Episode 40: Valuing Black Lives and Housing with Andre Perry

Shane Phillips 00:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. Our guest this week is Dr. Andre Perry of the Brookings Institution joining us to talk about his book 'Know your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities'. As many listeners may know, homes in Black neighborhoods are consistently undervalued relative to their fundamentals, and relative to homes in similarly situated white neighborhoods. And if you know that, you probably know it because of Dr. Perry's work. Know Your Price brings this research together with a much broader range of research and insights into how a racist society fails to appropriately value Black communities, businesses, homes, and ultimately Black people. We are a podcast about housing and we believe very strongly that better housing and land use policies can help solve many of the problems we face as a society. But this conversation is an important reminder that there are limits to what policy can achieve when some people are seen as inherently less valuable, or as unsafe places to invest public or private resources simply because of what they look like or where they grew up. In this episode, we talk about Black homeownership, inequities in appraisals and lending and plenty of other housing centered topics. But the biggest takeaway is the importance of investing in people. And Andre Perry does an excellent job of making that case in this interview. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante and Jason Sutedja. As always, feedback and show ideas can go to me at shanephillips@ucla.edu. Now let's talk to Dr. Andre Perry. Andre Perry is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, a Scholar in Residence at American University and a Professor of Practice of Economics at Washington University. He has many titles, and he is also the author of the 2020 book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities. And he's joining us today to talk about that book. Dr. Perry, welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Andre Perry 02:19
Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to this.

Shane Phillips 02:22
And Mike Lens is my co-host today. Hey, Mike.

Michael Lens 02:24
Hi, Shane. Hi, Andre. Hello, listeners. This is a very, very special episode for me, as some of our listeners know, I've been working on a book on black neighborhoods. I hope to be sending that off to editors soon. And it is..

Shane Phillips 02:41
Woohoo!

Michael Lens 02:42
Thank you! And Andre's work not just in the book 'Know Your Price', but his work with you know, Jonathan Rothwell and others at Brookings has been very influential in shaping my thinking. You know, I use some different methods to arrive I think at some similar stories as Andre and, and some of his colleagues. So this is very exciting. I just noticed that over my right shoulder if you look very closely, not you listener but if you're Andre, you can see that the book is right close to me. So it's good, very good.

Andre Perry 03:21
Keep a copy nearby, it's good for your health.

Shane Phillips 03:26
Okay, so we start each episode by asking our guests for a tour of some place they've lived. And Andre, I was hoping you could give us a tour of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania where you grew up. Know Your Price starts in Wilkinsburg so that feels like an appropriate place to kick off our conversation.

Andre Perry 03:41
Yeah, Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, it's a small majority Black city or borough surrounded by Pittsburgh on three sides, and for most of my life, I never knew where Pittsburgh began or Wilkinsburg ended. It was all kind of blended in this community. But it was a great place to grow up. I was born in 1970. So growing up, I was right smack dab in the throes of the departure of US Steel; they started to pull out of the city. But growing up in Pittsburgh, Wilkinsburg, I should say, it was great because on the main drag of Penn Avenue, you had all the stores and shops any downtown would have. In fact, a lot of people when they said are you going downtown, they would think of Wilkinsburg and not of Pittsburgh because you had department stores, you had the pet shop, you had shoe stores, magazine shops.. this is a thriving budding neighborhood. And in the book, Know Your Price, I narrate my runs. I ran cross country in high school and in college but in high school, I would run down Penn Avenue. And you would always after school I run past all the shops, I see my fellow students working in stores. I'd see parents of my friends, shopping, and then I would pass the EBA, the East busways, a bus station above ground there. So we had a transportation hub past the hospital. And the only reason I knew I was coming closer to Pittsburgh, the City of Pittsburgh, is I could smell vanilla wafers because there's a Nabisco cookie factory near the border of Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg. So when I could smell cookies, I knew I was really getting close to Pittsburgh, and the neighbor was really indistinguishable, we looked like each other. Because it was still a majority-black place. I'd run back and all is good in the world.

Michael Lens 06:03
You went you would run back without finding a way to get the cookies though? That seems like a big challenge.

Andre Perry 06:11
Man, I know. I tried to stay fit the entire time so our cross country coach would not allow us but..

Michael Lens 06:19
no, vanilla wafers during training.

