Health and Place

You're listening to the noon headlines. I'm Scott Bamba. A shooting at a Georgia

high school today caused an unknown number of injuries and a suspect was

arrested. Chaos ensued as officers swarmed the campus and students rushed

for shelter. Barrow County Sheriff Judd Smith speaking during a press conference

said the details about the shooting were still sparse. We're not releasing any

information as far as injuries, but we have multiple injuries.

Uh, this is a very, very fluid investigation. It's very early

and I have asked the assistance of the G. B. I. The agencies here behind me

today and their multiple agencies that responded this morning to help us and

help the sheriff's office.

We do have a suspect in custody

and we're asking for your patience as the

media to please let us get the facts that we need to make sure we get this

right. Appalachian High School was put on lockdown and students gathered in

its football stadium. Helicopter video from local television station WSB TV

showed dozens of law enforcement and emergency vehicles surrounding the

school about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Hundreds of Israeli forces have for more than a week carried out the deadliest

operation in the occupier.

They've been in the area since the war in Gaza began. Their focus has been the

Jenin refugee camp, a bastion of Palestinian militancy that has grown more

fervent since the Hamas attack on Israel that launched the war. The fighting in

Jenin accounts for 18 of the 33 Palestinian health officials say have

been killed in the operation so far, most of whom the military says have been

militants. Israel says its soldiers are dug in for battle with Hamas and other

groups, meaning the death of their loved ones. The military says that the

battle is likely to rise.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba resigned this week ahead of an expected

reshuffling of government leaders. Sagar Magani reports.

One of Ukraine's most recognizable faces on the international stage has resigned.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba did not give a reason, but was one of several

cabinet ministers stepping down in what President Volodymyr Zelensky calls a reboot.

Saying his government needs new energy in diplomacy and elsewhere as the war with Russia

approaches the thousand-day mark. Kuleba's been a key player in taking Ukraine's message to the

world and just last week urged Western partners to lift restrictions on using long-range weapons

inside Russia. If we are allowed to strike, we will significantly decrease the capacity of Russia.

Pointedly saying if that

does not happen. Then do not complain on Ukraine, complain on yourself.

Sagar Magani, Washington.

Former aide to New York governors was charged with being an agent of the Chinese government.

Julie Walker reports.

The Fed's efforts to root out secret agents for the Chinese government ramping up with

their latest case. Linda Sun charged with being an agent of the Chinese government out

on bond. Until last year, Sun was an aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

The second we discovered some levels of misconduct, we fired her. We alerted the authorities.

That was Hochul on WNYC. Sun had also worked for Governor Andrew Cuomo. She's accused of

blocking Taiwan government representatives from accessing New York officials, changing

the governor's messaging about issues important to China and other things.

The scope of what she was capable of doing is shocking. I'm furious, outraged by this behavior.

The president's wife and husband, Chris Yu, charged with laundering the millions she

got, spending it on luxury cars and homes. Both pleaded not guilty. Julie Walker, New

York.

A new study finds that every year people create 57 million tons of plastic pollution.

The material winds up everywhere from the deepest oceans to the highest peak of Mount

Everest to inside people's bodies. More than two-thirds of it is in the global south. Researchers

at the University of Leeds and the University of Washington are working on a new study to

see if it works.

The University of Leeds and the United Kingdom examined waste produced at the local level

in more than 50,000 cities and towns for the work published in today's journal Nature.

They looked at waste that gets into the open environment rather than plastic that goes

into landfills or gets burned properly. Outside experts worry that the study's focus on pollution

rather than growing plastic production lets the plastic industry off the hook.

I'm Scott Bhabha for KPFA and Pacifica Radio.

We'll be right back.

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Today on Against the Grain.

Every year more than 80,000 people have been exposed to plastic pollution.

We're on YouTube and Facebook.

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Today on Against the Grain, every year more than 80,000 African Americans die prematurely.

The medical establishment relies on genetics or dietary patterns to explain such appalling

numbers, but sociologist George Lipsitz argues that Black people, as well as Native Americans

and Latinos, are made sick by where they live, and that the most important cause of

health hazards for people of color is residential discrimination.

From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California, this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.

I'm Sasha Lilly.

What does housing and where one lives have to do with the very different levels of health

and well-being of Americans?

Everything, according to George Lipsitz.

He explores the key role of place in The Danger Zone is Everywhere, How Housing Discrimination

Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Lipsitz is Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, and he

joins me now.

Why, in a nutshell, do you argue that housing discrimination is central to so many racial

injustices in our society?

Housing discrimination.

It harms health and steals wealth.

It's an economic injustice, but it's also a public health menace.

It forces large numbers of people to live in what Tricia Rose calls proximity to toxicity,

that is, with poison, air, and water, and land around them.

