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I don't know. Good evening, everybody.

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My name is Adam Smith. I'm the Edward Osborne professor of US politics and political history and the director of the Rather American Institute,

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and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all here for the inaugural lecture by this year's John G.

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Wine and Professor of American Government. Before I introduce Professor,

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where I want to acknowledge the extraordinary generosity of the wine family who have endowed this professorship in honour of John Gilbert Winant,

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who was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James by FDR in the middle of the Blitz in 1941.

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The Daily Mail Front page the day after why Nance arrival quoted the new ambassador as saying I'm glad to be here.

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There is nowhere I would rather be at this time, which went down very well.

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According to the author of a book about Americans in wartime, London wine ends warmth and compassion,

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and his determination to stand with them and share their dangers was the first tangible

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sign for the British that America and its people really cared about what happened to them.

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He became a symbol of the best side of America.

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Well, at the RBI, we're very proud to host a professorship named for Ambassador Winant and the best side of America.

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I'm proud to of the distinguished roster of political scientists who have held this

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chair since its creation and known a more distinguished than the present incumbent.

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Margaret Weir, professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown University.

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Professor Win was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held positions at Harvard and Berkeley,

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as well as at the Brookings Institution. Hers is a formidable, wide ranging and influential body of scholarship.

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She's the author and editor of numerous books, including Schooling for All Race Class and The Decline of the Democratic Ideal Politics and Jobs,

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the boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States, and forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

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Who gets what? The new politics of insecurity, and also of many widely cited cited articles on the role of institutions,

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racial and ethnic divisions and ideas in shaping social and economic policy in the United States over the past century.

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She is as attuned to historical change as to the specifics of local institutional contexts,

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and a persistent theme of her work is a concern with equality and inequality in American society and how politics and public policy affects it.

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This is my very great pleasure to ask Margaret to deliver the 2020 wine lecture on

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American government entitled Race and the Problem of the Public in post-War America.

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Not used to delivering lectures this way, but I make sure I'm set.

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So thank you, Adam, for that very kind introduction. It's an honour and a pleasure for me to be here at Oxford and very pleased to

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deliver the wine at lecture and especially glad to have the chance to speak

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to colleagues and students in the UK about American politics at a time when

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both of our countries are experiencing what might be called unusual tumult.

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The title of my lecture today is race and the problem of the public in post-war America.

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One major story of America after the new deal is a national story of the growth of public and social economic engagement,

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and this is a story that is familiar to many students of American politics and social policy.

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The expansion of Social Security, the creation of unemployment insurance.

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But there's also a much more fraught story about the expansion of social policies, such as health care.

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Where in the absence of federal action during the 1930s, private arrangements grew up and efforts to expand policy become much more difficult.

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The difficulty in enacting and updating social policies motivates an enduring question of American politics.

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Why is it so hard to launch social policy initiatives and stem growing economic insecurity in the United States?

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One answer that has been given and received a lot of attention recently was given by my former colleagues,

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Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, in their book winner Take All Politics.

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And that argument is one about the mobilisation of the far right in American politics, the mobilisation of the far right and the Republican Party.

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And there's plenty of evidence.

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Much of it really nailed down by Theodore Scotch Paul, who's here today that far right organisations have colonised the Republican Party,

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have pushed it and use their power to press for tax cuts to discredit the Affordable Care Act and to support cutbacks in existing social programmes.

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More recently, people have also analysts have also, I think, rightly turn their attention to what political scientists call second dimension politics.

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And that is the politics of identity as an argument for why we have weak social and economic policies that assist low income people.

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If the first dimension of politics in this schema is the politics of economic issues, the second dimension is refers to racial and identity politics.

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But why is the second dimension of politics so available for politicians and particularly Republican

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politicians to use to prime public opinion against advancing redistribution and social welfare?

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This is somewhat puzzling because we live in an era when surveys routinely show that racial prejudice has diminished.

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Survey questions about school integration and integrate interracial marriage now routinely show large majorities favouring integration.

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These questions have become so routine that they don't really ask them anymore because they get such large majorities.