Andre Perry 06:22
Yeah, but now I run that same route when I go back, and there's just not the hustle and bustle anymore. Yeah, there's the stores - many of them are boarded up but the ones that do exist are the typical cash checking place, you know, the dollar store maybe. You can just see it just doesn't have the same verve as it used to. And now as I approach Pittsburgh, I don't smell cookies. But I do see a lot of white people. Because now where the Nabisco cookie factory used to be, it is now Google headquarters. And so it looks very different than it did before where I didn't know the difference between Wilkinsburg and Pittsburgh. Now you see a different type of vanilla wafer - many more white people as you enter Pittsburgh, and it's buzzing, and it reminds me of what Wilkinsburg used to be. And a lot of activity, a lot of "placemaking" has occurred, you have new housing, you have recreational activities, you have bars, you have shops, and then you know, you're run back in majority black Wilkinsburg, and you don't see any of that. And so, for me, a lot of my work is to understand how assets and black communities are devalued. Because you should see the same hustle and bustle in Wilkinsburg that you do in Pittsburgh but you don't not. And I argue that it's really because of the black population is detracting investment in those places.

Shane Phillips 08:17
That's a great introduction. And getting into the book, there's a statement that you repeat throughout, there is nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve. And it feels like that's in some ways, the thesis of your book. For those who haven't had the chance to read it yet, what are you communicating with that message? Tell us about the perspective shift that you're asking the reader to make with that statement?

Andre Perry 08:41
You know, growing up in Wilkinsburg, all I heard internally and externally, is how bad people (were) living in Wilkinsburg was. Once I was in college and I told somebosy I lived in Wilkinsburg and they said, "Oh, your living in 'will kills you' Burg. And there is a lot of crime there, higher crime than it was when I was in high school. But there's this fundamental belief that people cause problems. That if we can only in many ways, my work in education, I used to hear another way of saying that they would say if we can only fix the schools, everything will be alright. And that's to say if we can only educate these kids there be the world would be a better place. And so, in addition, you know, many of us in grad school, got to read the Moynihan Report- the monumental report by Patrick Moynihan. And in it he did a lot of structural analysis in there but he kinda had a conclusion that if black women weren't poor, everything would be a lot better. We got to make sure we fix this whole single family marital thing that which is causing,

Shane Phillips 10:02
Why don't they just choose not to be poor? Essentially?

Andre Perry 10:05
That's exactly right, that's exactly right. And so, so many of our policies really take that perspective that it's the problem of the person, it's personal choices that dictate the overall conditions. Now, I certainly believe that choices matter. But I never lose sight of the policymakers whose choices are scaled at a level that a single mother would, could never impact. And so my whole point of there's nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve is to point to policy. Yeah, and if and if there's any person that let's look at policy makers, but it's really, you know, I say, I don't blame people, I blame ideas. I blame policy. Because if we can change policy, we can really change behavior, we can change outcomes. But for me, it all starts with policy.

Shane Phillips 11:04
And the subtitle of your book is Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities. And since this is a housing podcast, we're going to spend plenty of time on the property side of things. But we also don't want to move past black lives too quickly here or pretend like you can appropriately value black property without valuing black lives as well. Your book came out six days before George Floyd, a black man was murdered by a white police officer. And as we all know, months of protests followed all around the world. And probably the most recognizable slogan or declaration of that time, was that black lives matter. That message and the movement for black lives obviously predate 2020. But there's a clear parallel here between it and your call for valuing black lives. And I was hoping you could just talk a bit about that relationship at a high level, but also where black property fits into all this if you could.

Andre Perry 11:58
Yeah, a lot of people know me for my research on housing devaluation, my colleague, Jonathan Rothwell, and I've been looking at this issue since 2018. And we released a report during that time that found that homes and black neighborhoods are underpriced by 23%, about 48,000 per home. Cumulatively, there's about 156 billion in lost equity in black communities. And, and I always tell people, that 156 billion amounts to more than 4 million businesses based upon the average amount of black people used to start their firms and would have paid for more than 8 million 4-year degrees based upon the average amount of a four year public education would have replaced the pipes in Flint, Michigan, 3000 times over, would have covered nearly all of Hurricane Katrina damages, double the annual economic burden of the opioid crisis - it's a big number. Right? So when, what when people talk about black communities, they're always talking about the people, and I always say that, that's why I always say there's nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't saw, we need to look at the policies and practices that extract wealth every day. And at the end of the day, property is not devalued, people are. It just comes out of the wash in home prices because as soon as white people move in to a community, the entire market shifts, right? We see the potential, we see increased demand for services, we see a new era. But for me, I wanted to make clear, people think when they pick up this book is a housing book, because they think, oh, Andre Perry is going to talk about devaluation. But it's really about how people are devalued and how it shows up in different sectors. And by the way, housing impacts so many other areas. So if you have lower home values, you have less equity to start a business. If you have lower home values, you have less resources in schools. If you have lower home values, you have less political power. There's so many different connections between housing and other areas., and that's what I wanted to make clear in my book.