It impedes access to employment, to shopping opportunities, to jobs, to transportation,

exposes people disproportionately to climate change, and it harms everyone, not just its

direct victims, because it misallocates resources, squanders the abilities and talents of people

unnecessarily, and it produces a society in which poor health and poverty are concentrated

and grow worse and worse rather than being alleviated and made better.

To what degree, when the racialized health gap is discussed, you know, the great differences

between certain groups?

Especially African-Americans, Native Americans, and whites in terms of their health outcomes.

When that is considered by the medical profession, to what degree are the ill effects of poor

housing and housing discrimination, where people live, how they live, taken into account

when the medical profession looks at these very different health outcomes?

The medical profession, in general, acknowledges...

that there are wide disparities in disease, illness, and infirmity.

Some 80,000 black people die every year unnecessarily because of these inequalities.

But the medical profession has been taught to use what we call the biomedical model of health.

That is an emphasis on individual genetics or individual behavior.

So, when they see there are gross racial disparities and injustices,

they wonder what...

what diet or exercise people follow.

They wondered if there's a genetic cause of diseases.

And there is some value to looking at this, but the Centers for Disease Control has pointed

out that genetics and individual behavior account for a very small part of people's

health.

That the really important ways in which health is determined has to do with the interconnectedness

among humans and social systems.

So, the health improvements that have taken place...

over the last two centuries have not really come from new technologies or new medicines,

but from things like sewage management, garbage collection, elimination of coal-burning furnaces,

removal of lead from gasoline, improved housing, more and better foods.

These are all what we call the social determinants of health.

And one of the key social determinants of health is housing, and housing discrimination

means that people who are unfairly discriminated against...

discriminated against are far from hospitals and medical help.

They're in places where there are toxic waste dumps and incinerators.

They live near lead-producing highways.

They live in areas of cities that are zoned for industrial production, which means they're

disproportionately exposed to pollution.

They experience the stress that comes from discrimination.

So, discrimination...

discrimination itself is a health hazard that's connected to hypertension and often

lifelong infirmities because of childhood experiences by recognizing something about

you that you can't change.

Your ascribed race determines your fate in life, not your character, not your work habits,

not your achievements, but rather, as I say, always say, the arbitrary, unnecessary, artificial

impediments that are imposed by relegating people of different races to different places,

to different places.

Well, tell us about the degree to which the things that you've just listed off, access

to adequate medical care, proximity to toxic hazards, whether it's industry or toxic sites,

as well as things like access to green space, which is something that has been studied and

its influence on people's well-being and longevity, to what degree are these things, things that

we can see differentially distributed?

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's really important to look at how these things are distributed based

on people's socioeconomic status, you know, if they're poor or if they are wealthy or

affluent and how much of those things are especially connected to race.

What impact does race have on where people end up living?

The two biggest fallacies about racial disparities in health are that it's simply a function

of class or that the problem...

The problem is the disparity rather than the illness itself.

So in terms of class, people at every class level experience worse relationship to the

environment and health care if they're Black, if they're Native American, if they're Indigenous,

if they're Latinx, if they're Asian American, if they're part of the aggrieved Middle Eastern

group.

That toxic waste sites, local health care, if they're black, if they're Native American,

if they're indigenous, if they're Latinx, if they're Asian American, if they're part

of the aggrieved Middle Eastern group.

The other one is that its most prudent behavior is that people that live at high risk levels

are treated better because of their health.

So the data by the University of Maryland data found that people located near poor whites

are treated better than those near middle-class Blacks, that exposure to toxic fish poisoned

by mercury or polluted air is worse for middle and higher-income Blacks than it is for middle-class

whites, that the poorest of the poor white children do not experience anywhere near the

degree of exposure to lead poisoning than middle-class Black children do.

So it's not simply a function of class.

It's a matter of whether you're gay or lesbian.

It's not as if our society has a class system that is occasionally interfered with by race.

We have what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism, that capitalism is a system of

making differentiations.

Class is one of those differentiations.

Race is one of those differentiations.

But you can't just solve the racist injuries done to people by improving the class inequalities.

Now, in fact, nobody should have to suffer from fossil fuel-induced climate change, from

the pollution that exists in toxic waste sites, from the inadequacies of medical care, from

the emphasis on profit-making medical equipment and tests rather than preventive medicine.

Nobody should be exposed to that.

And so these are injustices that are bad for everyone.

But they're worse for people of color.

And they persist because race enables the people who profit from ill health and discriminatory

housing to blame the victims and say it's the problem of the genetics or behavior of

the aggrieved group.

And that hides the way that medical injustice and housing injustice harm everyone.

Well, let me ask you more about that, specifically about the most vulnerable in society, especially

in terms of health, and that is children.

How does racialized housing discrimination affect children of color?

Well, children of color, let's say black children in Detroit or Latinx children in

Irlimark, California, suffer excessive exposure to health hazards.

In Detroit, lead poisoning is concentrated in black neighborhoods.

Black children are stuck in those neighborhoods because of history.

And it's a difficult thing.