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Similarly, surveys show that home sellers now agree that surveys show that Americans now agree that

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home sellers home sellers should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race.

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And so this is white respondents. I would note that it's not until 1990 that you get below 50 percent,

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but by 2010 it has dropped to a decided minority that agrees that it should be a home.

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Sellers should not be allowed to discriminate.

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So what I want to do in today's lecture, I want to argue that to understand the enduring power of second dimension politics,

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even in an era when people say they are less prejudiced,

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we need to tell the traditional national story of social policy and politics since the new deal,

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along with a parallel story about local development from the new deal on.

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And that is the story of the use of public powers to create a racially segmented public sphere.

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In that story, it's important to highlight a single mechanism, which is the institutional availability of exit,

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the ability of people to exit to separate local political jurisdictions.

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If you don't want to live near a person of a different race income level or you don't want to pay taxes for services that you don't want,

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you can move to a separate political jurisdiction. Over time,

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I will argue the availability of exit has segmented the public sphere horizontally and

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vertically and is deeply influenced politics and policy in three ways that I will discuss.

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It's naturalised and racialized the fragmentation of the public so that the

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mildest government action to promote affordable housing faces huge obstacles,

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even in an era of deep housing shortages.

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And it's stymied the development of metropolitan public infrastructure that might connect the fragmented parts of the metropolis.

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The availability of exit has further weakened the local public sector,

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especially the local public sectors that low income people of colour increasingly rely on.

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And finally, I will argue these arrangements have distorted ideals of democracy held by white higher income

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Americans who view local democracy as a right to be free from the burden of redistribution.

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To make these arguments,

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I'll draw on census data that maps the growth of spatial inequality in twenty five large metro areas in different regions of the country,

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along with case studies of Atlanta, Chicago and Houston.

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And I'll also present some research derived from a corpus of newspaper texts about affordable housing in Chicago and city building in the Sunbelt.

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So let me begin by sketching out the origins of horizontal and vertical segmentation of the public.

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We commonly think of the new deal as the founding moment of federal, social and regulatory policies.

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And as I stated, what was done, what was not done in that time period has profound effects on later policies and politics.

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Social Security altered the behaviour of senior citizens,

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making them powerful advocates for the Social Security programme and domains where the federal

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government did not act have a much more difficult time in establishing a strong public role.

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The new deals efforts to rethink the federal government's relationship with

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federalism and cities in particular fell into a similar realm as health care.

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It was studied and it was it was studied and considered, but no action was taken.

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The New Deal did launch a study of the problems of cities as part of its broader initiatives in studying local planning and national planning.

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Chaired by the president's uncle Franklin Delano, the National Resources Committee produced a large report.

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Our cities their role in the national economy. And the report was concerned with the economic viability and efficiency of cities,

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which have been a longstanding concern of progressive era reformers.

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And like earlier, a progressive era reformers,

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the report highlighted the irrationality of having so many local jurisdictions within the metropolitan area.

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It argued for consolidation and rationalisation of political jurisdictions.

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And it argued for the need to stretch the city. You can see that from the quotes that I pulled from the report.

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The concern about the mismatch between the need for services in the city and the exit of tax dollars to the suburbs.

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This concern was already evident in the nineteen thirties.

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And just to highlight the things that I thought were especially salient in that report,

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no community and a democratic society can remain a sound functioning organism if those amongst its members

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who gain the greatest benefit from it escape most of the obligations of that communal life imposes,

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and those who obtain the least in return in the way of necessities and amenities are left to bear the brunt of civic responsibility and taxation.

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And we will see that this idea that the brunt of taxation and escape from taxation becomes an important theme in metropolitan America.

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From the nineteen thirties on the report had little impact on federal policy.

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Instead, patterns of post-war development remained under the purview of states,

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most of which made it easy to form new local governments and to allow those governments to shape their populations using the power of zoning,

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leading to a proliferation of local jurisdictions. And this is a picture of the Chicago region, which wins the prise for the most local governments,

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with 1500 local governments in its six county region.

