Culture Scan

While the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 was a moment worth celebrating, it’s also important that we, as Americans and as real estate professionals, look at what’s happened since that historic moment.

I live in a bustling neighborhood in Chicago called Boystown, the city’s best-known gay enclave, with a plethora of bars, shops, and other businesses tailored for the LGBT community.

“Ghetto.” The word evokes a long and vexing tradition of racial imagery and history in the United States. We may think we know what the word means, but where does it come from? Why does it carry such socio-cultural weight?

The pace of historic change can be at once laborious and swift. The passage of the U.S. Fair Housing Act in 1968 is a case in point. 

It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be evicted, perhaps because the impacts of evictions are so wide-ranging. Household items are put on the curb and lost if the evictee can’t afford a storage unit. 

No matter how passive it may seem, reading is an activity. It can be an acknowledgement, a political act, an act of remembrance—and at its best, it’s often all three wrapped into one.

Edina, Minn. is one of the few suburbs I could see myself living in. It has decent public transportation, boutique storefronts, independent restaurants—and for an extra dose of kitsch—the first indoor shopping mall in America. It’s one of those old-growth ‘burbs, where the houses have character and the streets have sidewalks.

When I’m working on stories for REALTOR® Magazine, it’s not uncommon for my interview subjects to offer supplemental reading that might help round out my reporting. But rarely am I told that a book could change my thinking entirely on a given subject.

I live in Chicago, a city that consistently ranks among the most segregated in the nation. This fact is starkly evident to anyone who makes their lives here – a city where black and white citizens live separately, learn separately, and move through the city separately.

Just like the first volume, The City We Need Is Affordable, Vol. 2 looks at some of real estate’s more innovative responses to the challenge of affordable housing all around the world.