And that's why some of these guest houses are not limited to those groups.

And if you think that they're not limited to those groups, you're really wrong.

There are other types of young people who suffer.

So you can see the population with a hard time.

And they're less likely to have a car or a job, or they can't afford to pay the rent

to their children.

And they can't afford to pay the rent, which is a huge problem for the country.

And this is a real problem for our country.

It's a problem in our times.

conducive to the growth of insects. In Detroit, as I mentioned, children are not only concentrated

in areas of lead poisoning, but they're concentrated in areas where the privatization

of housing has enabled tax lien investors to scoop up large numbers of dwellings, which they

want to tear down and replace with gentrified housing. Those buildings that are torn down

contain toxic lead and other pollutants in the dust. So when Black children in Detroit go out

to play, they track home these poisons on their shoes and their clothing. Even living on a block

where housing has been demolished tremendously increases the chance of childhood asthma,

childhood lead poisoning. In Early Mart in California, a farming community where children

grow up near oil extractions,

near fields covered with pesticides, near places where diesel trucks emit poisonous

food. Little children go to school every day, and they might put their hands on their hearts

and pledge allegiance to the flag of their country. But before they see that flag, they

have to look at a flag on the building which says whether they can play outside, whether

the air is okay. And if the flag is green, they can play outside. But when the flags

are purple and red,

they have to stay inside all day. This deprives them of the outside play that children need

for healthy growth and development.

The polluters go on polluting the waterways, the fields, and the air, and making money

from it. And it's the children who have to adjust, but they suffer childhood injuries

that can lead to lifelong medical and psychological problems. We found that early, adverse early

childhood experiences with illness caused by child abuse, child abuse, child abuse,

child abuse, child abuse, child abuse, child abuse, child abuse, child abuse, child abuse,

children, childhood experiences with children who experience

childhood injuries, childhood injuries caused by pollution, caused essentially by housing

discrimination can be like a time bomb. You don't feel all of the effects immediately.

It accumulates over life. And so, children who live in these neighborhoods in later life,

experience delayed responses in terms of impaired central nervous systems, cardiovascular systems.

They're more likely to have hypertension, they're more likely to have heart attacks, they're

more likely to be ill as adults, and they're more likely to come into work because they're

in a state where there's no means of getting to go.

and therefore be less able to care for and pay for medical care for their children.

Well, and as you mentioned earlier, much of the medical system and sort of received wisdom about

people's health tends to focus narrowly on individual choices like diet and exercise

without putting them in the larger context of the social environment in which someone lives.

So for a child growing up in a neighborhood which they are effectively shunted into, that their

families have very little choice about where they live, how does that neighborhood, that place where

they end up, end up shaping their access to fresh food and ample space to exercise, those things

that are, you know, narrowly regarded? Let's think along with these children and what they're up

against.

Well, they're up against this biomedical model of health which tells them they should eat

nutritious foods even if they're living in food deserts where there are no supermarkets that

supply fresh food.

It tells them they should exercise even if they live in places where there are no recreational

fields or activities.

That tells them that they should play outside even though they live on streets with asphalt and

near buildings with tar on the roofs that trap heat.

They're more likely to live in what scientists call heat islands than white children are.

And so they have many obstacles before they even can think about diet and exercise, and they have impediments to that diet and exercise.

But it's even more complicated, and that is the biomedical model in medicine is accompanied by the tort model of injury in law.

So housing discrimination has been outlawed since the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

But at least 4 million instances of housing discrimination take place every year.

And that's because the law imagines that discrimination is individual, interpersonal, intentional, and aberrant, that it happens to you one deliberate act at a time.

But if you grow up in a place that has been redlined since the 1930s, if you grow up in a place that has had 50 years of no insurance and no investment,

that has been zoned for.

Polluting industries and polluting transportation.

There is no individual responsible.

There is no one act that you can go to court and engage in litigation to correct.

Housing discrimination is collective, cumulative, continuing.

For these children and their families, there's no prior state of justice that they can return to.

The tort model of injury of law says somebody slaps you.

You go to court and the court.

you whole. It remedies that slap. But what if the slap was done by decades of insurance company

investment and discrimination? What if it was done by zoning policies? What was it done by where

highways are located and where private homes were torn down and seized because of policies

of eminent domain? There is no individual act and there can't be an individual solution.

Now, just as people should exercise and attend to their diets, people should engage in litigation

for fair housing and should make the perpetrators of discrimination pay for it. But the biomedical

model in medicine and the tort model of injury and law means that all of these

remedies are going to be inadequate. And so, while these communities face obstacles,

just because they're resourceless, we shouldn't think of them as not resourceful.

That in fact, there is active, engaged, collective action being taken in relation to health and

housing discrimination, community gardens, environmental justice organizing, community land

trust that takes speculation out of the housing market, public health collectives, fair housing

councils. And so, these neighborhoods that are most farthest from the fruits and benefits of democracy

are often the laboratories

where new democratic practices and processes are emerging

out of the desperate need for health and housing justice.