Michael Lens 14:27
So sticking with the housing side a little bit more, you know, I think a lot of our listeners are pretty familiar with the ways black neighborhoods have been devalued throughout our past and present and what some of what the legacy costs of this history are. Can you get in a little bit more more about some of that history? So practices like racial covenants and redlining, urban renewal and disparities in home appraisals that you know, continue with us today, and how these things relate to this concept of devaluation?

Andre Perry 15:04
Yeah, so I did not mention how I started looking at particular cities in my book. One of the things with my own city of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and you know how I ended up there, as the story was told to me, is my mother or the person I call 'Mom' made a deal with my maternal grandmother that she would take me in at the time, because my mother was poor. She already had a child when she was 15. She had me when she was 17. And so Mom did what a lot of black women did at the time, just taking kids. Now my father at the time, he was a heroin addict. He was incarcerated for most of my childhood. He ended up getting murdered in jail in prison, right outside Detroit, Jackson State Penitentiary. And so for my book, Know Your Price, I started looking at the areas where my father and mom lived...

Michael Lens 16:08
Right!

Andre Perry 16:09
... historically speaking, and what I found was that, they lived in areas that were redlined - where the federally backed Home owners Loan Corporation drew red lines around those areas deeming them unworthy of many of the refinancing opportunities at the time. They lived in areas where that there was an unfulfilled promise of urban renewal., they lived in areas where they were displaced by highway construction., They were surrounded by racial housing covenants so they couldn't necessarily leave those areas, and so that history compelled me to look at home prices in those areas. And so that's when we started digging in, to say "hey, history and policy matter in these cases." When we looked at home prices, we certainly controlled for education, crime, walkability, all those fancy Zillow metrics to come up with that 23% , 48,000, 156 billion. But before that, if you don't control for anything, homes, and black neighborhoods, are underpriced by 50%.

Michael Lens 17:25
Right.

Andre Perry 17:26
And that's largely because of the policies that have impacted the market and those places. Now, I'm currently involved in a little bit of an intellectual battle regarding my research, actually. Because I do say demand is a factor in my in home prices. I mean, for me, it's not the THE factor. I don't think a lack of demand is a reason why you have lower prices. I also think there's this bias in various structures Right. But I also believe that those biases compel people not to invest in those communities, not to live in those communities. That's why in many cases, you see very good structures just abandoned, you know, in certain in certain areas. But for me, that history is absolutely important. I don't think you can come up, you can actually correct housing discrimination without having some reparative type of approach to addressing past inequality. Like we're not going to wave a magic wand and raise home prices, that's for sure. Because you would hurt the people living in those homes, they'd be pushed out ultimately, in those areas. So for me, it's about how do you repair. How do you repair incomes, how you repair the wealth inequalities, how do you repair educational systems, how do you restore the value that's been extracted by racism over time? You know, I don't talk a lot about reparations in the book, but I do mention that there needs to be a reparative culture that goes along with our fixes to housing policy because if you're not dealing with the repair to the past, you're really never going to deal with the present.

Michael Lens 19:28
I pretty obviously agree with that. I'm also glad that you got into some of your biography there because I wanted to talk to you a little bit about you know, how you use multiple methods in this book, right? I mean, from my reading of it, you're a social scientist, you pull a lot from, you know, social science of yourself and others. You use a journalistic style, I think in some, certainly in some parts of the book, you do a lot of interviewing of local experts in education, healthcare, economic and community development. But this book is often very autobiographical in places, and you know, I think it's both a very powerful biography, in my view, but one that, you know, is also all too commonplace in our culture. And I certainly read echoes of my own family in that biography, how did you kind of decide to write the book in this way? And, you know, what were some of the challenges in using such a multi method approach?