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The consequence for post war suburbanisation was a legally sanctioned right to exit cities,

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laying the groundwork for a racially defined horizontal segmentation of the public sphere.

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We now have a rich historical literature on the racially exclusive patterns of suburbanisation that characterised the post-war building

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boom with the movement of whites into separate political jurisdictions that used a variety of strategies to prevent black suburbanisation.

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The historian Robert Self-Study of Oakland has shown how racially restrictive

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covenants and side presents an example of a racially restrictive covenant.

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These were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948, made unenforceable by the Supreme Court.

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But his research shows they continued to be enforced long after that at the subdivision level,

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effectively making a home buying off limits to African-Americans.

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This was reinforced by the federal housing authorities underwriting standards, which would not insure loans to racially mixed areas.

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Discrimination in private mortgage lending presented African Americans with huge obstacles to homeownership.

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And the violence that routinely met African-Americans who did try to move to the suburbs presented another kind of obstacle.

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These political boundaries and the policies that supported them had self-reinforcing features,

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so this that density map of Detroit and its suburbs shows a sharp line between the city and the suburbs.

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The green is African-American, the white is blue and you can see on Eight Mile Road the sharp division that exists to this day.

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That's a recent map to this day, marking off where whites live and where blacks live.

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The barriers that initially prevented African-Americans from building equity and housing wealth made future moves to the suburbs difficult,

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even after formal barriers had been dropped because African-Americans were less likely to have the funds for a down payment.

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Having missed out on the initial wave of suburbanisation and because Summers offered little rental housing today,

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homeowner ship rates are seventy four percent for non-Hispanic whites and their forty three percent for black Americans.

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Over time, these boundaries have come to account for more of total segregation than segregation within cities.

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A study in 2012 by the policy analyst Paul Schakowsky estimates that segregation across

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political jurisdictions account for three quarters of all segregation in the United States.

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So political boundaries and this horizontal fragmentation started in the nineteen thirties.

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Failure to alter the boundaries of the city and to engage with that and over time became a reinforcing feature of American politics.

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The horizontal fragmentation and turn set the stage for a vertical segmentation of the public sphere.

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And by this, I mean that the federal government gradually shared responsibility to assist local

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governments that were fiscally strained as a result of older infrastructure,

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poor minority populations, declining tax bases, the need to supply social supports.

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The federal government didn't want to engage over time with those kinds of issues.

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In contrast to most advanced democracies, which either address the fiscal problems of local governments by ordering political

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consolidation from above or ensuring some form of fiscal equalisation across local governments,

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the United States developed an ad hoc, highly politicised system of intergovernmental assistance.

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In the 1960s,

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the federal government launched major programmes offering local financial assistance based on the power of mayors within the Democratic Party,

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but also linked to federal initiatives associated with the war on poverty that aim to intervene directly in poor minority neighbourhoods.

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What Desmond King calls forceful federalism. But this was a short lived period after Republicans came to power in the 1970s.

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This brief period of direct federal support to cities apart from law enforcement diminished

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dramatically and responsibility for place based issues was devolved to the states,

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which were typically an unfriendly venue for cities.

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The result has been a vertical segmentation of the public sphere.

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The federal failure to assist New York City as it faced bankruptcy in nineteen seventy five is a marked

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the emergence of the new type of relationship between the federal government and local governments.

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The historian Kim Phillips finds Brooks fears city recounts the emergence of local of

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the argument that local irresponsibility is the cause of New York City's problems,

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and she documents the subsequent shrinkage of local politics as bankers and accountants now describe the scope of public possibility.

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The Reagan administration took the withdrawal of the federal government from local assistance further with the elimination of federal revenue sharing,

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which had once offered no strings attached kind of support for local governments.

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At the same time, you can see that some of the major players oriented policies that offered places assistance have been cut quite substantially.

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One of them, the Community Block Grant, has declined by more than 60 percent.

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I would also note that the White House budget Trump's White House budget has called for the elimination of this programme for the last four years,

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including the budget that was just released on Monday.

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On some of the policies that most help the needy in cities, temporary assistance in local governments,

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temporary assistance to needy families and the social services block grant cut quite substantially from the 1980s.

