Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation: Sheryll Cashin’s Keynote Presentation

By Nick Adjami
April 27, 2022

Thanks to all who joined us for Fair Housing in DC: Envisioning an Equitable City. We enjoyed your company as author and professor Sheryll Cashin educated us about local housing segregation, and Diane Glauber of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law enlightened us about the Regional Analysis of Impediments process. As the process progresses we will share opportunities to participate.

In her keynote presentation, Professor Cashin emphasized the importance of being educated about the roots and continued preservation of housing segregation. “The beauty of understanding this past and present is that once you understand these processes, the way forward is clear,” she said. “We just need to do the opposite: inclusion rather than exclusion and maintenance of boundaries, racial equity in city budgeting rather than opportunity hoarding and overinvesting in already advantaged places, and changing the relationship of the state with high-poverty Black neighborhoods from punitive to caring.”

Her full remarks, as well the question and answer session that followed, are available here:

———

The Equal Rights Center (ERC) — a national non-profit organization — is a civil rights organization that identifies and seeks to eliminate unlawful and unfair discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations in its home community of Greater Washington DC and nationwide. The ERC’s core strategy for identifying unlawful and unfair discrimination is civil rights testing. When the ERC identifies discrimination, it seeks to eliminate it through the use of testing data to educate the public and business community, support policy advocacy, conduct compliance testing and training, and, if necessary, take enforcement action. For more information, please visit www.equalrightscenter.org.