Andre Perry 20:36
It was challenging, I work in a think tank, where research is the coin of the realm research and policy. And oftentimes, those things aren't accessible to everyday readers. I mean, most of the research, or reports we put out, you know, you're really talking to a small subset of America. And so I wanted to write something that translated the reports that we do to everyday people, first and foremost. But I also wanted to break down some of the myths around researchers in general, that we're disconnected and were removed and we're dispassionate observers of phenomenon. No, we're highly involved. And for me, I'm an I'm biased in that I live in black communities; much of the policies that were enacted against black America, it affected me. I cannot deny these things. And I really wanted to show everyday people that we are a part of it. If you are living in the suburbs, and you constantly are voting a certain way around education policy, you're part of the problem, you know, in your analyses, and if you're a researcher, if you don't put your biases up front, we consider that bad work. I encourage a lot of my colleagues in Brookings, and in other think tanks and other areas to show, okay, where do you come from, because that informs a lot of your work whether you like it or not. Now we have methods to mitigate our personal bias but you know, our framing of the issue, a lot of it comes from our backgrounds, and how we spend our lives. So I wanted to also just say, "hey, I'm a part of this, I'm in this." Now I tell a very sympathetic story in that I was informally adopted by an older woman, my father was incarcerated and was murdered in prison, and so I have a very sympathetic story. But I still want people to understand that researchers are people that we're not disconnected from these issues. The other thing is, I also wanted to have a redemptive story for my father, for my mother, you know, because for so much of my history, it was "your mother made bad choices, your father made bad choices." And after reading this research doing this research, no, my father should be doing this podcast with you right now. I literally shared intellect, their genetics with them. Yeah, we grew up in the same types of neighborhoods. Yeah, he is murdered in jail. And I'm not. Now some people's, "Oh, that's, you know, how are you so different?" No, I'm no different. Yeah, no different literally no different. There's millions of people snatched up by racism every single day who should be someone's fellow, senior fellows, who should be a professor, should be a bus driver, should be a teacher, whatever but they're gone because of these structures (that) extract wealth and opportunity from our communities. And then finally, I wanted to tell a story of other people. You know, I do think it's sometimes it's a little bit narcissistic to dwell on a person. So I also wanted to share other people's stories. And so that's where a more journalistic lens but I think it was difficult at times to blend, research, hardcore research, biographical and an autobiographical narrative, but I really think I did a good job because it's who I am. I'm all those things. You know, I am a, I mean, I'm a writer. I'm a thinker. I'm a doer and I want wanted to convey the multiple ways people communicate. And I think, yeah, I think I've pulled it off.

Shane Phillips 25:09
You're calling here for valuing homes in black neighborhoods at their appropriate worth, which is to say their value if not for the influence of individual and systemic racism and bias. And one thing you note, which has come up already, is that we wouldn't want to just wave a magic wand and increase the value of devalued neighborhoods, you know, 25 or 30% immediately. That would price a lot of people out, especially renters, and so there's a need to do this with care. And what we're really talking about here is how do we do, how do we grow, how do we invest without gentrification, or without, you know, a lot of the negative things that are associated with gentrification. You call for a more iterative process of restoring wealth without displacement. And that sounds like a great framework for thinking about solutions. And I was hoping you could dig a bit further into those details. What does or what should the process of restoring value and wealth to black neighborhoods look like? And while we're on that subject, I'd love to hear about your work with Stuart Yasgur on the valuing homes in black communities challenge if there's anything you can share at this stage?

Andre Perry 26:17
Yeah, I generally think there's three approaches to restoring value that's been extracted by racism. And, and again, it has to be done in an iterative way. And this is how some of the things in general I think need to happen. You have to essentially restore value to people directly, you got to "cut the check". You got to get homeowners or downpayment assistance to potential homeowners, you need to get tax credits, micro loans to homeowners. We need to figure out ways to get loans to business owners. Now, one of the most important side effects or negative effects of devaluation is people have less discretionary income to put towards their home or their communities. So you got to figure out a way to restore that value directly to people. And I emphasize people because there's always a lot of emphasis on investing in place, and the brick and mortar in the infrastructure and buildings and such. The problem, if you only invest in place, you'll eventually increase property values, and people won't be able to keep pace, and then they're ultimately pushed out. So you got to invest in people but you do have to invest in place simultaneously because of devaluation. You know, beautification is an issue, infrastructure is waned, and so you do need to invest in the physical properties of a particular neighborhood.

Shane Phillips 27:55
Yeah and from your book, it feels like Pittsburgh is sort of the example of the place that went, you know, pretty all-in on placemaking, but not so much on the people themselves.