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These cuts were accompanied by a deliberate sidelining of other forms of expertise about intergovernmental fiscal relationships.

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The U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relationships was created in 1959 to develop bipartisan,

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technocratic approaches to rationalising local public finance and assessing federal responsibilities to state and local governments.

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In 1966, after Republicans took over Congress, the ACR, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations was abolished,

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removing not only a source of expert knowledge but also a venue for discussing fiscal

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relationships in the federal system and relationships between cities and suburbs.

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By the time of the Great Recession, apart from Obama's short lived and underfinanced stimulus programme,

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it was clear that these vertical relationships had now been replaced.

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Vertical public political relationships had now been replaced by a new common wisdom defined by bond

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rating agencies that centred on the need for local governments to be more responsible in their spending.

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The result has been to impose cuts on the local public sector of the most distressed cities,

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with results including poisoning the water supply with lead in Flint, Michigan, that have often been devastating.

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So what are some of the consequences of the horizontal and vertical split?

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What does it mean for local public capabilities and ideas about democracy in an era of high inequality and greater diversity?

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I want to flesh out three consequences and the first.

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Is the way this pattern of suburbanisation entrenched racial categories in ways of thinking about political jurisdictions and public infrastructure.

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Distinctions amongst political jurisdictions became naturalised and racialized in ways

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that have blocked the development of affordable housing in areas of opportunity.

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The quotations that I'm showing here are from the text analysis showing the

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responses of people to efforts to promote affordable housing in Chicago suburbs.

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And the first quotation gives the sense that affordable housing is not natural.

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It's not natural for for it to appear in some places, and that the way places have always been is now the way they should always be.

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The second quote makes it clear how racialized the idea of affordable housing is and how associated with failed public housing projects in this case,

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Cabrini Green, one of Chicago's notorious housing projects that had a clear racial identity.

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So one thing that that the entrenched racial categories did is to make it very difficult to ever

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have a conversation about affordable housing in well-to-do places that offer lots of opportunity.

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They also have stymied the development of the metropolitan public sector and especially true of public transit in the Sun Belt.

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Atlanta's public transit system, Marta, was first created in the 1960s and it was supposed to be a five county regional system.

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Until very recently, it has mainly been confined to the city of Atlanta because other counties voted to block its expansion into their areas.

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Debates about expansion had and still have thinly veiled and not so thinly veiled racial arguments.

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For example, the New York Times reported on bumper stickers and in the 1986 expansion effort that said Share Atlanta crime support Marta again.

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Just last year, the Association of Marta with African-Americans and with the City of Atlanta was used in

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campaigning to defeat yet again the expansion of Marta out to one of the outlying counties,

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a county that is now majority minority. I would add robocalls suggested that Marta plan to put quote thousands of apartments in this county.

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Should the referendum pass. The racialisation of space also mobilises fierce opposition to any efforts to challenge it.

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Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968,

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neither political party has wanted to touch this issue since the 1970s.

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In 2015, however, the Obama administration issued a new rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.

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The title of the rule was drawn from the 1968 Fair Housing Act,

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which stated that local governments that received public funds were required to quote affirmatively further fair housing.

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But the federal government never defined what it would mean to affirmatively further fair housing,

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and the rule was simply became paperwork that no one ever looked at.

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But in 2015, the Obama administration wanted to shake this up,

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and it put a rule out through the administrative process that put new requirements on local government and what it did,

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it prescribe detailed guidelines for analysing housing and demographics.

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It created publicly available data and mapping tool tools that they would use to inform this analysis.

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And it mandated broad local public participation in the process.

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The emphasis of the rule was on the need to remedy racial exclusion and particularly

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exclusion from areas of opportunity areas that offer good schools access to transit.

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The rule also stipulated that the federal government would monitor the outcomes of local planning,

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and it would reject reports that did not fulfil the requirements of the rule.

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In the back now, this is was really a planning exercise,

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but in the background was the threat that the federal government could withhold funds from localities that were not compliant.

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The rule attacked attracted a lot of attention on the right as a challenge to the American way of life.

