Justice / society

analogous to what we did during the New Deal, when we turned low-wage factory jobs into high-paid middle-class jobs. If we were willing to pay a little more for our cars and appliances to create a middle class in the last century, surely we can afford to pay more in this one to the people who serve us food and care for our kids and aging parents.

What it is

Disproportionately affects people of color (black and latinx in SF)

Solutions

Cities / gov

liberalize land-use restrictions to build more housing?

Deal with collapse of middle class

tech companies

put money back into the communities

fund affordable housing

how to get ahead of it in communities they're expanding to?

Increases income gap

Strips cities of culture

High-speed transit could do more to improve housing affordability than just about anything else, by allowing more workers to commute from outlying areas. New York’s extensive transit system is why it is becoming cheaper to live near Manhattan than it is to live near San Francisco.

subsidized, Affordable housing for long term residents

PATTERN: economic growth, but for who? privileged few & at expense of non-elite (middle and working class people)

helping to increase supply and bring down steep housing costs

Invest in public transportation > private busing

Upgrade service jobs (in pay, benefits)

San Francisco has the second highest inequality gap of any major city in the country

Homelessness

San Francisco

Homelessness

34% of the homeless population in San Francisco is Black (but just 6% of population), 22% is Latinx (vs 15% of pop)

Organizations:
http://www.cohsf.org/

Individual actions:

Taxing tech companies’ revenue

Homelessness sf stats: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San-Francisco-PIT-Executive-Summary-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf

Displacement (gentrification, evictions, rising rent)

Often follow tech shuttle stops: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayareahousingcrisis/article/Housing-prices-are-re-segregating-the-Bay-Area-13239870.php#photo-16192082

Be aware of the history of the neighborhood you’re moving into. If you’re moving into a neighborhood that historically is of a community that is not your own, ask yourself how you will be an outstanding neighbor to those who were there before you? How will you be positively contribute to the community and neighborhood you are moving into? If you don’t have concrete answers to those questions, ask yourself if there is not another neighborhood that you could live in.

give back to the communituy

Check the address of the building you’re moving into for no-fault evictions and don’t support landlords who use no-fault evictions to displace their tenants. No-fault evictions in San Francisco, are usually the result of a landlord using the Ellis Act, Owner Move-in, or demolition to evict tenants that is not related to their status as a tenant.

Support local Black and Latinx businesses, vendors, and products

Donate money / time / expertise to local organizations:

http://www.cohsf.org/
https://antievictionmap.com/
https://cjjc.org/

Now happening in Oakland. How can we stop that?

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W/a predatory landlords?

growing (racial) wealth gap

What

Contributing factors

Future

Automation (AI)

likely to disproportionately affect Black americans (specifically men) bc a) overrepresented in the “support roles” that are most likely to be affected by automation, such as truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks and b) underrepresented in resistant occupations such as education, health, business, legal (black women actually overrepresented)

generational wealth gap

closing racial wealth gap could net 1.1-1.5 trillion

Solutions

shifting education profiles to align with growing sectors

engaging companies and public policy makers in developing reskilling programs

redirecting resources to ease the transition as automation changes the landscape for African American workers

Divestment in low-to-moderate income communities

a report that NCRC issued last year found that 75 percent of neighborhoods that had been marked “hazardous” in the Home Owners Loan Corporation redlining maps of the 1930s are still some of the most economically struggling communities today.

Displacement of local communities when wealthier people move in and drive up rent prices (and prices of goods and services) (in manhattan w/ finance, brooklyn w/ hipsters, sf w/ tech)

Solutions? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/inside-senator-elizabeth-warren-s-housing-crisis-fix

Simply building more housing won’t prevent that racial banishment if local and federal government still perpetuate racist policies — and might end up exacerbating the problem. “You can’t just fix housing supply without fixing structural racism,” says Rysman. “You have to address structural racism, economic inequality, and housing supply together.”

Need to address structural racism, economic inequality

Putting black Americans with lived experience of homelessness in leadership positions would help combat that mistrust and change the systems

Historical

Predatory lending & foreclosure crisis of late 2000s

Redlining

Wealth is accumulated over generations. white peoples' centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste today

Studies indicate the median white family in the United States holds more than ten times the wealth of the median African American family. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/the-economic-impact-of-closing-the-racial-wealth-gap

Wealth, not income, is the means to security in America. Wealth — assets and investments minus debt — is what enables you to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better amenities and better-funded schools. It is what enables you to send your children to college without saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and what provides you money to put a down payment on a house. It is what prevents family emergencies or unexpected job losses from turning into catastrophes that leave you homeless and destitute.

