The Root Cause Research Center and Actor's Theatre are bringing Ananya Roy to speak on "Housing Justice: Racial Banishment & a Right to the City."

First, the event. Then we'll define a few terms. The Root Cause Research Center is partnering with Actor's Theatre of Louisville to launch "Root Cause Radical Thinkers: A Movement Science Speaker Series."

On Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 a.m., Ananya Roy will be speaking about Housing Justice: Racial Banishment & a Right to the City. Roy's talk at Actor's Theatre is free of charge but you must reserve a place because seating is limited. Go here to do so.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which promotes research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and and seeks to build power to make social change. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (1999).

Ananya’s research and scholarship has a determined focus on poverty and inequality. Her work has focused on urban transformations and land grabs in the global South as well as on global capital and predatory financialization.

Going a bit deeper ...

Three research and policy priorities are central to Ananya’s current commitments. First, she leads a National Science Foundation funded research network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. Building a shared terrain of scholarship across universities and movements, this network is concerned with advancing ideas, practices, programs, and policies of housing justice in Los Angeles as well as in other cities of the world. Second, Ananya’s research is concerned with “racial banishment,” the pushing out of working-class communities of color from urban cores to the far peripheries of metropolitan regions. In collaboration with housing justice lawyers and movements in Los Angeles, she studies the role of municipal ordinances in such processes of banishment. Third, since 2017, she has been actively involved in scholarship about sanctuary cities and cities of refuge. As evident in her recent article, The City in the Age of Trumpism: From Sanctuary to Abolition (Environment and Planning D), she seeks to expand practices of welcome and hospitality in order to take account of the long histories of settler-colonialism, imperialism, and slavery.

Here's a snippet about the Root Cause Research Center.

We believe that the people most impacted by an issue are best positioned to discover the root causes and solutions of that issue. They are the ones with the firsthand experience, social context, insights, and networks that are necessary to fully unearth the whole story behind a deep-rooted problem.

The Root Cause Research Center works alongside and trains community members to investigate and report community concerns. We bring together impacted community members and train them in community organizing, research, and design--all to help them tell their own data stories to the public, to policymakers, and to other connected stakeholders. We partner with local grassroots leaders to launch Community-Based Participatory Research projects. We also design inventive and interactive visuals that break down complex information for policy change.

The Root Cause Research Center is a policy-focused, grassroots-led institution grounded in Data Equity, Movement Science, and Abolitionist Planning (see Definitions below). We are actively building a new system in the American South that provides an alternative to the traditionally hierarchical and classist model of research. We lean into transformative justice by creating community-based alternatives to dehumanizing and inaccessible research institutions that use impacted community members as test subjects rather than co-investigators.

And a video.

New Albanians with memories of a time before taco walks will recall the Root Cause Research Center's co-investigator Joshua Poe, who lived here in New Albany a decade ago. Here's a forgotten piece he wrote in 2010 for the long dormant New Albany Bicycling Coalition blog. It actually was reprinted at Broken Sidewalk.

From contributor and New Albany resident Joshua Poe: "Observations about biking from New Albany to Louisville."

And, a few more links about Poe's work.

Joshua Poe explains how those "public input" meetings are kept meaningless to maintain pre-determined outcomes.

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

NYT on "The Architecture of Segregation."

If you think the perpetual public housing conversation in places like New Albany only involve whether or not to improve the building we already have, where they already are, be advised that the terms of the discussion seem gradually to be changing.

And New Albany is notoriously slow to grasp change.

The Architecture of Segregation, and editorial in the New York Times

Fifty years after the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development — and nearly that long after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — the fight against the interlinked scourges of housing discrimination and racial segregation in America is far from finished. Economic isolation is actually growing worse across the country, as more and more minority families find themselves trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods without decent housing, schools or jobs, and with few avenues of escape.

This did not happen by accident. It is a direct consequence of federal, state and local housing policies that encourage — indeed, subsidize — racial and economic segregation. Fair housing advocates have recently been encouraged by a Supreme Court decision and new federal rules they see as favorable to their cause. Even so, there will be no fundamental change without the dismantling of policies that isolate the poor and that Paul Jargowsky, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University-Camden, and others call the “architecture of segregation.”

As things stand now, federally subsidized housing for low-income citizens, which seems on its face to be a good thing, is disproportionately built in poor areas offering no work, underperforming schools and limited opportunity. Zoning laws in newer suburbs that rest on and benefit from infrastructure built with public subsidies prevent poor, moderate-income and minority families from moving in. Discriminatory practices exclude even higher income minority citizens from some communities.

SCOTUS: "Exclusionary housing practices that result in adverse racial segregation are unconstitutional."

Those "other" Supreme Court rulings overshadowed this one.

The Supreme Court Keeps the Fair Housing Law Effective, by the Editorial Board of the New York Times

 ... Explicit, legally sanctioned racial segregation in housing may be over, Justice Kennedy wrote, but “its vestiges remain today, intertwined with the country’s economic and social life.” From discriminatory lending practices to zoning laws that favor higher-income home buyers, persistent patterns work to hurt minorities and other vulnerable groups the law was written to protect.

At City Lab, the crux of it.

The question at the heart of the Supreme Court’s decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project was whether Texas could concentrate low-income housing tax credits in poorer minority neighborhoods—away from wealthier white neighborhoods. The answer is no: Exclusionary housing practices that result in adverse racial segregation are unconstitutional.

In a city like New Albany where virtually every resident has an opinion about sewers, public housing or both, it's hard to see how this does not pertain to us, and yet the topic remains divorced from public discussion.

$20 million on parks.

Housing? Pins drop and crickets chirp.

Wealth Doesn't Trickle Down, But the Effects of Housing Discrimination Do, by Kriston Capps (City Lab)

From 1990 to 2010, wealth has accumulated in ever-richer neighborhoods, thanks in part to exclusionary housing practices.

The opinion with the greatest impact from the Supreme Court’s latest term may very well be the case that decided the future of fair housing. The Court’s decision last week in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project affirms that it is unconstitutional to set housing policies that discriminate implicitly against a protected minority.

This decision is as wide reaching as the court’s mandates on healthcare and marriage equality, yet its impact can be harder to understand. That’s because economic stratification and racial segregation have been built into our neighborhoods over the course of many years, even decades.

That other Supreme Court opinion: The Fair Housing Act of 1968.

We're all waiting for the other ruling, but this one's important.

The Supreme Court Keeps the Fair Housing Law Effective, by the editorial board of the New York Times

Housing discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional to be illegal. That is the point of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday interpreting the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in accord with clear congressional intent, and preserving a well-established and critical tool in the long-running battle to ensure a more integrated society.