Dr. Justin Rex, Assistant Professor of Political Science at BGSU and chair of an interdisciplinary ICS research cluster studying US poverty and its many dimensions, discusses his work on housing affordability and equity in Northwest Ohio.  

Transcript:

Introduction:

From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.

Intro Song Lyrics:

I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.

Jolie Sheffer:

This is the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Today we are joined by Dr. Justin Rex, an Assistant Professor of Political Science here at BGSU. Dr. Rex's scholarly research examines First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court as well as regulations of food, consumer transactions, and advertising. He's also the chair of an interdisciplinary ICS research cluster studying US poverty and its many dimensions. I'd like to welcome you here today, and I'm thrilled to be able to discuss your work on housing affordability and equity in our region. Thanks for joining me, Justin.

Justin Rex:

Thanks for having me.

Jolie Sheffer:

I'm curious about, given your background, how did you come to be thinking about housing-related issues?

Justin Rex:

Sure. I think part of it came from some of my background teaching at Wayne State University in Detroit. And after I graduated from grad school there, I taught in the Honors College, and we taught a series of interdisciplinary introductory courses for all Honors College freshmen on Detroit and an American Government course that was attached to it. Learning about the history of Detroit, one thing that really surprised me is somebody that was new to really urban studies was seeing how central housing was, as a battleground and a political battle for the development of that city in terms of people fighting neighborhood integration, literally fighting, and also the sort of de facto fighting that went over who was living where that you saw through practice like redlining and so forth throughout its history. That kind of just opened up my eyes that housing was really a central fight politically that was going on, and it really shaped a lot of the politics of that city, and Detroit being a microcosm for what was going on in a lot of different cities.

Justin Rex:

That was kind of the first thing that opened up my eyes, really, to thinking about housing as a central issue, for thinking about urban issues, but also just some of my interest more broadly in inequality. Housing is central there too, given past housing practice and the way federal government policies and other policies have shifted wealth to certain classes of citizens through housing policy as well.

Jolie Sheffer:

Could you explain a little bit about some of those policies in history? What is redlining? How did mortgage practices work to further inequality?

Justin Rex:

Yes. Redlining came from the Federal Housing Administration when it decided it was going to start trying to promote home ownership and give out loans to people. They had to, like anybody making a loan, had to make a decision about what's a good investment. Who is somebody that's going to be able to repay this loan so that we're not going to lose our money? They had to decide what kind of neighborhoods they wanted to lend to, and in practice, what that meant is that quote unquote good investments tended to be in white neighborhoods because they thought those would maintain values. The redlining, or the term, comes from literal red lines that were drawn on maps to indicate which neighborhoods were good places for investment