Sociologist George Lipsitz is my guest. We're discussing the arguments he makes

in The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, How Housing Discrimination Harms Health

and Steals Wealth. I'm Sasha Lilly, and this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.

So, housing discrimination takes many forms and it takes many forms both for homeowners and for

renters. And before we delve into those, I wonder if you could explain what redlining

is and its history, how it's evolved in the United States.

Redlining is a policy that codified things that had long been in place before it came into

being. Redlining is a name that we gave the things in the 1930s, where the Homeowners's Loan Corporation, back by the full state government later though, put RLIR in theтерms back with public housing question. But in the 1930s, the homeowner is стратив. This is not what it was supposed to be. This style, is a field where the clean up the clean up of conflict between populations is never and ever. But the security services, sexual molestation Turkish Túrk and what makes mans Pvölzú is

larger than one quarter adventures and limits the height of

the perspective of do streets. wer the homeowners loan corporation

Loan Corporation, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, made loans to

people that enabled renters to become homeowners. It was one of the largest transfers of wealth in

the history of the United States. But it was done on an expressly racialized basis by drawing red

lines around neighborhoods that people of color lived in. If the neighborhood was all white,

all Christian, it got an A rating. If the neighborhood was all white and not near

communities of color, it got a B rating. If it was a mixed neighborhood, it got a C rating.

If it had Black people or other aggrieved groups, Asians, Native Americans, Latinx people,

and in some cases, even disrespected white groups like Jews and Greeks and Italians,

it got no loans.

And these red lines were drawn around these neighborhoods, which doomed them to be places

where people couldn't move in, you couldn't get a loan to refurbish the house, and they quickly

became slums. The areas that were A and B neighborhoods and designated for whites got

favorable loan terms and became places where whites accumulated assets that appreciated in value and

were passed down across generations.

So,

taxpayers of every color paid funds that went into the federal treasury. But the faith and credit of that treasury was used to build white wealth through home ownership and to leave only means-tested public housing as the federal response to the housing needs of the people who were in those red-lined areas.

Now, redlining, it was named this because of these maps, but these were simply codifying what the home mortgage,

and real estate industry had been doing for years.

In the 1890s, cities passed laws that called for racial zoning.

That said in some places that if a block you couldn't move on to a block unless

that block was occupied by more than half of the houses were occupied by people of your race.

And so, this over time, meant that white neighborhoods were white and black neighborhoods became even blacker.

There were other policies, public order policies.

zoning policies that were used to keep people out. The real estate industry had a formal policy that

they shouldn't change the racial composition of white neighborhoods. Bankers secretly denied loans

to fully qualified credit seekers who were black because they wanted to protect white home

ownership. In many places, in almost every city in the country, there were restrictive covenants.

These are deed restrictions that said this house is reserved for whites and it's reserved for white

occupancy and perpetuity. So that's a collective action by whites to say you don't sell your house

to the highest bidder. You can only sell your house to somebody who is also white. And you're

leaving that house for white ownership in the future, even though you don't know those whites,

you don't know what they're worthy of. There's no requirement for them to be anything other than

white to buy that house.

So if a black person came up to you and said, I want to offer you twice the value of your house so I can move in,

you're obligated by that deed restriction to keep it out. So this is, this makes what whiteness,

what Daria Rothmeier, a law scholar, calls a racial cartel, basically a way of protecting property in

perpetuity. And these kinds of redlining, which were legal from 1934 to 1968, have set up the pattern of housing,

and what insurance companies and mortgage lenders consider to be risky neighborhoods that exist even into the present.

Colin Gordon has a book which talks about the ways in which after fair housing laws were passed,

the unfair things weren't changed. They were simply done into more covert ways.

So this redlining that existed legally from 34 to 68 still exists. And areas that were redlined,

legally, and often under the cover of law since then, are the places with the highest number of foreclosures,

the highest numbers of heat islands, the highest numbers of toxic chemicals,

the highest numbers of places where houses are abandoned and become sites for sex trade or drug trade,

the highest number of houses whose infrastructures,

are ripped apart by people stealing copper and other metals from them.

So just as a childhood injury can hurt adulthood and future generations,

discrimination done by people who are long past continues to plague people in the present.

The long-term effects of that discrimination continues to shape what insurance companies consider to be risk,

where zoning regulations encourage,

housing,

and places where toxic chemicals are placed and where transportation is either subsidized or impeded.

Well, in the United States, compared to other industrial countries,

homeownership is valorized. The state has actively subsidized homeownership.

How would you pair, given the history that you've just been discussing and its long shadow today,

how has that history and the current practices that continue redlining affect the rates of homeownership for African-Americans,

Native people, Latino people, as opposed to whites?

Homeownership is unequally divided because of past and present discrimination.

