I don't know. Good evening, everybody.
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,
and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all here for the inaugural lecture by this year's John G.
Wine and Professor of American Government. Before I introduce Professor,
where I want to acknowledge the extraordinary generosity of the wine family who have endowed this professorship in honour of John Gilbert Winant,
who was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James by FDR in the middle of the Blitz in 1941.
The Daily Mail Front page the day after why Nance arrival quoted the new ambassador as saying I'm glad to be here.
There is nowhere I would rather be at this time, which went down very well.
According to the author of a book about Americans in wartime, London wine ends warmth and compassion,
and his determination to stand with them and share their dangers was the first tangible
sign for the British that America and its people really cared about what happened to them.
He became a symbol of the best side of America.
Well, at the RBI, we're very proud to host a professorship named for Ambassador Winant and the best side of America.
I'm proud to of the distinguished roster of political scientists who have held this
chair since its creation and known a more distinguished than the present incumbent.
Margaret Weir, professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown University.
Professor Win was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held positions at Harvard and Berkeley,
as well as at the Brookings Institution. Hers is a formidable, wide ranging and influential body of scholarship.
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,
the boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States, and forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Who gets what? The new politics of insecurity, and also of many widely cited cited articles on the role of institutions,
racial and ethnic divisions and ideas in shaping social and economic policy in the United States over the past century.
She is as attuned to historical change as to the specifics of local institutional contexts,
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.
This is my very great pleasure to ask Margaret to deliver the 2020 wine lecture on
American government entitled Race and the Problem of the Public in post-War America.
Not used to delivering lectures this way, but I make sure I'm set.
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
deliver the wine at lecture and especially glad to have the chance to speak
to colleagues and students in the UK about American politics at a time when
both of our countries are experiencing what might be called unusual tumult.
The title of my lecture today is race and the problem of the public in post-war America.
One major story of America after the new deal is a national story of the growth of public and social economic engagement,
and this is a story that is familiar to many students of American politics and social policy.
The expansion of Social Security, the creation of unemployment insurance.
But there's also a much more fraught story about the expansion of social policies, such as health care.
Where in the absence of federal action during the 1930s, private arrangements grew up and efforts to expand policy become much more difficult.
The difficulty in enacting and updating social policies motivates an enduring question of American politics.
Why is it so hard to launch social policy initiatives and stem growing economic insecurity in the United States?
One answer that has been given and received a lot of attention recently was given by my former colleagues,
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, in their book winner Take All Politics.
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.
And there's plenty of evidence.
Much of it really nailed down by Theodore Scotch Paul, who's here today that far right organisations have colonised the Republican Party,
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.
More recently, people have also analysts have also, I think, rightly turn their attention to what political scientists call second dimension politics.
And that is the politics of identity as an argument for why we have weak social and economic policies that assist low income people.
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.
But why is the second dimension of politics so available for politicians and particularly Republican
politicians to use to prime public opinion against advancing redistribution and social welfare?
This is somewhat puzzling because we live in an era when surveys routinely show that racial prejudice has diminished.
Survey questions about school integration and integrate interracial marriage now routinely show large majorities favouring integration.
These questions have become so routine that they don't really ask them anymore because they get such large majorities.
Similarly, surveys show that home sellers now agree that surveys show that Americans now agree that
home sellers home sellers should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race.
And so this is white respondents. I would note that it's not until 1990 that you get below 50 percent,
but by 2010 it has dropped to a decided minority that agrees that it should be a home.
Sellers should not be allowed to discriminate.
So what I want to do in today's lecture, I want to argue that to understand the enduring power of second dimension politics,
even in an era when people say they are less prejudiced,
we need to tell the traditional national story of social policy and politics since the new deal,
along with a parallel story about local development from the new deal on.
And that is the story of the use of public powers to create a racially segmented public sphere.
In that story, it's important to highlight a single mechanism, which is the institutional availability of exit,
the ability of people to exit to separate local political jurisdictions.
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,
you can move to a separate political jurisdiction. Over time,
I will argue the availability of exit has segmented the public sphere horizontally and
vertically and is deeply influenced politics and policy in three ways that I will discuss.
