Author and Brookings Senior Fellow Andre Perry, who has collaborated with LISC on the work to upend racially biased real estate appraisals, inaugurates a seven-essay series from LISC and NPQ, “Community Strategies for Systems Change.” Perry's article dissects how progressive grassroots action can lead to critical policy change and, pointing to the upcoming series, authored by LISC's local partners, notes that it's in “community stories such as these that you will find the fundamental building blocks of systemic change.”
The excerpt below was originally published on Nonprofit Quarterly:
Why Grassroots Action Is the Most Likely Path to Systemic Change
By Andre M. Perry, Brookings Senior Fellow
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Andre M. Perry |
When it comes to addressing structural racism, the failure of national politics in the United States is plain to see. The Black-white wealth gap remains unchanged after half a century. The Black homeownership rate is about the same as it was when the National Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. At 42 percent, it is about 30 percentage points lower than that of whites. Many of the practices used to segregate communities, like single family zoning and the price comparison approach for home appraisals, are still in place.
We assume the power and authority that government and corporate leaders possess necessitate not only their involvement in policy formation, but also their initiation of it. We suppose that rules and laws can easily change with a stroke of a leader’s pen, but the snail’s pace of change suggests that leadership at the top is conflicted and restrained—that most leaders lack the will to eliminate stubborn wealth gaps. In short, change that benefits the majority is unlikely to come from the top.
For change to occur, we should look to civic action happening on the ground. With regards to housing policy, for example, much of existing civil rights legislation was passed in response to organized local pressure. In other words, change came to Washington, D.C., not from it.
Corporations that have announced their support for racial justice have most often backed into such declarations. This was exactly what occurred with the flurry of corporate commitments made after the mass uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. More often than not, government and corporate action comes at the end of a process led by civic action, not at the beginning.
How Policy Change Occurs: A Housing Justice Example
The small steps forward that we’ve taken recently to improve access to housing illustrate that civic action is indeed a leading catalyst for systemic change, even if that is not typically how the press portrays social change.
Take housing appraisals, a field in which I have been deeply involved. In the conventional account, the Biden administration is driving new federal policy, starting with an address made by Biden to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, during which he announced that his administration would launch “an aggressive effort to combat racial discrimination in housing. That includes everything from redlining to the cruel fact that a home owned by a Black family is too often appraised at a lower value than a similar home owned by a white family.”
Biden’s announcement resulted in the formation of the Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) Task Force, a first-of-its-kind interagency effort to address racial bias in home appraisals. This past March, PAVE released its final action plan, the most wide-ranging set of reforms ever put forward to advance equity in the home appraisal process. The plan lays out 21 actions to be taken by 13 federal agencies, including the development of new rules to remove discrimination from every stage of the home valuation process and efforts to build a more diverse home appraiser workforce.
On the surface, it would seem that the federal government is taking the lead to force an overdue reckoning in the real estate industry. However, this leaves out a critical question: why now?
Certainly, people have been making calls to end racial bias in appraising since redlining first became common practice in the early 20th century. To understand why, 54 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the federal government is finally taking action to address discrimination in real estate appraisals requires looking to the grassroots organizations and individuals that together forced Biden’s hand.