Figures vary from year to year, but close to three-quarters of whites are homeowners,

whereas half or less than half are non-whites.

So, I think it's important to be aware of that.

But I imagine that almost half of white and Latino people are homeowners,

but it's not just a question of if you own a home.

It also has to do with where that home is,

and how it's treated by the banking and the insurance system.

So, for white people,

homeownership almost always involves appreciation of value.

deduction and the property tax, local property tax deduction in the federal tax system. If you're

a renter, you don't get either of those and you don't build up any equity. In addition, though,

homeowners who are Black suffer from low home value appraisals. I have a chapter in the book

that shows how home appraisers, when they think a home is inhabited and owned by whites,

they value it from anywhere from a quarter of a million to half a million dollars more than if

that same home is occupied by Blacks. We have a series of incidents that have taken place over

the last five years where Blacks attempting to refinance their loans were given a very low

home value appraisal. And then they cleared out the books of Toni Morrison and the paintings of

Jacob Lawrence. They had a white friend ask an appraiser to come and look at the same home

on the property tax deduction. And then they cleared out the books of Toni Morrison and the

family's contacts and the Batmobile documents and the net information. So, all of this systems

are incredibly complex. And the home whenever it appeared to be owned by a white person was given,

in one case, a half a million dollars higher valuation ñ exact home, exact same location,

but a different race. So, there is discrimination in home value appraisals.

A great book by Andrew Carl called The Black Tax says the same homes that are given low

home-value appraisals are given artificially high property tax appraisals.

Errin PRATT, CFO, Ltd. She was a former White House attorney when Carol Carpenter was elected

the National Office of itu. Back in thời naive times, no land had been in fact a landscape of these

marry-or-lost data focuses. Obviously, enough is that we longer should bear the price of affordable returns as relatively

shows how in cities across the country, white suburban neighborhoods are given consistently

lower property tax appraisals than areas inhabited by Blacks. And part of what Blacks pay for is not

just what white neighborhoods aren't paying for, but what steel mills and racetracks and

downtown developments are not paying because of tax abatements. And so, the tax system

is an engine of racial inequality. This is the opposite of what our racist political culture

and media culture often claims. It says whites are the hardworking, taxpaying people, and

Blacks are the beneficiaries of government largesse. But in fact, Black homeowners

consistently have to pay for the tax. And so, the tax system is an engine of racial inequality.

And so, the tax system is an engine of racial inequality. And so, the tax system is an engine

to pay higher property tax rates and find it harder to challenge those appraisals, those

tax appraisals, than wealthy white suburban homeowners do. This leads to bankruptcy.

It leads to tax lien foreclosures and auctions. And thousands of Black homes have been seized

over the past 10 years through tax failure. Taxes, in some cases, assessments have doubled.

The homeowner couldn't pay the tax. It was auctioned off.

It was auctioned off for almost a pittance of what was owed. And that became part of

the holdings of private investment companies from out of state who were gobbling up lots

of property that used to belong to Black people. So, the tax system is an engine of racial

inequality. It also means things like property tax relief, like Proposition 13 in California,

2 1⁄2 in Massachusetts, the Hancock Amendment in Missouri. All of these give

tax relief to white-owned residences and encourage cities to make up the revenue either

through sales taxes, through big-box stores, or through excessive fines, fees, and debts.

So, the big-box stores tend to not be in Black neighborhoods or Black suburbs. And so,

wealthy Blacks often go to white areas and pay money, and their sales tax supports revenue in

that area.

The areas that are inhabited by Blacks become places where there is predatory policing through

fines, fees, and debts. You may remember that in Ferguson, the city collected more revenue

by fining Black people for having saggy pants, for having loud boom boxes, for alleged traffic

violations, and for jaywalking. The City of Ferguson got almost four times the revenue from

those fines than it did from Emerson, New Jersey, and San Francisco, which is a great, beautiful,

beautiful city. The city of Ferguson got almost four times the revenue from those fines than it did

from Emerson, New Jersey, and San Francisco, which is a great, beautiful, beautiful city.

Electric, a Fortune 500 company that benefited from property tax relief. And so throughout the

country, this inequality in taxation produces a burdensome of fines, fees, and debts, some of them

unpayable for people of color. That means often that they lose their houses. It means they go to

jail because they can't pay fines and therefore lose their jobs and become even more precarious

on the housing market. And it means that there is what John Robinson III calls the racialization

of municipal opportunity. And that means that you not only have these different tax systems,

but that cities and counties engage in what's known as underbounding. That is, they designate

areas inhabited by people of color. For example, Mexican-American people in Modesto, California,

Black people near Pinehurst in Moore County, North Carolina,

these areas are underbounded. They don't get city services. And the amenities and city services

are confined to the areas of white residents. And it means that if you're living in one of those

areas that are outside the boundaries, your neighborhood becomes a place where there's

slow response for fire and police protection, where there are vacant lots, where people dump

garbage, where the streets are not paved and therefore

water pools up and people get insect-borne, waterborne diseases. So you have, this is why

I call the book The Danger Zone is Everywhere, that health and housing discrimination isn't just

the question of doctors and landlords. It's a question of home appraisers, property tax appraisers,

zoning officials, and also local officials being forced to use the tax system as a way

of penalizing people of color for being excluded from city services

and providing an unstated but massive subsidy for whiteness.