It's naturalised and racialized the fragmentation of the public so that the
mildest government action to promote affordable housing faces huge obstacles,
even in an era of deep housing shortages.
And it's stymied the development of metropolitan public infrastructure that might connect the fragmented parts of the metropolis.
The availability of exit has further weakened the local public sector,
especially the local public sectors that low income people of colour increasingly rely on.
And finally, I will argue these arrangements have distorted ideals of democracy held by white higher income
Americans who view local democracy as a right to be free from the burden of redistribution.
To make these arguments,
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,
along with case studies of Atlanta, Chicago and Houston.
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.
So let me begin by sketching out the origins of horizontal and vertical segmentation of the public.
We commonly think of the new deal as the founding moment of federal, social and regulatory policies.
And as I stated, what was done, what was not done in that time period has profound effects on later policies and politics.
Social Security altered the behaviour of senior citizens,
making them powerful advocates for the Social Security programme and domains where the federal
government did not act have a much more difficult time in establishing a strong public role.
The new deals efforts to rethink the federal government's relationship with
federalism and cities in particular fell into a similar realm as health care.
It was studied and it was it was studied and considered, but no action was taken.
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.
Chaired by the president's uncle Franklin Delano, the National Resources Committee produced a large report.
Our cities their role in the national economy. And the report was concerned with the economic viability and efficiency of cities,
which have been a longstanding concern of progressive era reformers.
And like earlier, a progressive era reformers,
the report highlighted the irrationality of having so many local jurisdictions within the metropolitan area.
It argued for consolidation and rationalisation of political jurisdictions.
And it argued for the need to stretch the city. You can see that from the quotes that I pulled from the report.
The concern about the mismatch between the need for services in the city and the exit of tax dollars to the suburbs.
This concern was already evident in the nineteen thirties.
And just to highlight the things that I thought were especially salient in that report,
no community and a democratic society can remain a sound functioning organism if those amongst its members
who gain the greatest benefit from it escape most of the obligations of that communal life imposes,
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.
And we will see that this idea that the brunt of taxation and escape from taxation becomes an important theme in metropolitan America.
From the nineteen thirties on the report had little impact on federal policy.
Instead, patterns of post-war development remained under the purview of states,
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,
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,
with 1500 local governments in its six county region.
The consequence for post war suburbanisation was a legally sanctioned right to exit cities,
laying the groundwork for a racially defined horizontal segmentation of the public sphere.
We now have a rich historical literature on the racially exclusive patterns of suburbanisation that characterised the post-war building
boom with the movement of whites into separate political jurisdictions that used a variety of strategies to prevent black suburbanisation.
The historian Robert Self-Study of Oakland has shown how racially restrictive
covenants and side presents an example of a racially restrictive covenant.
These were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948, made unenforceable by the Supreme Court.
But his research shows they continued to be enforced long after that at the subdivision level,
effectively making a home buying off limits to African-Americans.
This was reinforced by the federal housing authorities underwriting standards, which would not insure loans to racially mixed areas.
Discrimination in private mortgage lending presented African Americans with huge obstacles to homeownership.
And the violence that routinely met African-Americans who did try to move to the suburbs presented another kind of obstacle.
These political boundaries and the policies that supported them had self-reinforcing features,
so this that density map of Detroit and its suburbs shows a sharp line between the city and the suburbs.
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.
That's a recent map to this day, marking off where whites live and where blacks live.
The barriers that initially prevented African-Americans from building equity and housing wealth made future moves to the suburbs difficult,
even after formal barriers had been dropped because African-Americans were less likely to have the funds for a down payment.
Having missed out on the initial wave of suburbanisation and because Summers offered little rental housing today,
homeowner ship rates are seventy four percent for non-Hispanic whites and their forty three percent for black Americans.
Over time, these boundaries have come to account for more of total segregation than segregation within cities.
A study in 2012 by the policy analyst Paul Schakowsky estimates that segregation across
political jurisdictions account for three quarters of all segregation in the United States.
So political boundaries and this horizontal fragmentation started in the nineteen thirties.
Failure to alter the boundaries of the city and to engage with that and over time became a reinforcing feature of American politics.
The horizontal fragmentation and turn set the stage for a vertical segmentation of the public sphere.
