Episode

8/28 How Housing Zoning Creates Inequality w/ Richard Kahlenberg

August 28, 2023

Happy Monday! Sam is BACK from vacation. He and Emma speak with Richard Kahlenberg, education & housing policy consultant and non-resident fellow at Georgetown University, to discuss his recent book Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Trump’s various legal woes, this weekend’s white supremacist mass shooting in Florida, the UAW’s tentative agreement with auto companies, the NLRB’s massive new ruling to empower unions, and various conservative political operations, like CPAC and No Labels, before looking at the local response in Jacksonville to the racist shooting of four Black people. Richard Kahlenberg then dives right into why the incredibly dry topic of housing zoning inspires rabid reactions and fundamentally shapes so much of our social stratification. Kahlenberg then parses through the relationship between class and race in US public policy, and how they frequently act as proxies for each other, becoming tightly bound in how they must be addressed, as seen in the shift from extreme racial segregation to extreme class segregation coming out of the Civil Rights era, and how this economic stratification so neatly feeds into educational segregation. After walking through his primary case study of Scarsdale and Port Chester, in upstate New York, Sam, Emma, and Richard discuss Reihan Salam’s recent response to Kahlenberg’s work, as they tackle how deeply tied up in elitist and hyper-individualist culture the vast majority of exclusionary housing policy is. Wrapping up, they tackle Kahlenberg’s major policy projects and suggestions to push back against these exclusionary zoning laws (even when the wealthy communities object), and work through the local models for both sides of the zoning debate.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma watch Vivek Ramaswamy get absolutely bodied by Chuck Todd and Dana Bash over his comments about anti-racists being more racist than racists, parse through the DeSantis Campaign entering its clearance sale era, and do a deeep dive on Jesse Singal’s recent freak out over MR’s coverage of his misinformation campaign last week. Wrapping up, the MR Team unpacks Tim Pool’s recent endorsement of shaming all women, plus, your calls and IMs!

Check out Richard’s book here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenberg/excluded/9781541701465/?lens=publicaffairs

Find out more about Jesse Singal here: https://affordablecareactlitigation.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/state-plaintiffs-sj-reply-5-3-19.pdf

https://glaad.org/gap/jesse-singal/

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