I'm speaking with George Lipsitz.

He is the author of The Danger Zone Is Everywhere,

How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

I'm Sasha Lilly, and this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.

So you were just discussing all of these different engines

that drive the racial wealth gap through housing,

including the contradictory to low appraisals of home values,

and yet homeowners having to pay inflated property tax assessments.

I wonder if you could tell us about the dimension of this story

that has to do with the insurance industry and its assessments of risk.

Can you tell us the history of the insurance industry and African Americans in the U.S.?

Insurance companies invested in white suburban areas

and disinvested in areas where there were inhabitants of color.

Going back to the 19th century, many insurance companies had provisions

that they would not insure a neighborhood if Black people were allowed to live in it.

This continued up through the 1970s,

expressing the importance of the insurance industry and African Americans in the U.S.

And it's been continued informally in many places since then.

When doctors wanted to get medical insurance, a white doctor could get insurance.

Black doctors were listed by the American Medical Association

in a separate category of colored doctors,

and they were unable to get malpractice insurance,

thereby increasing the risk of malpractice.

The number of white doctors and artificially lowering the number of doctors who were not white.

Insurance companies essentially built the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s.

They took the money that people paid in and did not yet need to get for things they were insured for,

and they built segregated suburbs.

They built Stuyvesant Town in New York.

They built the housing.

They built the housing development, the Park Merced Homes in San Francisco.

And the insurance companies that built in these insisted that they be for white residents only.

They also worked to avoid having schools and churches that were integrated near these developments.

In Richard Rothstein's book, The Color of Law,

talks about the ways in which much of suburbia was built

by insurance company investments that required segregated housing.

At the same time, the insurance companies refused to cover,

protect buildings in areas in inner cities where people of color were located.

And in the 1960s, when the cities blew up because of the accumulated frustrations and injustices that were there,

insurance companies were among the main targets.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP talked repeatedly about the bias

and discriminatory policies of insurance companies.

Some of this had to do with direct discrimination against blacks,

but a lot of it had to do with identifying blackness with risk.

So, for example, future Supreme Court Judge Thurgood Marshall found

that he couldn't get auto insurance.

He couldn't get a car.

And he felt it was clear that he was being discriminated against.

And they said, no, it's not because you're black.

It's because you live in a black neighborhood.

But he lived in a black neighborhood because of housing discrimination.

And so, a place became a proxy for race and a justification for risk.

And this continues with the algorithms that insurance companies use.

And these have now been spread by two police departments who judge risk of crime on the basis

of these algorithms.

It spreads to credit agencies who use them.

But these are places that don't identify real risk.

They connect risk to things like did you inherit money from your parents?

Do you live in a neighborhood that is disinvested in, that has more renters than homeowners?

And so, somebody with a perfectly good driving record in the inner city in St. Louis or Detroit,

has to pay much more for auto insurance than somebody who has a less worthy record but

lives in a white suburb.

And so, the insurance companies have played a central role in creating and perpetuating

discrimination.

They've also been accused of discrimination in treatment of their own employees, that

they tend to have very few black agents.

They open agencies in areas that are white.

Many.

There are a backlog of lawsuits by black people in the insurance industry charging discrimination

against them.

And there are cases where a black businessman in Chicago had damage done to his building,

and the insurance agent told him, well, you people are always complaining, and you have

a lot of fraudulent cases in this area.

And so, I'm not going to give you the money that I would otherwise give you.

And when you say you people, and you talk about punishing somebody for the area that

they're in, you're not really judging people by individual merit or character, you're lumping

them together.

It's the quintessential definition of racism.

When these same risk assessment policies are used in policing, they produce what's called

broken windows policing.

And that is a form of policing that says, you know, if you don't have a good sense of

what's going on in the area, you don't have a good sense of what's going on in the area.

And that's what we call a blockade of policing that says, in areas that are high risk, that

have a lot of arrests, you have to relentlessly punish minor crimes.

This is what happened in Ferguson.

This is what happened in Baltimore.

This happens all across the country.

In neighborhoods where police are able to say there's a high risk, they stop people

for alleged traffic offenses.

They ticket people for things that, in my white neighborhood, for example, would never

produce a ticket.

So, my neighbor is J. Walker.

We walk all the time.

My neighbors sit on the porch with an open container of liquid.

Nothing happens to them.

But if you do that on 6th Street in Los Angeles, you do that on Martin Luther King Boulevard

in St. Louis, you wind up getting ticketed, arrested, fined.

You can't pay the fine.