Andre Perry 28:04
That's exactly right. I'm always saying that placemaking is a, you know, verbal waffle there because you don't have to make places they already exist. Right? That it's really about who are you going to make places for, and oftentimes, we make places not for black people, we make for other folks. And so for me, you know, I feel that we do need to invest in Wilkinsburg, we do need to invest in the structures but you gotta invest in the people - the long standing residents of Wilkinsburg, (and) figure out ways to create more homeowners, business owners and the like and, and reward the people who've stayed and will convert for a long period of time. The third piece of this we need to divest from racism. And let me explain you know, much of the problems that have been highlighted by my work is in the appraisal industry. Now, we we looked at home values, and this is always been a very difficult thing for me to describe. That I actually think we do ourselves a disservice when we blame all of the devaluation in black neighborhoods, pin it all on appraisals and appraising. It is not just appraisers and appraisals that's the problem. We know that lending is a problem, we know that steering is a still a problem, (and) there's, you know, underwriting and all these things matter. And so, appraisals and appraising, appraisers and appraising I should say, are right there but they're a factor. Now, it's a factor we need to divest from. In particular, the price comparison approach is fraught; the approach where you compare one home to another in the neighborhood to get a sense of price. The reason why that's fraught is that if you compare one home to another, in a neighborhood that's been discriminated against, using effectively recycled discrimination over and over again, you never get out of it. And so for me, we got to divest from that model. We, I do believe in more automated valuation models using AI and technology to figure out more ways that, you know, I remember a time I couldn't catch a cab in New York and DC, in parts of the area, and then Uber Lyft came along, and all of a sudden, you saw taxis wanting to go to those areas. Now, there's some a lot of negatives that have occurred because of Uber and Lyft so we also need to be mindful to tech...

Shane Phillips 30:51
And there's also still discrimination with Uber and Lyft. But I think, you know, to your point, it does represent I think for, most people would say a step forward in that regard where the discrimination is not as bad in the same way as you know, loan practices are better than they used to be in 1960 say but there's still a long way to go. It's not to say that this improvement is the last step

Andre Perry 31:14
And AVMS, as they are called, they also can scale by us to a degree that would be even more harmful, because software developers share the same biases as appraisers. But I just want to make two points on that is that there's a lot of emphasis on the workforce in terms of not very diversified - 95% of appraisers are white 75% are male. So we need to diversify that workforce. With that said, if you diversify the workforce, and you still use the same practices, you're going to get similar results. So that goes into my partnership with Stuart Yasgur and Ashoka on the Valuing black Homes or Homes in Black Communities challenge that we just completed this past spring where we sought innovations stemming from local innovators from local communities who are dealing with devaluation, to offer up their products in terms of new mortgage products, new ways to value homes, (and) new policies that they were suggested. And what came about of that, we gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to these innovators, who eventually produce a suite of ideas that really represented the range of ways we need to address housing devaluation. And this is, I mean it's weird, because in so many ways, the social justice community, they love me, like they love me. But then I said, "hey, we can't just blame one sector. We can't just, you know, you got to show that this is systemic, and there's multiple enemies here. And I go back to this, I don't blame people. We do...

Shane Phillips 33:18
A lot of people acting on the incentives that our policies have created for them.

Andre Perry 33:23
That's right. And I stay true to that. I really stay true to that. I don't want to attack any one person, even an occupation. I want to look at policies. So I think what that challenge did with Ashoka and Stuart Yasgur, it really gave us a suite of ideas that ran the range of issues that we need to address in order to affect housing devaluation.

Shane Phillips 33:52
Can you talk about any of them or any at that stage where there are there?

Andre Perry 33:56
Yeah, we saw new a interesting that you caught me off guard because I always forget the innovators names, but I'll say are some of the products. We certainly saw Community Land Trust models that were promising; these ideas where you could separate the land from the physical property to make housing more affordable. We saw new mortgage products, (and) new valuation systems. We saw a new shared equity approach where people who owned a home where the tenants can then purchase shares in the equity that was developed from it. So these new community ownership models and new policies around preventing devaluation, so for folks who want to check it out, Google or whatever search engine you use, hit up Andre Perry and Stuart Yasgur, and Ashoka of Valuing in Black Communities challenge, and you'll learn a lot about the innovations that we found.

Michael Lens 35:08
Cool, hot off the presses.

Andre Perry 35:09
Yes.

Shane Phillips 35:10
So in the last answer, you know, something that I heard there and I know you talked about in the past is there's sort of a destructive cycle or circle going on where perception drives reality. And what I'm basically getting at is that there is a belief and that, you know, because of racism essentially, there is a belief that assets and people in black neighborhoods are not as valuable. And that perception, because people act on it by not moving there by not opening by not going to the businesses there, etc, that actually does make them worse investments in objective terms, and so you have this reinforcemen where the belief that these neighborhoods are lower quality or whatever, actually affects the revenues and the outcomes for the people who live there. And so how do we, you know, this is a very big question, but how do we break that cycle, that connection between perception and reality where the two are reinforcing one another,

Andre Perry 36:12
You know, the only way I know how to break those perception is by investing in black people. You know, when people get the returns, when they see the returns, that they will realize, because ultimately I study under appreciated assets, you know, meaning if you add water, it will grow. And for me when we add the water, and you see the the growth and community, that changes perception because nothing grows without investment, you know. Perceptions don't improve, the communities don't improve so (for) me if we recognize that there's devaluation, we have to then say, the first order remedy is investment.