Income gap

Produces segregration. - You do not have to have laws forcing segregated housing and schools if white Americans, using their generational wealth and higher incomes, can simply buy their way into expensive enclaves with exclusive public schools that are out of the price range of most black Americans

Today black Americans remain the most segregated group of people in America and are five times as likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods as white Americans

Not even high earnings inoculate black people against racialized disadvantage. Black families earning $75,000 or more a year live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning less than $40,000 a year, research by John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, shows.

http://www.designingthewe.com/undesign-the-redline/

strengthening local economies

covid 19

Why does racism exist

racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father" [Ta-Nehisi Coates]

racist policies (w/ roots in econ & upholding power) -> disparate impact -> racist ideas [Stamped from the beginning]

Solutions

Reparation

Post slavery

post slavery Millions of black people, liberated with not a cent to their name, desperately wanted property so they could work, support themselves and be left alone. [...] They were asking to, as the historian Robin D.G. Kelley puts it, “inherit the earth they had turned into wealth for idle white people.”

We are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children or money to buy any of it. Narratives collected of formerly enslaved people during the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s reveal the horrors of massive starvation, of “liberated” black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die.

Then comes share cropping, convict leasing

Lynching, violence, retaliation

despite the odds, some managed to acquire land, start businesses and build schools for their children. But it was the most prosperous black people and communities that elicited the most vicious response. Lynchings, massacres and generalized racial terrorism were regularly deployed against black people who had bought land, opened schools, built thriving communities, tried to organize sharecroppers’ unions or opened their own businesses, depriving white owners of economic monopolies and the opportunity to cheat black buyers

scale of the destruction during the 1900s is incalculable. Black farms were stolen, shops burned to the ground. Entire prosperous black neighborhoods and communities were razed by white mobs from Florida to North Carolina to Atlanta to Arkansas. One of the most infamous of these, and yet still widely unknown among white Americans, occurred in Tulsa, Okla., when gangs of white men, armed with guns supplied by public officials, destroyed a black district so successful that it was known as Black Wall Street

Discrimination

racist hiring laws and policies forced them into service jobs, even when they earned college degrees

legally relegated into segregated, substandard neighborhoods and segregated, substandard schools

As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.

while black Americans were being systematically, generationally deprived of the ability to build wealth, while also being robbed of the little they had managed to gain, white Americans were not only free to earn money and accumulate wealth with exclusive access to the best jobs, best schools, best credit terms, but they were also getting substantial government help in doing so

Nevertheless, more than six decades after the nation’s highest court proclaimed school segregation unconstitutional, black children remain as segregated from white kids as they were in the early 1970s

Lay those redlining maps over almost any city in America with a significant black population, and you will see that the government-sanctioned segregation patterns remain stubbornly intact and that those same communities bore the brunt of the predatory lending and foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s that stole years of black homeownership and wealth gains.

Why

discrimination + opportunities

The magnitude of the wealth gap only widens as black people earn more income.

Misperceptions (https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/what-we-get-wrong.pdf)

the racial wealth gap is not about poverty. Poor white families earning less than $27,000 a year hold nearly the same amount of wealth as black families earning between $48,000 and $76,000 annually. It’s not because of black spending habits. Black Americans have lower incomes over all but save at a slightly higher rate than white Americans with similar incomes. It’s not that black people need to value education more. Black parents, when controlling for household type and socioeconomic status, actually offer more financial support for their children’s higher education than white parents do, according to the study. And some studies have shown that black youths, when compared with white youths whose parents have similar incomes and education levels, are actually more likely to go to college and earn additional credentials.

black Americans with a college education hold less wealth than white Americans who have not even completed high school. Further, because black families hold almost no wealth to begin with, black students are the most likely to borrow money to pay for college and then to borrow more. That debt, in turn, means that black students cannot start saving immediately upon graduation like their less-debt-burdened peers

Also not about college, lack of homeownership, single motherhood,

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none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to “lift themselves” out of poverty and gain financial stability — not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home — can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against black Americans doing the same.

From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century.

a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it and our federal government initiated, condoned and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that pays.

Race-neutral policies simply will not address the depth of disadvantage faced by people this country once believed were chattel.

because reform and technically "non-discriminatory" laws do nothing to account for past injustices

What

should include a commitment to vigorously enforcing existing civil rights prohibitions against housing, educational and employment discrimination, as well as targeted investments in government-constructed segregated black communities and the segregated schools that serve a disproportionate number of black children

must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap.

ACCOUNTABILITY....? What does justice look like?

Problems with cancel culture

Accountability can't be forced, can't "hold" people accountable

fails to acknowledge nuances & conditions that led to this

"When we stigmatize harm and pretend it’s something only perpetuated by those people over there, we only continue the cycle. People aren’t going to want to enter into accountability if all they know is that accountability = disposal."

Critiques

Doesn't produce the actual kinds of innovation that we need (tech? zoom?)

Engine of oppression

Grows wealth for the few, not the many

so much of advancements funded by public R&D, should partially be owned by public as well

In other words, the private sector, with its focus on fast profits and familiar patterns, now dominates America’s innovation spending. That, Dahl and others argue, means the biggest innovations cannot find their long paths to widespread adoption. We’ve “replaced breakthrough innovation with incremental innovation,” says Rob Atkinson, founder of the ITIF. And thanks to Silicon Valley’s excellent marketing, we mistake increments for breakthroughs.

Build products to help those from whom it can profit

in a game run by venture capital, the people you end up helping are the ones who can pay, so investors can make their money