And by this, I mean that the federal government gradually shared responsibility to assist local
governments that were fiscally strained as a result of older infrastructure,
poor minority populations, declining tax bases, the need to supply social supports.
The federal government didn't want to engage over time with those kinds of issues.
In contrast to most advanced democracies, which either address the fiscal problems of local governments by ordering political
consolidation from above or ensuring some form of fiscal equalisation across local governments,
the United States developed an ad hoc, highly politicised system of intergovernmental assistance.
In the 1960s,
the federal government launched major programmes offering local financial assistance based on the power of mayors within the Democratic Party,
but also linked to federal initiatives associated with the war on poverty that aim to intervene directly in poor minority neighbourhoods.
What Desmond King calls forceful federalism. But this was a short lived period after Republicans came to power in the 1970s.
This brief period of direct federal support to cities apart from law enforcement diminished
dramatically and responsibility for place based issues was devolved to the states,
which were typically an unfriendly venue for cities.
The result has been a vertical segmentation of the public sphere.
The federal failure to assist New York City as it faced bankruptcy in nineteen seventy five is a marked
the emergence of the new type of relationship between the federal government and local governments.
The historian Kim Phillips finds Brooks fears city recounts the emergence of local of
the argument that local irresponsibility is the cause of New York City's problems,
and she documents the subsequent shrinkage of local politics as bankers and accountants now describe the scope of public possibility.
The Reagan administration took the withdrawal of the federal government from local assistance further with the elimination of federal revenue sharing,
which had once offered no strings attached kind of support for local governments.
At the same time, you can see that some of the major players oriented policies that offered places assistance have been cut quite substantially.
One of them, the Community Block Grant, has declined by more than 60 percent.
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,
including the budget that was just released on Monday.
On some of the policies that most help the needy in cities, temporary assistance in local governments,
temporary assistance to needy families and the social services block grant cut quite substantially from the 1980s.
These cuts were accompanied by a deliberate sidelining of other forms of expertise about intergovernmental fiscal relationships.
The U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relationships was created in 1959 to develop bipartisan,
technocratic approaches to rationalising local public finance and assessing federal responsibilities to state and local governments.
In 1966, after Republicans took over Congress, the ACR, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations was abolished,
removing not only a source of expert knowledge but also a venue for discussing fiscal
relationships in the federal system and relationships between cities and suburbs.
By the time of the Great Recession, apart from Obama's short lived and underfinanced stimulus programme,
it was clear that these vertical relationships had now been replaced.
Vertical public political relationships had now been replaced by a new common wisdom defined by bond
rating agencies that centred on the need for local governments to be more responsible in their spending.
The result has been to impose cuts on the local public sector of the most distressed cities,
with results including poisoning the water supply with lead in Flint, Michigan, that have often been devastating.
So what are some of the consequences of the horizontal and vertical split?
What does it mean for local public capabilities and ideas about democracy in an era of high inequality and greater diversity?
I want to flesh out three consequences and the first.
Is the way this pattern of suburbanisation entrenched racial categories in ways of thinking about political jurisdictions and public infrastructure.
Distinctions amongst political jurisdictions became naturalised and racialized in ways
that have blocked the development of affordable housing in areas of opportunity.
The quotations that I'm showing here are from the text analysis showing the
responses of people to efforts to promote affordable housing in Chicago suburbs.
And the first quotation gives the sense that affordable housing is not natural.
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.
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,
Cabrini Green, one of Chicago's notorious housing projects that had a clear racial identity.
So one thing that that the entrenched racial categories did is to make it very difficult to ever
have a conversation about affordable housing in well-to-do places that offer lots of opportunity.
They also have stymied the development of the metropolitan public sector and especially true of public transit in the Sun Belt.
Atlanta's public transit system, Marta, was first created in the 1960s and it was supposed to be a five county regional system.
Until very recently, it has mainly been confined to the city of Atlanta because other counties voted to block its expansion into their areas.
Debates about expansion had and still have thinly veiled and not so thinly veiled racial arguments.
For example, the New York Times reported on bumper stickers and in the 1986 expansion effort that said Share Atlanta crime support Marta again.