You go to jail.

So, this idea of blackness as risk, which started in the insurance company, carries

over to medicine, to policing.

To banking and to many areas.

And so, one of the ways in which we could remedy the unjust, unfair distribution of

wealth and opportunity in this society is to rethink the way risk is applied.

Because the real risk comes from letting children in Earl and Mark grow up breathing polluted

air.

Letting children in Detroit be in places where there are centers of lead poisoning.

Where irrational, arbitrary, artificial discrimination squanders the talents and abilities of people

of color and produces a complete misallocation of resources in the society.

And we'll return to precisely those questions of what to do.

But I wanted to ask you specifically about renters.

Because we've been discussing how the way housing is structured.

Insurance.

Banks.

Local and state governments.

How that shapes who owns property and how they own it under what circumstances.

But of course, you mentioned that there are many people of color who are not able to buy

houses.

And I wanted to ask you how housing discrimination particularly affects renters.

The rental crisis is even worse than the home ownership crisis.

That there's no city in the country where a family can afford a home.

That there's no city in the country where a family can afford to rent housing with two wage earners making the minimum wage.

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of luxury single-family housing and under-insure and under-invest in multiple-family housing.

But this lack of housing means that landlords don't have to repair their buildings. And it

means that renters are routinely subjected to illegal overcrowding, to violations of building

codes, which means that they're more susceptible to asthma, to insect-borne illnesses, to lead

poisoning, to freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer. The lack of rental housing

and the various efforts at gentrifying areas where renters live and replacing them with

home-owned condos means that there's an enormous amount of transience in the lives of renters.

And so it's not just that renters are not taken as seriously as homeowners are.

It means they move a lot. That means they can't build social networks. They can't feel the

security in place that a homeowner can feel. Neighborhoods that have high degrees of

transience are often sites for criminal activity. They're sites where neighbors don't know each

other and can't protect each other. When children have to transfer from one school to another,

the chance of them being involved in violent instances goes up enormously.

When returning incarcerated people come from jails and prisons, there are very few

places where they can be transferred. And so it's not just that renters are not taken as seriously as homeowners.

They can live. But the shortage of rental housing means that they're unable to build

networks. And they have to constantly move once they've been released. And this, again,

interferes with social networks. It disrupts family life. It exposes people to health hazards.

And it also economically makes it impossible for them to be able to afford

the health care and medicines that they need, some of which are exorbitantly priced because,

in general, they're not able to afford the health care and medicines that they need.

Insurance companies collaborate with medical producers to raise the prices of these things

beyond the ability to pay of those who need them the most.

And I guess you're already touching on this, really, by describing the precarious situation

of renters. But of course, there are those who are even struggling to be able to

make rent at all and end up unhoused. When we look at rents, we see that they're not able to

make rent at all. They're not able to make rent at all. They're not able to make rent at all.

And so we see racial disparities in wealth. The most vulnerable of all, of course,

are those who have no housing whatsoever. How is that racially skewed?

House homelessness is much more prevalent among people of color. In Oakland, at one point,

Blacks were a quarter of the population, but 70% of those who are homeless. Black children

are much more likely to be houseless than children of any other race. And understand,

that people who are disabled are also more likely to be houseless. And houselessness is itself a

disabling condition. And so you have people being punished for having medical needs. And then those

medical needs are exacerbated or created by not having housing. If you don't have housing, many

of the remedies that require, say, for cancer, that require electronic equipment or chemicals

that increase urination, those can't be used. And so, you know, there's a lot of people who are

being used for you. And so your medical condition becomes even worse.

Housing, again, is viewed by the biomedical model and the tort model of entry in law as an

individual failure. But it's actually the collective failure of the society to produce

enough adequate, safe, and secure housing. Researchers have shown the places that have

the highest rents and the least available housing are the places that have the highest

degrees of houselessness.

versus the one where we have normal hour Tenn

a life. Is that reasonable?

you're not going to stop houselessness by sermons and by telling individual people what they should

do. You need to create the conditions where it doesn't become necessary. The Los Angeles

Community Action Network is a group of housing activists who have been, many of whom have been

houseless, and they explain how they became houseless, and they have a whole program of how

to deal with houselessness that involves ending massive policing and harassment and having

restorative justice principles within their own group. And so you have many activist

organizations like this that are attending to the real causes of houselessness, but also seeing

houseless people not as simple victims or as people to be manipulated and ordered around,

but as people who can be manipulated and ordered around.

And so I think it's really important for us to be made full citizens when the Los Angeles Community Action Network

creates ways of reporting in which the community polices itself is actually far less crime in Skid Row

and adjacent areas in L.A. But that's not necessarily good for the police and the drug

enforcement agencies who occupy those areas to create excessive arrests, which means they get

more funding because they're claiming there's so much crime. But much of that crime is not

crime. It doesn't exist until the police show up. And even more of it would not exist if there was

access to safe, secure housing.

