This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 26, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There has never been a forthright accounting of the unfortunate history of residential zoning and its racist

legacy. The Better Cities Project is starting to examine zoning in its current effects on various

groups through what they call the 1921 project.

I spoke with BCP's Patrick Toey last week.

Within the criminal justice context I hear from people that I know that, well, look, the laws themselves are facially neutral,

and the fact that there are disparate outcomes among various races, that's just a product of something else that doesn't have

anything to do with the what is actually in the statute it doesn't say if your skin is this color you get this penalty and your skin is this color you get this penalty.

Within the housing context we can say something a little more strongly and we can I mean people have that argument in

the criminal justice context but within the context of housing and how we designate

space for building housing how we build roads, where those roads are built?

Economic development is the same thing. So here's the way I put it.

Imagine your friends are playing Monopoly and they offer to deal you in halfway through the game.

They're not going to discriminate against you, but you're not going to win because all the properties have been bought.

And so what's happening is we set up a system years ago that was racist and even though it is no longer we have

disparate outcomes because of that and it's everything from the ability to build generational

wealth we can argue about the solutions and certainly the left and the right do.

But I need people to understand that the claim is legitimate. For people who have read the color of law, which is a great book by Richard Rothstein, if you dig through the archives, the Cator Daily Podcast, you can hear our discussion about that.

But this was... you can hear our discussion about that.

But this was among various cities in America,

very intentional, and defended this racial segregation

...