Shane Phillips 37:00
Because sort of you have to you have to take the leap basically.

Andre Perry 37:03
You have to take the leap, that's exactly right. If you see that the structures have impacted behaviors, information flow, perceptual stuff then you got to disrupt it and take that leap of faith. And so that's what I believe in, and there's, you know, it's hard to say, but, but we take leaps for other people all the time. It's funny, we have moonshot ideas. You know, what's the Holmes woman where people gave billions of dollars to the woman who, they are named Holmes, the one

Shane Phillips 37:45
Elizabeth Holmes, or no, is that an actress, salesperson, whoever that?

Andre Perry 37:50
Yeah, there you go.

Shane Phillips 37:53
Thanos would be good but Theranos.

Michael Lens 37:58
She just, she just got a sentence, right? She (is) going away for a long time.

Andre Perry 38:04
But to just think how many billions of dollars we give for ideas, you know, that may be sound, but they're, you know, they're not proven to be solid assets. We know that in black communities, we have homes that are much more valuable than their price. We know that we have firms that are much more valuable than they are invested in. And so why not invest in those things? And we also see it in this regard, then the whole white washing experiments. It's, you know,

Shane Phillips 38:40
Can you talk about those briefly?

Andre Perry 38:42
Yeah, white washing is where people, particularly when they're getting a appraisal for refi(nancing), they detect that the original appraisal they got was low. So then they remove all the black art, black books, the clothing, the hair products, the cocoa butter, whatever was in there, replace all those out, and then replace it with white facing things. So and then they get a white stand-in to play the role of the owner when the second appraiser come and what happens is, and what you're seeing, it's all over the news, the second appraisal comes in hundreds of thousands of dollars higher. Now, you know, there's no real reason that should happen. No, except you believed in that person, you believed...

Michael Lens 39:32
... racism.

Andre Perry 39:33
Yeah, it's like, you know, I'm like, wow, and you did not believe...

Shane Phillips 39:39
It is such a good illustration of the person side of this though because the nothing has changed about the building. It is in the same neighborhood the same, you know, all the other neighbors could be white or black or whatever, and yet just changing the person changes the value for that appraiser.

Andre Perry 39:58
Absolutely, and you know, and I'm also very cognizant that when you're trying to change perception, it's going to be hard. It's going to be very hard because these tropes are so stuck in our mind that we should not go to that school, we should not go to that neighborhood, we should not go here. And then there's a tight market, and then you have little options, and you say, "well, maybe in particularly young people, that's what they do, maybe I can live in the black neighborhood then all of a sudden, you see potential, you start investing in that neighborhood, you see, you know, you start getting axe throwing (in) places, you know, and all of a sudden, it's like, "oh, this is the new hot neighborhood." And, you know, it was all about perception at the end of the day so for me, we got to figure out a way to take a leap of faith and believe in people. And so yeah, that's what we gotta do.

Shane Phillips 41:01
I want to stick on homeownership here for a minute. So in the US, there's a roughly 30 percentage point gap between the homeownership rate for black households and for white households. And you do call for more homeownership incentives to address that huge disparity. And it's a disparity that has persisted for for generations. You also frame homeownership as a sort of interim step in the process of appropriately valuing black homes and neighborhoods, since rising home values won't displace homeowners generally, unlike renters. I know you're very familiar with the research showing that, you know, black households get worse mortgage terms than similarly situated white households, and buy homes and neighborhoods that appreciate less rapidly than whites. And my understanding is that there are also timing issues where households of color tend to buy disproportionately later in the economic cycle, so that they gain less equity on the upswing and are more at risk of going underwater on their loans when prices fall. None of this is the fault of black homebuyers, and it all seems to go back to your declaration that there's nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve. But I'd be interested to hear your reflections on the importance of homeownership for black households, some of the risks and nuances we should keep in mind when pursuing or pushing for more homeownership. And what it's going to take for black households to benefit from homeownership in the same ways or at the same scale as white households have or if that's even possible.

Andre Perry 42:32
Yeah, I have a lot of mixed reactions to that. First and foremost, I'm never, I never forget that for the descendants of the enslaved, ownership means something different. That having control of yourself your, you know, your personhood and just a little space to call your own; it means something different.

Shane Phillips 42:57
We had Daniel Lee from Culver City at an event a few years ago, and he made this exact same point. Yeah.

