Richard Rothstein

How Better Homes in America—a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.

A review of "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America."

For all of its strengths, Richard Rothstein’s new book does not account for the central role capitalism played in segregating America's cities.

"The Color of Law" offers an indicting critique of the progressive agenda.

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.

Municipal governments today hold around $4 trillion in outstanding debt. The growing costs of simply servicing their debt is cannibalizing their annual budgets.

How America gave up on housing equality.

More than fifty years after the Fair Housing Act, inequality and segregation persists. What went wrong?

Race-based federal lending rules from New Deal programs kept Black families out of suburban neighborhoods, a policy that continues to slow economic mobility.

In trying to understand one of the key aspects of structural racism, have we constructed a new moralistic story that obscures more than it illuminates?

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the long history of housing discrimination.

Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.

We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated — just like they were designed to be.

By following the money, a new history of urban inequality turns our attention away from federal malfeasance and toward capital markets and financial instruments.

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

Even housing policies that sought to create more Black homeowners were stymied by racism and a determination to shrink the government’s presence.

A study of more than 100 cities shows neighborhoods subjected to discriminatory housing policies nearly a century ago are hotter today than other areas.

Black homeowners have been an oft ignored actor in metropolitan history despite playing a central role.

Bartholomew’s legacy demonstrates with particular clarity that planning is never truly neutral; value judgments are always embedded in engineers' objectives.