Just last year, the Association of Marta with African-Americans and with the City of Atlanta was used in
campaigning to defeat yet again the expansion of Marta out to one of the outlying counties,
a county that is now majority minority. I would add robocalls suggested that Marta plan to put quote thousands of apartments in this county.
Should the referendum pass. The racialisation of space also mobilises fierce opposition to any efforts to challenge it.
Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968,
neither political party has wanted to touch this issue since the 1970s.
In 2015, however, the Obama administration issued a new rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.
The title of the rule was drawn from the 1968 Fair Housing Act,
which stated that local governments that received public funds were required to quote affirmatively further fair housing.
But the federal government never defined what it would mean to affirmatively further fair housing,
and the rule was simply became paperwork that no one ever looked at.
But in 2015, the Obama administration wanted to shake this up,
and it put a rule out through the administrative process that put new requirements on local government and what it did,
it prescribe detailed guidelines for analysing housing and demographics.
It created publicly available data and mapping tool tools that they would use to inform this analysis.
And it mandated broad local public participation in the process.
The emphasis of the rule was on the need to remedy racial exclusion and particularly
exclusion from areas of opportunity areas that offer good schools access to transit.
The rule also stipulated that the federal government would monitor the outcomes of local planning,
and it would reject reports that did not fulfil the requirements of the rule.
In the back now, this is was really a planning exercise,
but in the background was the threat that the federal government could withhold funds from localities that were not compliant.
The rule attacked attracted a lot of attention on the right as a challenge to the American way of life.
It was an issue that was picked up and filtered through local tea parties.
Rush Limbaugh, the talk show host who was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the president last week,
talked about it in his in 2014 as the rule was being discussed.
And in ways that I think are revealing, it's a longer quotation, but I'll read it.
So what they're going to do, and he's talking about affirmatively furthering fair housing,
they're going to build projects, is the name for this low income housing.
Think Pruitt-Igoe? That's the name of a failed housing project in St. Louis.
Think Bed-Stuy here. He's a little out of date because Bed-Stuy was already gentrifying by then.
They're going to build public housing in these affluent suburban areas to make sure there is diversity.
This is what people who are aware of what Obama's doing are calling his war on the suburbs.
I realise some of you are thinking, Come on, rush, folks. Please use your common sense.
You know that practically everything Obama is doing is based on redistribution.
Redistribution is what taking from those who have.
So here's a photo on the web site.
There's a website transcription of the radio show, and here's the the photo that was that was on the transcription.
And what was especially interesting in this radio show was that it didn't begin by talking about Obama's war on the suburbs,
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.
And then it drew an analogy to the war on the summer.
If you can see these are are presumably refugee children.
It drew an analogy to the war on the suburbs and throughout the radio show weaves back
and forth between the invasion from the southern border and the invasion of the suburbs.
It's not surprising that the affirmatively furthering fair housing rule was suspended within months of Trump taking office.
And that last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed an alternative rule that makes no mention of race,
segregation or opportunity, and instead focuses on removing all impediments to developers who want to build housing.
A second major consequence of the horizontal and vertical fragmentation of the public is a further weakening of the local public sector,
the local public sector, especially in jurisdictions with growing numbers of low income African-Americans and Latinos.
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.
Although the words urban and black have long been associated in the American mind and in the media with poverty since the 1990s,
it's become clear that that picture is no longer an accurate portrayal of metropolitan poverty in America.
Since the 1990s, there's been a decline in the share of low income people living in the historic central city
and a rise in the share of low income people living outside the historic central city.
By 2006, the number of poor people in the suburbs exceeded the number of poor people in the historic central cities.
It is still important to stress that the rate of poverty was still higher in those historic central cities.
But as part of this greater geographic variation in where low income people live, we see two new patterns.
The first is a rise in the number of low income people in small suburban political jurisdictions.
We think of suburbanisation in the United States as an opening of opportunity.
And sometimes it is.
But a significant portion of low income residents who live outside the central city live in small, high poverty political jurisdictions.
And that's particularly true in the Midwest and St. Louis, for example.
About a quarter of the suburban municipalities have poverty rates above 20 percent,
which you say that the poverty rate right now in the United States is about 12 percent
and African-Americans are disproportionately represented in these municipalities.
