Edina Neighbors for Affordable Housing

In the 20th century, local and federal officials, usually white, enacted policies that reinforced racial segregation in cities and diverted investment away from minority neighborhoods in ways that created large disparities in the urban heat environment. The consequences are being felt today.

States and local governments already haven’t been investing enough to help build housing that poor families, and sometimes even middle-class people, can afford. And now funding could be yet another victim of the coronavirus.

The availability of data clearly showing just how wide the racial inequality gap is would put pressure on Congress to find ways to help Black Americans accumulate wealth and the means to secure affordable housing.

How can we move towards residential desegregation?

After exposing structural racism in Hennepin County, the Mapping Prejudice project at the University of Minnesota Libraries has received new funding to develop its digital tools so they can be used by communities across the country.

The current housing crisis could get messy quickly, but fixing it shouldn’t be complicated, if Congress intervenes.

Black and Hispanic homeowners face property tax assessment rates 10 to 13 percent higher than non-minority homeowners in same tax jurisdiction.

A new study suggests there’s widespread interest among American parents in sending their kids to schools that are substantially integrated. It’s a preference shared across racial lines and income brackets, by mothers and fathers, Democrats and Republicans, and among parents of every level of educational attainment.
So why do families, when given the choice, routinely pick schools that further segregate the system?

The federal moratorium on evictions signed into law in March as part of the CARES Act is set to expire.

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, a new poll finds it is having different effects on Americans’ economic well-being. For some, the virus has meant lost income or struggles to pay bills on time — particularly among Hispanic, Black and younger Americans.

No group of protesters could devastate south Minneapolis more than years of disinvestment and abandonment already have.

What does systemic racism look like? In this episode, we look at how housing discrimination in theory and in practice in the Twin Cities contributes to the dramatic racial disparities in Minneapolis.

Eviction moratoriums and unemployment benefits are expiring, which will have a bigger effect on minority neighborhoods, experts say.

When the nation’s economy ground to a halt this spring, economists warned that an avalanche of evictions was looming. The federal government and many states rushed to ban them temporarily. Twenty states, including Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and Wisconsin, have since lifted their restrictions, and researchers have tracked thousands of recent eviction filings in places where data is available. Eviction bans in nine other states — including Minnesota — and at the federal level are set to expire by the end of the month.

Widening gaps in income, wealth and opportunity in the years before the virus hit left everyone more vulnerable to the disease. It undermined the nation’s defenses and weakened its response. Yet the devastation of the pandemic has also created an opportunity to begin to put things right, to ensure that the America that ultimately emerges is more just, more free and less fragile.