Contributor(s): | The history of planning and housing in the United States and its violence towards communities of colour has played out in so many ways. From red-lining to restrictive covenants and from segregated public housing to deliberately segregated city plans, the Federal Government, financial institutions and planners have all promoted and facilitated a system that has ripped apart cities and communities across America.

 

Drawing on her work as a planning and housing specialist and her role with the Detroit land bank, Dekonti Mends Cole talks about the aftermath of the last financial crisis and its uneven geographic and human impacts on the city. She reminds us that “Housing is civil rights work” showing how profoundly disinvestment in communities of colour grew into pernicious, intergenerational financial inequality with White households having amassed ten times more wealth than their Black counterparts.