Publication Title

Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy

Volume

33

Page

243

Year

2026

Abstract

This Article describes an existential legal and factual conflict about residential segregation. It is centered in a neighborhood a few blocks north of where George Floyd—and more recently Renee Good—were murdered. Five years before Floyd’s murder, the conflict reached a breaking point, resulting in three lawsuits. One involved federal civil rights and two involved state civil rights claims that housing policy was causing deeper residential and educational segregation. Much of this debate was summarized in a series of articles in the journal Housing Policy Debate before the lawsuits were filed.

On one side were proponents of greater residential and educational integration by dedicating a share of government-supported affordable housing to whiter communities with strong schools. To them, the murder of Floyd and its aftermath were part of the legacy of segregation, its profound harms to education, health, safety, and its role in creating white prejudice through isolation in privileged communities.

On the other side were the organized opponents of residential integration, mostly housing developers who coalesced into a group called Equity in Place. This side believed that the government supported low-income housing should be highly concentrated in extremely segregated and disadvantaged neighborhoods. To them, there could never be too much subsidized housing in a poor non-white neighborhood. Equity in Place repeatedly asserted that this strategy would improve education and health and reduce local crime. They also argued that only racially homogeneous poor communities would create the requisite solidarity to make racial progress and foster equality in the Twin Cities.

In the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, a $1 billion, “separate but equal,” government-funded strategy failed.

Over the last few decades, housing developers have convinced the government and philanthropists to provide them with $1 billion to improve education, public health, and public safety in the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis. Phillips includes roughly 7,500 households, and many of its residents are impoverished and unhealthy. Its children have been performing poorly in school and dropping out, and the area has been riddled with high crime rates. In exchange for the $1 billion, developers have provided 42% of all Phillips residents with subsidized apartment units, with the promise that these units would improve health and education and reduce crime in the neighborhood. The advocates of this strategy promised that their strategy would be more effective than allowing impoverished Phillips’ residents the opportunity to live in more mixed-income neighborhoods.

The public was not aware that new apartments in Phillips would cost one-third more—sometimes twice as much—as they would in suburban areas, such as Dakota County, a white suburban area south of Minneapolis, or that they would rent for more than the existing market rate apartments in Phillips. The developers, who were overwhelmingly white, did not hire disadvantaged residents of Phillips or people of color to build their new homes and get good construction jobs. The public did not know that after it paid for the new apartments, the developers and investors would own them outright and could later sell them and thus get paid twice.

The developers got the $1 billion, but the conditions in Phillips did not improve. In fact, they got worse. Today, Phillips’ residents have the worst public health in the Twin Cities region, among the lowest performing schools (with only around 10% of children competent in math and reading), and the highest violent crime rate in the metropolitan area.

This wasted money could have been better spent on community health racially and economically diverse magnet schools, after-school programs, and community violence prevention initiatives. It should also have been spent on real, affordable housing wherever the residents of Phillips themselves wanted to live, in the context of serious efforts to reduce educational and residential segregation across the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

These terrible conditions in Phillips set the stage for the murder of George Floyd and the resulting demonstrations and upheaval—locally, nationally, internationally—in its aftermath.

This Article will conclude by discussing new national evidence about the benefits of racial integration. It will then analyze the striking similarity between Equity in Place’s construction of the Fair Housing Act and that of the Trump Administration and argue that greater residential integration in the Twin Cities, and everywhere else, will dramatically decrease racial inequality.

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