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[APPLAUSE] >> You often hear the phrase,
the bad neighborhood is on the other side of the railroad tracks.
But have you ever wondered what came first, the bad neighborhood, or
the railroad tracks?
And the answer is, it's complicated.
It's complicated because in the US, cities have been strategically designed
to enable some people to succeed while keeping others,
namely inner-city black families, from finding that same success.
So what's the impact of this today?
It means that the unemployment rate for black individuals is nearly twice that for
white individuals.
And it means it would take a staggering 228 years for the average back family
to accumulate the same amount of wealth that the average white family has today.
Every time I hear these statistics I cringe.
This is about so much more than low socioeconomic status.
This is about race.
And so I began to wonder how did we get here.
To understand the problem we need to go way back.
It's the 1920s and the start of the Great Migration,
the migration in which more than six million black individuals
moved from rural areas of the South to cities in the North and the West.
By coming north, they hoped to escape the overt and
often violent racism of the Jim Crow South, but
what they found was an even more insidious form of racism in the north.
Racism hidden in the structural makeup of where they lived.
When black families came to the north,
they were subject to threat of the double H, housing and highways.
In the 1930s, the government sponsored Homeowner's Loan Corporation
graded US neighborhoods to determine if they would be approved for home loans.
The foremast, is this neighborhood negro?
Yes or no?
And this was the number one determinant
of whether a neighborhood was approved for a home loan.
So when black families tried to buy homes they were told again, and
again, home loans are not available to you.
And so these predominantly black neighborhoods were systematically denied
access to home loans.
In the US, not being approved for a home loan is essentially a sentence for
poverty.
Home ownership accounts for more than 60% of wealth accumulation and
this only gets worse over time as wealth, or
lack thereof, is passed down generation after generation.
But the problems didn't stop at a lack of housing.
In 1956, President Eisenhower unveiled his grand plan for
the US interstate highway system.
For urban planners, the creation of a highway was an easy way to
take care of the places and spaces of people of color, which they termed blight.
Robert Mose, as the master builder of New York City,
purposely built the highway to cut through the heart of the black community and
to isolate black neighborhoods from the rest of the city.
With the creation of the highway, whites fled to the suburbs.
These new suburban families no longer contributed their tax dollars or
purchasing power to the city center, and so
service available to those in the inner city quickly declined.
Unfortunately, black families were unable to access the amenities of the suburbs.
Moses purposely built the bridges of Long Island so
low that buses could never pass beneath.
In doing so he was able to keep Long Island pristine, a haven for whites,
with jobs and beautiful beaches, while trapping black families in the inner city.
Sadly, many of these divisions remain today.
Let's take Detroit.
Inner-city Detroit is almost 80% black,
but if you cross Eight Mile Road to the north or
the Expressway to the south, you find suburbs that are just 1% black.
And there's even a wall, it's termed Detroit's Berlin Wall, and
it was built in the 1940s to separate the black neighborhood from the white one.
And this matters.
It matters to me and it should matter to all of you.
It matters because racial inequality is so deeply embedded in the US,
that where you live is a proxy for your life opportunity.
Social scientists study the disconnect between where low income households reside
and where the suitable jobs are located.
In cities like Detroit, where the black-white segregation is the highest,
you also see the highest levels of disconnect with that job distribution and
the largest black-white income gaps.
Where you live determines where your children can go to school,
what food you can buy, what healthcare you can receive, and
what public transportation is available to you.
So if your race determines where you live,
then your race determines your access to these basic amenities.
And this matters for all of us.
It's about what is moral and it is about what is just, but
it has also serious economic consequences.
One 2013 study found that a unit increase in a city's racial segregation led to
a 1.5% decrease in a city's economic growth.
And another study found that greater segregation is linked to large and
significant increases in the rates of violent crimes, such as robbery or
aggravated assault.
This is not acceptable and it needs to change, and
there are things that we all can do.
First, we need to add amenities to these still under-served neighborhoods.
Open a grocery store, build a pharmacy, invest in neighborhood gardens,
entertainment spaces or schools.
We can start by taking advantage of underutilized assets.
In Cleveland, city residents found an abandoned Kmart building and
they turned it into a recreation center that's now used by inner-city youth.
Do you know that there are millions of square feet of this type of empty
floor space waiting for our investment all across the US?
Next, we can take a hard look at our public transportation systems.
In 1994, the L.A. Bus Riders Union sued the Transit Authority for racially
discriminating against minority groups in their delivery of public transit.
The bus riders won, and when L.A.
Transit added hundreds of new buses black ridership significantly increased.
And finally, we can implement inclusive housing policies.
We need to zone more neighborhoods for multi-family housing.
When you invest in a neighborhood it often leads to gentrification,
pushing out the original tenants as housing prices rise.
When we zone for multi-family housing we can keep prices affordable and protect
those most vulnerable to displacement, even as the value of a neighborhood rises.
Racial inequality is a huge issue for this country.
Yes, we need more diversity in the workforce.
And yes we need more equitable treatment of citizens by law enforcement.
But I would argue that metropolitan equality
is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
We need to understand how our cities were built, how communities were intentionally
marginalized, and how those segregations remain today.
So demand investment in neighborhoods, and
demand equitable public transportation, and demand inclusive, affordable housing.
At Stanford, we strive to change lives and change organizations and
change the world, but let's start by changing the cities in which we live.
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