Andre Perry 43:03
Yeah, and so there's, you know, we want the American dream more than anyone else, no question about that. And what with that said, the way that racist housing policy has worked over the generations, we also have to find alternative means to building wealth in this country. We need housing for two different things, shelter and wealth development. And some markets, it's going to be very hard to get into the housing market if we don't change the very nature of home ownership, it has to be different; this has to be different. And so for me, I want alternative forms of ownership but I also want new forms of wealth building in this country. You know, my colleague, Derek Hamilton, and his baby bonds idea, I think, is very important, because the idea that every generation will have the ability to pass on significant sums of wealth, through housing, you know, I just don't believe that's always going to be as consistent as it was over the last, at least since homeownership started.

Shane Phillips 44:26
You can't have home values doubling every generation in real terms, right? At a certain point, housing is all you're spending your money on, right? That's exactly you can't continue at that pace forever on that trajectory.

Andre Perry 44:38
That's right. But for me, housing and ownership is important because you want to be able to predict where you're going to go to work, predict where you want to go to school, you want adequate shelter, you want these things and so we need alternative forms of wealth building as well. Right and again, I want to be clear to all the listeners; I am not saying homeownership isn't important, it is vitally important but we also need to understand that we need alternative forms of a wealth building, another social safety net than we did in the past.

Michael Lens 45:19
Another way of thinking about that is perhaps homeownership has become too important, or at least, this single form of homeownership that is really the only option of ownership is too important given the extreme barriers to entry into it. And the big downsides of getting it wrong, right, if like, all of your wealth is tied up into your property, that's a little bit too, if all of your wealth plus all these other things that you just list, you know, your access to your job, and your schools and et cetera, et cetera. like, maybe that's just too big of a thing in our lives. And I think, I think if we can make some of these community ownership shared equity type options more ubiquitous, so where it's not just you're a renter, or a single homeowner, like then we can diversify, you know, this type of asset and diversify people's assets.

Andre Perry 46:29
Yeah, you know, another thing this is going to get very macro and, and too heavy, but I do a lot of this work about increasing ownership, not just with homes and businesses. And I also don't want to replicate the very push that, you know, wiped out one Native Americans in this, this idea that property owners can demand everything, control everything. For me, it's always been about power and voice. I think, power has, you gain it, you can gain a semblance of it through homeownership. But I really do feel that you should have power if you're not a homeowner, you should have voice if you're not. And so I'm always figuring out, "hey, is the goal to, you know, give everybody a home or is the goal to give everybody power, you know, and an opportunity to make a way or more opportunities to make a way to pass on wealth and opportunity to their children?". And so for me, you know, I just, I struggle at times because I also think we fall into this idea that we should be creating housing for wealth purposes. And for me, no, we should be creating housing because, for shelter, for the other reasons I describe.

Shane Phillips 47:57
The distinction I've been making lately is sort of like going back to the days when owning a home was more a question of security than wealth. And security maybe implies some level of wealth. But if you own your home, and you're, you know, secure there but you also have baby bonds and these other means of investment maybe you don't need to rely so much on the value of the home itself to kind of make sure you have resources for retirement and so forth.

Andre Perry 48:27
And it's sad, though, that we've been talking about homeownership is so tied to all these other things, is that if you don't own a home, and if your parents didn't own a home, it's more likely that you're going to have to take out student loans to go to college. It's more likely you're going to have to take out business loans to start a business, and so it disadvantages people. And so my other quest is to figure out ways so that if you don't own a home, you can still go to college for free, you can walk, you know, not for free, but you still have the means to go to college, you can still have the means to start a business, you can still do these things. And so that's where the challenge is for me.

Shane Phillips 49:13
Early in the book, you discuss how researchers often spend too much time comparing outcomes for black households and black neighborhoods against their white counterparts. And you argue that we should spend more time comparing black neighborhoods to each other, learning from the most successful black neighborhoods, and applying their lessons elsewhere. To you, what does it mean for a majority-black neighborhood to be successful, and in the work you've done leading up to and following the publication of the book, what are some of the characteristics or trends or practices that you've seen associated with successful majority black neighborhoods or cities that you think hold promise for other places across the country?

