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Richard Rothstein says government policy created ghettos

Inner-city and suburban ghettos — poverty-stricken neighborhoods that are hard to escape and often inhabited by immigrants and minorities — are taken for granted as part of the American landscape.

It's easy to assume that they are a natural occurrence or were always there, especially if you were born in the 1970s or 80s when they became part of the national narrative on poverty. But historian Richard Rothstein believes that these neighborhoods are a direct result of government intervention in the private sector, specifically in real estate policies.

Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, says that policies created in the 1940s, 50s and even 60s that most Americans have "forgotten about" created the ghettos of today.

"We have a myth today that the ghettos in urban areas are 'de-facto' — just an accident of the fact that people don't have enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods," Rothstein says. "That's not how it happened. We had a system established purposefully by public policy."

Rothstein talked to the Deseret News about his research on how government intervention created some of America's most impoverished and isolated neighborhoods. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DN: You've documented government policies that deliberately created segregated neighborhoods. Can you give us some examples of how that began happening?

Rothstein: During the New Deal, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) built housing in cities across the country as part of the economic program to provide jobs and housing. During that time, low-income workers had to live in urban neighborhoods to get to work at the factories, so Jewish immigrants, Irish immigrants and African-Americans lived in integrated neighborhoods. The WPA demolished those existing neighborhoods on the pretext that they were slums and built segregated public housing instead. I'm not suggesting those neighborhoods were fully integrated, but they were much more before the WPA got into it. This happened in Atlanta, St. Louis, the Bay Area — segregated housing was created where there hadn't been before. ...

Read entire article at Deseret News