FROM THE READINg ROOM Putting Integration on the Agenda
Moving Toward Integration, the Past and Future of Fair Housing, by Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva, and Jonathan M. Zasloff1 (we refer hereinafter to the book as "SKZ" begins with a powerful indictment of the harm that racial residential segregation continues to inflict. It asserts that housing segregation is the "giant answer" to the question of why on social and economic measures such as school achievement, income, wealth, homicide rates, and out of wedlock births, African American outcomes lag those of whites.2 We would add other measures as well: for example, shorter African American life expectancies and higher rates of cardiovascular disease that arise, in part, from life in more polluted and stressful neighborhoods; the black white wealth gap, one of the most powerful contributors to social and economic racial inequality, attributable in significant part to the exclusion of African American homeowners from neighborhoods where housing equity appreciation far exceeded inflation; and even our dangerous political polarization, which largely tracks racial lines.