Well, George Lipsitz, speaking of that question of funding, you know, when health outcomes in this

country are considered, we, as it's been said many times, have this incredibly expensive medical

system, which actually delivers pretty poor outcomes to people. And all of these questions

of funding seem to be the same. And I think it's really important for us to be able to

think about that. And I think it's really important for us to be able to think about that. And I think

highly politicized, right, in terms of saying, what is the solution? Where should the money go?

But what would it look like to, instead of using the model of medicine that you've been describing

that ascribes people's health outcomes to their individual choices, if we were to think of health

in these much broader social terms and place-based terms, how might that shift the kind of remedies

and the sort of funding for those remedies? And I think that's a really important question.

that would address the root causes of so many people's ill health and lack of well-being in this

society.

First, we have to stipulate that housing and health discrimination would be wrong, even if they were

economically productive, because it's unfit conduct for humans to force other humans to go

without decent housing and health. But in fact, our current system is totally counterproductive

economically.

That we spend more on health care than any nation in the world and get less for that spending.

The American Friends Service Committee has done report after report that shows if the money spent

on predatory policing and spent on expensive medical tests, expensive medical equipment,

arbitrary higher costs of drugs, if all of that money was diverted to meeting basic human needs,

not only would people be better,

but we would have to wrapped things up.

So I think that that's really important.

off, but actually the economy would be better off. This is why when I say the danger zone is

everywhere, these forms of discrimination hurt everyone. They don't just hurt the people who

suffer immediately from it. They prevent all of us from having access to housing and health care

as human rights rather than as commodities to be manipulated for private profit.

You argue that there are many ways that we could do precisely that and address housing

discrimination, and some of them are things that could be done in the short term. Some of them

are much longer-term goals, but starting with the short term, what would make a significant

difference? Well, first, it would be a good idea to enforce the law. The fair housing law has been

on the books since 1968, and through relentless litigation and efforts at legislation, community

mobilization, it's been done. It's been done. It's been done. It's been done. It's been done.

This reach and scope has been expanded, but the Roberts Court over the last 20 years has

consistently constrained the ability of fair housing litigation to meet the needs of homeowners,

but every city and every institution that receives federal funds has an obligation,

according to the 1968 fair housing law, to affirmatively further fair housing,

and that just doesn't mean you ban discrimination. It means you invoke,

what's called, the precautionary principle. You see what the effects of what you're doing are.

So just as in environmental law, you have to issue a report saying, what are the environmental

effects of a certain policy? We could have a racial impact law for what happens when we

build certain kinds of housing and not others, what happens when we subsidize suburban trains

rather than inner city nonpolicy.

polluting transportation? What happens when we have medical establishments that take over

poor neighborhoods and create subsidies for their employees to live there, but then create

houselessness or at least housing insecurity for the current residents?

So enforcing fair housing law, having racial impact statements, understanding that every

government agency, including the Department of Agriculture and the Defense Department,

which are involved in housing, have an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing would

make a difference. But we also need, we can't just do this from the top down. You can't

just have the law or the political system mandate things. There needs to be a grassroots

bottom-up engaged and active constituency for health and housing justice. This exists

within the federal government.

Fair housing councils, it exists within projects like the people in Grand Rapids, Michigan,

who are refurbishing a historically redlined neighborhood by providing jobs for people

returning from jail, but also getting young people involved in creating safe roads to

school. In the projects of the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego, that is basically

redesigned a community development plan.

It's a plan for fair housing and non-polluting growth. It can be solved by having community

land trusts in which collective ownership of housing takes speculation out of the market.

A lot of this in East Los Angeles is being done effectively, and there are community

land trusts all over the country. So these are the things that need to be done from the

bottom up. There needs to be things done from the top down. A Polish philosopher named Stanisław

Lek said, in an avalanche, there is a need to be done from the bottom up. There needs

to be things done from the top down. A Polish philosopher named Stanisław Lek said, in an

avalanche, there is a need to be done from the top down. There needs to be things done

from the top down. There needs to be things done from the top down. A Polish philosopher

named Stanisław Lek said, in an avalanche, every snowflake pleads not guilty. So the

doctors say I'm not responsible for the law. The lawyers say I'm not responsible for the

health food system. The health food system says we're not responsible for the insurance

industry. The insurance industry says we're not responsible for what the police do. But

in fact, each snowflake pleading not guilty cannot be cured one at a time. There needs

to be a systemic and structural response to these interconnected conditions.

Andrea Pellettier 14 Well, on that note, I want to thank you

you so much for being on the program. Thank you. It's a pleasure to speak with you.

George Lipsitz is the author of many books, including How Racism Takes Place. We've been

discussing the ideas in The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, How Housing Discrimination Harms

Health and Steals Wealth. He's Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology

at UC Santa Barbara. You've been listening to Against the Grain. I'm Sasha Lilly.

Thanks so much for listening.

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