Andre Perry 49:53
Recently, through a partnership with the NAACP, my writing partner Jonathan Rothwell, and I, we created the Black Progress Index, and it's an attempt to do very that - to compare outcomes, in this case life expectancy between black people in different places so anyone can look at their county or metro area to look at life expectancy in the in those places. But what we did, we looked at the social determinants of health, we use a machine learning algorithm to find the 13 most impactful indicators on life expectancy, and a lot of them are not surprising: income, homeownership, (and) environment. There was, there were some surprising things - the percent of black immigrants was a strong predictor, religiosity was a negative predictor, in terms of church memberships, was a negative predictor. But we did that because when you compare white people to black people in the aggregate, you miss all the progress that is being made at the local level, you know, so what I tried to do is to show that there's progress occurring. And yes, in the main overall in the aggregate, black homeownership is 30 points lower but in places like Prince George's County, places in Virginia, homeownership is much higher, and we should look at what did people do in those places to make those things happen? And so for me, the reason why I say let's not always compare black people to white people, is because one, that exercise masks the real progress and change that's occurring. And two, I also think, it leads to black people not being invested in - when black people are at the bottom of all of these metrics, we are perceived as problems to be fixed. And investment doesn't go to problems, they go to solutions. And that's why you see in education and all these other areas, we giving resources to white teachers, or white saviors to fix black problems, and that's true in a lot of other ways. So for me, I think that there's a lot of unnecessary comparing between races, when you look at within group, when you do within group analysis, you really do get a better sense of what's going on across the country.

Michael Lens 52:43
Uhm uhm so Andre, this book discusses multiple examples of black devaluation in other contexts. You know, of course, as a housing podcast, we've talked a lot about housing, but you also cover health care, economic development, education, and, and politics at a minimum. And I think one of your really important insights is that a consistent thing that gets in the way of black uplift is that we do not trust black people to help themselves. In community and economic development, white-owned or -lead entities and initiatives are funded to kind of fix black spaces and problems. In education, the research consistently finds that black teachers are crucial to black student outcomes yet we all often fix black schools by firing black teachers and administrators. What are some of the recommendations that you make to put black people in charge of their own problems and solutions?

Andre Perry 53:41
Yeah, this is something I wrestle with, I'm writing a book, a new book called Black Power Scorecard, in which I tried to measure power in different domains in different cities. And what we're having is a power discussion. I don't think, and this might be very pessimistic of me, that lack of trust in black people isn't going anywhere. This is about demanding what you deserve. You know, I named the book Know Your Price based upon my favorite play in the whole wide world, Two Trains Running by August Wilson, the great August Wilson from Pittsburgh, and in the play the main character Memphis is about to have his property seized through eminent domain by the City of Pittsburgh, they offer Memphis $15,000 to which the owner , and to which Memphis says "no, I'm not selling my property for $15,000, I got my price, I know my price", I'm paraphrasing. But it's there's a refrain throughout the play that suggests "no, I got my price and know my price". There was another character Hambone in the play who agrees, (and) makes a deal with a proprietor that he would get a ham If he painted the fence, the store front's fence. He paints the fence but he never gets his ham, and throughout the play, you hear "give me my ham, give me my ham, give me my ham". And we don't know if, if he had, Hambone had mental health issues before he painted the fence, but eventually goes mad and dies, demanding his ham. Now, there's a moral to the story, or I'm sorry, I forget the most important part, the main character Memphis after saying, "no, I got my price and know my price", he gets $35,000 for the property eventually, it's assumed he's getting market rate or the white rate. And the moral of the story is, you gotta know you have worth you got to know you have value. What I tried to do is give people the prices stand up. Now, a caveat to this is there's two: one, I want to get to a place where we don't have to sell our property. We're not forced to sell. I also don't want us to go mad demanding our worth. That's where organizing and collective power comes in. There are lots of people dying, demanding their fair share. There, they're losing their minds, literally losing their minds from demanding what they deserve. I think there needs to be a serious conversation about organizing in this community. When my book came out, it was in the throes of the 2020 movement. And I don't think I would be talking to you today if I did not release a book during that period. You know, that demand led to Biden Administration recognizing the work, it led to them instituting PAEE, the Property Appraisal Evaluation Equity Task Force,

Shane Phillips 56:54
That's impact, right there

Andre Perry 56:56
Impact, you know, multiple state local ordinances but it all comes from demand, and it comes from organizing. So I think, I don't think anyone ever is going to give us the respect you deserve. I do think when we organize and mobilize, we get the change we need. And so for me, that's what I'm working on.

Michael Lens 57:22
All right.

Shane Phillips 57:23
All right. Andre Perry, this has been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the housing voice podcast.

Andre Perry 57:28
Hey, thanks for having me. I look forward to hearing more episodes.

Shane Phillips 57:33
Cool. You can read more about Andre's research on our website (lewis.ucla.edu). Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips, and Mike is there at MC_lens. Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.