The most famous of these in this issue of suburban small suburban cities gained national prominence with Ferguson,
Missouri, and the killing of Michael Brown and the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Chicago area also exhibited a similar growth in small, high poverty suburban jurisdictions with an overrepresentation of African-Americans.
That's one pattern in this new political geography, another pattern in the new political geography.
And this is more prominent in the Sunbelt.
In the south is the rise in low income people living in unincorporated areas, and these are areas with no overlying municipal government.
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.
Rather, what they are are places that have been deliberately skipped over in the annexation process in the city making
process so that you end up with a kind of a Swiss cheese political geography that omits poorer places.
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.
And, you know, it just went up the highway there and grab them.
But it leaves out these other areas, which are low income areas, heavily Latino areas simply left out.
Each type of this political geography has distinctive problems for low income residents.
Unincorporated areas are served by county governments whose fiscal and service
capabilities vary considerably across the U.S. In most unincorporated areas,
residents have very limited public services.
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.
Residents have weak political voice and as a result are vulnerable to environmental problems and unaddressed public nuisances like dumping.
Illegal dumping. Small political jurisdictions face a different set of problems.
They are vulnerable to a downward spiral of population, exit service cuts, tax increases, reduce property values and further exit.
Harvey Illinois, a majority black town of near twenty five thousand people in Chicago's south suburbs,
provides a stark example of this negative spiral struggling with pension payments.
A budget shortfall. And a thirty eight percent poverty rate.
The town laid off a quarter of its police force and 40 percent of its firefighters in 2018.
Yet the town had a high tax rate. A 1990s and up to a 2019 study comparing tax rates of selected municipalities in
the Chicago area showed that the poorest municipalities had the highest tax rates.
The tax rate in Harvey was three times that, as high as the affluent municipalities like suburban municipalities like Naperville.
The result is what legal scholar Michelle Anderson calls minimal government.
These are minimal governments that cannot and do not provide for the basic needs of their residents.
These are also often predatory governments, and this problem was outlined in the Department of Justice report on Ferguson,
Missouri, which showed that law enforcement efforts were focussed on revenue generation.
City departments depended on widespread use of fees and traffic fines to support basic public services,
and the slide is an excerpt from the Department of Justice report.
You see, there's emails from the Ferguson finance director to the chief of police telling him
to get his officers to write more tickets because the city had a sales tax shortfall.
So as the political geography of poverty has changed,
with the numbers of low income residents spread throughout metropolitan America, greater numbers of people,
low income people and people of colour in particular are subject to government with limited resources and weak public infrastructure.
These places have been put in a sense, out of sight and out of mind.
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,
the Sun Belt is a particularly interesting place to look at ideas about democracy and local government because of its distinct history.
Sunbelt metros typically had much less horizontal fragmentation that kind of
1500 governments that Chicago looked like that very unusual in the Sunbelt.
Instead, the South had big county governments and separation was legally enforced through racial legal, formal segregation.
In other parts of the Sunbelt, especially in Texas, state laws made it easier for cities to annexe,
which is why Houston grew from seventy three square miles in 1940 to six hundred and thirty seven square miles today.
Suburban development was a later process in the Sunbelt took off in the 1970s into the 90s so that some of the types of
characteristic racial barriers that you saw in the 1950s in the Northeast and Midwest were less prominent in the 1990s.
Some analysts have argued that these differences have made it possible for Sunbelt
cities and counties to have less racial segregation and to have stronger tax bases.
But the research that I've been doing indicates that spatial segregation along jurisdictional lines is now occurring in many Sunbelt metros,
with richer, whiter areas effectively seceding from their counties to form separate cities.
You see it in Atlanta, Miami and Sacramento, where some of the places that I have been studying since 1990,
there have been 11 new cities formed in the Atlanta region and 14 in Miami-Dade.
This is a contentious political process because it's the richer areas that are starting the process, depriving county government of revenues.
It's the whiter areas that are leaving counties when they become ruled by county commissioners who are majority minority.
And it's contentious because the areas that are left behind have no say in the process.
So in the text analysis that I'm doing, I'm looking for arguments on either side about why new cities are needed or
not as a way to try to understand how people think about the public sector.
