhoods and thereby enable a shaming campaign against people who live in highly segregated communities. 

 

Comments

[Asher Luzzatto]

Robert's last point here about some sort of "information forcing" rule is really interesting. I think the biggest problem with exclusion/segregation today is that we (the general public) have very little access to information and/or evidence about the problem. If information was made public, I think we could make much more informed decisions about what to do (if anything at all).

[Ryan Truesdale]

I would go one-step farther and suggest that not only can we not trust government to combat racism, but that the government should not even be involved in “private racism,” but instead should allow the free market and public shaming sort things out.