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It was an issue that was picked up and filtered through local tea parties.

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Rush Limbaugh, the talk show host who was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the president last week,

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talked about it in his in 2014 as the rule was being discussed.

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And in ways that I think are revealing, it's a longer quotation, but I'll read it.

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So what they're going to do, and he's talking about affirmatively furthering fair housing,

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they're going to build projects, is the name for this low income housing.

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Think Pruitt-Igoe? That's the name of a failed housing project in St. Louis.

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Think Bed-Stuy here. He's a little out of date because Bed-Stuy was already gentrifying by then.

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They're going to build public housing in these affluent suburban areas to make sure there is diversity.

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This is what people who are aware of what Obama's doing are calling his war on the suburbs.

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I realise some of you are thinking, Come on, rush, folks. Please use your common sense.

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You know that practically everything Obama is doing is based on redistribution.

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Redistribution is what taking from those who have.

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So here's a photo on the web site.

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There's a website transcription of the radio show, and here's the the photo that was that was on the transcription.

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And what was especially interesting in this radio show was that it didn't begin by talking about Obama's war on the suburbs,

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it didn't begin by talking about Obama and the suburbs began by talking about refugee children being sent to states that did not ask for them.

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And then it drew an analogy to the war on the summer.

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If you can see these are are presumably refugee children.

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It drew an analogy to the war on the suburbs and throughout the radio show weaves back

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and forth between the invasion from the southern border and the invasion of the suburbs.

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It's not surprising that the affirmatively furthering fair housing rule was suspended within months of Trump taking office.

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And that last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed an alternative rule that makes no mention of race,

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segregation or opportunity, and instead focuses on removing all impediments to developers who want to build housing.

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A second major consequence of the horizontal and vertical fragmentation of the public is a further weakening of the local public sector,

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the local public sector, especially in jurisdictions with growing numbers of low income African-Americans and Latinos.

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And to get a handle on this issue, it's important it's necessary to understand the new geography of poverty in the United States.

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Although the words urban and black have long been associated in the American mind and in the media with poverty since the 1990s,

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it's become clear that that picture is no longer an accurate portrayal of metropolitan poverty in America.

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Since the 1990s, there's been a decline in the share of low income people living in the historic central city

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and a rise in the share of low income people living outside the historic central city.

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By 2006, the number of poor people in the suburbs exceeded the number of poor people in the historic central cities.

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It is still important to stress that the rate of poverty was still higher in those historic central cities.

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But as part of this greater geographic variation in where low income people live, we see two new patterns.

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The first is a rise in the number of low income people in small suburban political jurisdictions.

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We think of suburbanisation in the United States as an opening of opportunity.

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And sometimes it is.

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But a significant portion of low income residents who live outside the central city live in small, high poverty political jurisdictions.

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And that's particularly true in the Midwest and St. Louis, for example.

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About a quarter of the suburban municipalities have poverty rates above 20 percent,

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which you say that the poverty rate right now in the United States is about 12 percent

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and African-Americans are disproportionately represented in these municipalities.

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The most famous of these in this issue of suburban small suburban cities gained national prominence with Ferguson,

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Missouri, and the killing of Michael Brown and the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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The Chicago area also exhibited a similar growth in small, high poverty suburban jurisdictions with an overrepresentation of African-Americans.

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That's one pattern in this new political geography, another pattern in the new political geography.

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And this is more prominent in the Sunbelt.

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In the south is the rise in low income people living in unincorporated areas, and these are areas with no overlying municipal government.

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They have to receive services from county governments. So these are not rural places on the outskirts of town that have yet to be developed.

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Rather, what they are are places that have been deliberately skipped over in the annexation process in the city making

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process so that you end up with a kind of a Swiss cheese political geography that omits poorer places.

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And this is the city of Houston. All of this is Houston, and you can see that in a next because it wanted to annexe wealthier places.

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And, you know, it just went up the highway there and grab them.

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But it leaves out these other areas, which are low income areas, heavily Latino areas simply left out.

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Each type of this political geography has distinctive problems for low income residents.

