All in Housing
Despite being published almost ten years ago, Retrofitting Suburbia has many relevant lessons for salvaging suburban sprawl created by generations before us that took the term Euclidean zoning and ran with it. They left downtown's and created separated districts in the suburbs. One area was for the office towers on the highway, the other on the rail lines was for industry, and removed a safe distance away were winding neighborhoods for the single-family home.
When I started reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein I already knew about FHA's discriminatory practices in lending and redlining from previous research for creating a local historic district in Lincoln, Nebraska. This is also how I found out about restrictive covenants that prohibited people from living in a house based on race, religion, and nationality. But what I did not know prior to this book was that racial segregation went far beyond these practices and was part of a broad swath of government policies aimed at segregating America. This de jure segregation was neither "subtle nor intangible," as the author puts it.