And for those who are supportive of the new cities, two kinds of arguments have stood out so far.
Advocates and supporters routinely use the language of self-determination and democracy to justify their quest for a new city.
Referring to it as a basic right, as the middle quotation puts it, self-determination is the bedrock of democracy.
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
economic calculation that reveal conceptions of fairness that leave little room for redistribution.
And as a quotation show, these are often quite precise calculations,
such as the middle one where the argument for the need to secede is that we provide 14 percent of the tax base,
but we only have nine percent of the population. So I want to circle back to a question that I started the talk with.
Which is why it's so easy to stir up a second dimension race racial and identity politics in the United States.
The answer that I would give is that structural racism is deeply embedded in our local institutions
and the politics surrounding it are routinely enacted in metropolitan areas across the country.
The policies that support Exit have transformed thinking in multiple domains,
from policy oriented ideas to individual beliefs about redistributive fairness and ultimately to beliefs about democracy itself.
In this sense, the two dimensions of politics,
the first dimension being economic issues and the second dimension of identity politics are deeply entwined in the everyday experience of Americans.
So far, I've presented a stark picture.
Of what American public life is like, and I want to end this lecture by asking,
do the trends that I've described the trends of the last 60 years of a racialized and weakened public sphere?
Will there continue into the future? After all, the United States is much more diverse than it was 50 years ago.
It's 18 percent Latino, 13 percent African-American, six percent Asian.
Inequality has grown. The white middle class that became the middle class by moving out into the suburbs in
the 1950s is now split apart and the middle is hollowing out as inequality has grown.
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.
And in fact, I want to suggest that there are two stories of America operating side by side.
On the one hand, there's plenty of evidence that racial and income segregation has continued, even even as America has become more diverse.
A recent paper by sociologist Douglas Massey and Jacob Rowe shows that whites and Asians are benefiting from the increasing segregation of affluence,
and that African-Americans and Latinos continue to live in neighbourhoods with disproportionate levels of poverty.
Research at the local level routinely reveals efforts on the part of affluent suburbs to eliminate the affordable housing that they do have,
often on the grounds of removing blight. The new cities in Atlanta, for example,
have used their new powers over land use to tear down many of the apartment complexes that were home to low income Latino residents.
And finally, white flight is ongoing in metros across the United States.
More whites are moving even further out into exurban locations as changes occur and places become more diverse.
So a lot of what we observed over the last 60 years, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it will continue.
But I also want to say that side by side with this is a picture of a quite different America.
And this is a picture that includes big, diverse cities, especially big, diverse, rich cities that benefit from agglomeration economies.
And it was as a result they have more fiscal and regulatory leeway to enact policies that help low income residents.
So you see in cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles.
Increases in the minimum wage guaranteed pre-school in New York City.
Regulations that help low wage workers, such as regulations governing work scheduling practises.
Guaranteed representation in civil cases, which are critical for people who are being evicted.
So what's going on in some of the cities and big cities,
especially rich cities that have the resources to do this is something quite different and
a revival of the use of public powers and public resources to assist low income people.
This alternative story also includes growing support for regional public infrastructure such as public transit,
and some of the support stems from the greater racial diversity of who lives where in metropolitan America.
So the Atlanta region finally has expanded its transit system beyond its 1960 boundaries,
but it was due to the support of voters in a neighbouring county that have become 80 percent African-American.
But it's also significant that some of the support stems from broader political coalitions,
environmentalists and business leaders who recognise the importance of public infrastructure,
including transit that connects places within the region.
And finally, this alternative story is evident in the organisational innovation in some institutions, some public institutions.
And in this regard, I would highlight the role of libraries which have transformed themselves into important safety net institutions,
offering English as a second language free computer access to low income people who can't afford broadband at home.
Free lunches for children out of school in the summer months.
The immediate future of America, I think, is one of an uneasy coexistence of these two competing visions.
One private and racially exclusive and the other public and diverse to tilt the balance in favour of public and diverse, however,
will require the re-entry of the federal government to offer fiscal and regulatory tools
to help reconnect the divisions that it helped to authorise during the last half century.
Thank you.