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Unincorporated areas are served by county governments whose fiscal and service

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capabilities vary considerably across the U.S. In most unincorporated areas,

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residents have very limited public services.

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Many places in California, they do not have water because their wells have run dry and there are no public facilities that the county provides.

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Residents have weak political voice and as a result are vulnerable to environmental problems and unaddressed public nuisances like dumping.

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Illegal dumping. Small political jurisdictions face a different set of problems.

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They are vulnerable to a downward spiral of population, exit service cuts, tax increases, reduce property values and further exit.

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Harvey Illinois, a majority black town of near twenty five thousand people in Chicago's south suburbs,

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provides a stark example of this negative spiral struggling with pension payments.

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A budget shortfall. And a thirty eight percent poverty rate.

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The town laid off a quarter of its police force and 40 percent of its firefighters in 2018.

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Yet the town had a high tax rate. A 1990s and up to a 2019 study comparing tax rates of selected municipalities in

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the Chicago area showed that the poorest municipalities had the highest tax rates.

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The tax rate in Harvey was three times that, as high as the affluent municipalities like suburban municipalities like Naperville.

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The result is what legal scholar Michelle Anderson calls minimal government.

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These are minimal governments that cannot and do not provide for the basic needs of their residents.

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These are also often predatory governments, and this problem was outlined in the Department of Justice report on Ferguson,

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Missouri, which showed that law enforcement efforts were focussed on revenue generation.

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City departments depended on widespread use of fees and traffic fines to support basic public services,

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and the slide is an excerpt from the Department of Justice report.

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You see, there's emails from the Ferguson finance director to the chief of police telling him

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to get his officers to write more tickets because the city had a sales tax shortfall.

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So as the political geography of poverty has changed,

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with the numbers of low income residents spread throughout metropolitan America, greater numbers of people,

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low income people and people of colour in particular are subject to government with limited resources and weak public infrastructure.

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These places have been put in a sense, out of sight and out of mind.

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A final impact. That I want to discuss is the way that the horizontal and vertical segmentation of the public has influenced views of democracy,

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the Sun Belt is a particularly interesting place to look at ideas about democracy and local government because of its distinct history.

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Sunbelt metros typically had much less horizontal fragmentation that kind of

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1500 governments that Chicago looked like that very unusual in the Sunbelt.

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Instead, the South had big county governments and separation was legally enforced through racial legal, formal segregation.

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In other parts of the Sunbelt, especially in Texas, state laws made it easier for cities to annexe,

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which is why Houston grew from seventy three square miles in 1940 to six hundred and thirty seven square miles today.

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Suburban development was a later process in the Sunbelt took off in the 1970s into the 90s so that some of the types of

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characteristic racial barriers that you saw in the 1950s in the Northeast and Midwest were less prominent in the 1990s.

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Some analysts have argued that these differences have made it possible for Sunbelt

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cities and counties to have less racial segregation and to have stronger tax bases.

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But the research that I've been doing indicates that spatial segregation along jurisdictional lines is now occurring in many Sunbelt metros,

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with richer, whiter areas effectively seceding from their counties to form separate cities.

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You see it in Atlanta, Miami and Sacramento, where some of the places that I have been studying since 1990,

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there have been 11 new cities formed in the Atlanta region and 14 in Miami-Dade.

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This is a contentious political process because it's the richer areas that are starting the process, depriving county government of revenues.

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It's the whiter areas that are leaving counties when they become ruled by county commissioners who are majority minority.

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And it's contentious because the areas that are left behind have no say in the process.

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So in the text analysis that I'm doing, I'm looking for arguments on either side about why new cities are needed or

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not as a way to try to understand how people think about the public sector.

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And for those who are supportive of the new cities, two kinds of arguments have stood out so far.

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Advocates and supporters routinely use the language of self-determination and democracy to justify their quest for a new city.

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Referring to it as a basic right, as the middle quotation puts it, self-determination is the bedrock of democracy.

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This is their right if they want to secede. So and a second thing that stands out in the way democracy is discussed is that it is connected to an

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economic calculation that reveal conceptions of fairness that leave little room for redistribution.

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And as a quotation show, these are often quite precise calculations,

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such as the middle one where the argument for the need to secede is that we provide 14 percent of the tax base,

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but we only have nine percent of the population. So I want to circle back to a question that I started the talk with.

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Which is why it's so easy to stir up a second dimension race racial and identity politics in the United States.

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The answer that I would give is that structural racism is deeply embedded in our local institutions

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and the politics surrounding it are routinely enacted in metropolitan areas across the country.

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The policies that support Exit have transformed thinking in multiple domains,

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from policy oriented ideas to individual beliefs about redistributive fairness and ultimately to beliefs about democracy itself.

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In this sense, the two dimensions of politics,

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the first dimension being economic issues and the second dimension of identity politics are deeply entwined in the everyday experience of Americans.

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So far, I've presented a stark picture.

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Of what American public life is like, and I want to end this lecture by asking,

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do the trends that I've described the trends of the last 60 years of a racialized and weakened public sphere?

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Will there continue into the future? After all, the United States is much more diverse than it was 50 years ago.

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It's 18 percent Latino, 13 percent African-American, six percent Asian.

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Inequality has grown. The white middle class that became the middle class by moving out into the suburbs in

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the 1950s is now split apart and the middle is hollowing out as inequality has grown.

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There are signs such as protests by teachers in recent years that squeezing the public sector is less popular than it was 40 years ago.

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And in fact, I want to suggest that there are two stories of America operating side by side.

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On the one hand, there's plenty of evidence that racial and income segregation has continued, even even as America has become more diverse.

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A recent paper by sociologist Douglas Massey and Jacob Rowe shows that whites and Asians are benefiting from the increasing segregation of affluence,

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and that African-Americans and Latinos continue to live in neighbourhoods with disproportionate levels of poverty.

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Research at the local level routinely reveals efforts on the part of affluent suburbs to eliminate the affordable housing that they do have,

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often on the grounds of removing blight. The new cities in Atlanta, for example,

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have used their new powers over land use to tear down many of the apartment complexes that were home to low income Latino residents.

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And finally, white flight is ongoing in metros across the United States.

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More whites are moving even further out into exurban locations as changes occur and places become more diverse.

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So a lot of what we observed over the last 60 years, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it will continue.

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But I also want to say that side by side with this is a picture of a quite different America.

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And this is a picture that includes big, diverse cities, especially big, diverse, rich cities that benefit from agglomeration economies.

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And it was as a result they have more fiscal and regulatory leeway to enact policies that help low income residents.

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So you see in cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles.

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Increases in the minimum wage guaranteed pre-school in New York City.

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Regulations that help low wage workers, such as regulations governing work scheduling practises.

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Guaranteed representation in civil cases, which are critical for people who are being evicted.

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So what's going on in some of the cities and big cities,

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especially rich cities that have the resources to do this is something quite different and

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a revival of the use of public powers and public resources to assist low income people.

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This alternative story also includes growing support for regional public infrastructure such as public transit,

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and some of the support stems from the greater racial diversity of who lives where in metropolitan America.

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So the Atlanta region finally has expanded its transit system beyond its 1960 boundaries,

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but it was due to the support of voters in a neighbouring county that have become 80 percent African-American.

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But it's also significant that some of the support stems from broader political coalitions,

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environmentalists and business leaders who recognise the importance of public infrastructure,

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including transit that connects places within the region.

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And finally, this alternative story is evident in the organisational innovation in some institutions, some public institutions.

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And in this regard, I would highlight the role of libraries which have transformed themselves into important safety net institutions,

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offering English as a second language free computer access to low income people who can't afford broadband at home.

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Free lunches for children out of school in the summer months.

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The immediate future of America, I think, is one of an uneasy coexistence of these two competing visions.

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One private and racially exclusive and the other public and diverse to tilt the balance in favour of public and diverse, however,

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will require the re-entry of the federal government to offer fiscal and regulatory tools

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to help reconnect the divisions that it helped to authorise during the last half century.

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Thank you.