A Washington, D.C., neighborhood devastated by riots in 1968 is unrecognizable today, as high-end development rises directly on top of Black neighborhoods. "If you devalue the whole area, you can redevelop the whole area based on a particular narrative of it," said Brandi T. Summers, a professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book "Black in Place" followed the transformation of H Street Northeast in Washington after the riots.

Black families pay 13% more in property taxes each year than a white family would in the same situation, a massive new data analysis shows. Troup Howard and Carlos Avenancio-Leon, then working on doctorate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, combined 118 million real estate transactions and assessments from 2005 to 2016 with maps of more than 75,000 local taxing entities - such as counties, school districts, airport authorities and utility districts. They used the maps to sort homes into areas that faced the same property tax burdens, identified the races of homeowners using federal mortgage data, and looked at every time a dwelling was assessed and then sold in the same year. That allowed them to compare a home's assessed value and its market value, alongside the homeowner's race and ethnicity.

Low-income families who don't qualify for federal child care subsidies often turn to home-based care providers. These providers tend to have less formal education, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. By offering the poorest families insufficient assistance to access excellent child care and by denying help to millions more low-income families, the federal government is effectively lowering the quality of child care available to a huge segment of the American public.

A UC Berkeley study released Monday unearthed that prosecutors usually routinely strike Black and Latino prospective jurors and that appellate courts have failed to rein in the practice. The study, "Whitewashing the Jury Box," was spearheaded by UC Berkeley law professor Elisabeth Semel, who runs the law school's Death Penalty Clinic, the Los Angeles Times reported. The report examined close to 700 cases decided by the state's Courts of Appeal from 2006 through 2018 that involved appeals of prosecutors' jury strikes.

Thousands of Bay Area households -- nearly one in five people -- were already struggling to pay their bills and had less than $400 in savings when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, according to a new survey conducted by sociologists and political scientists from Berkeley, the campus's Othering & Belonging Institute, and the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point. The survey, based on interviews conducted with more than 3,000 Bay Area residents between 2018 and 2019, also found strong racial disparities, with 77% of blacks and 43% of Latinos having less than $400 in savings, compared to 18% of whites and 11% of Asians. For more on this, see this press release at the Othering & Belonging Institute.

This is the stunning cruelty of the U.S. that shocks large portions of the world. Many workers are not just temporarily out of work, but are registering the collapse of their work worlds, the prospect of no paycheck, homelessness, a pervasive sense of being abandoned by the society to which they should rightly belong, says comparative literature and critical theory professor Judith Butler in an interview about the personal and political implications of vulnerability and mourning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking of vulnerability, she says: "Humans share the air with one another and with animals; they share the surfaces of the world. ... These reciprocal and material modes of sharing describe a crucial dimension of our vulnerability, intertwinements and interdependence of our embodied social life. ... On the other hand, the public response to the pandemic has been to identify 'vulnerable groups' -- those who are especially likely to suffer the virus as a ravaging and life-threatening disease and to contrast them with those who are less at risk of losing their lives from the pathogen. The vulnerable include Black and Brown communities deprived of adequate health care throughout their lifetimes and the history of this nation. The vulnerable also include poor people, migrants, incarcerated people, people with disabilities, trans and queer people who struggle to achieve rights to health care, and all those with prior illnesses and enduring medical conditions. ... For those who are homeless or unemployed, the economic forecast could not look bleaker. Without a working and equitable health care system, the affirmation of health care as a public good and a mandate of government, the unemployed are left to scramble for alternatives to avoid falling ill and dying for lack of care." About mourning, she says: "Learning to mourn mass death means marking the loss of someone whose name you do not know, whose language you may not speak, who lives at an unbridgeable distance from where you live. One does not have to know the person lost to affirm that this was a life. What one grieves is the life cut short, the life that should have had a chance to live more, the value that person has carried now in the lives of others, the wound that permanently transforms those who live on. What someone else suffers is not one's own suffering, but the loss that the stranger endures traverses the personal loss one feels, potentially connecting strangers in grief."

A newly published survey of 30,000 hourly service sector workers, conducted between September 2017 and November 2019 by Berkeley's Shift Project, found that roughly 55% of workers at some of the largest grocery, food service, big box, and retail stores in the country said they lacked access to paid sick leave. "The widespread lack of paid sick leave for service sector workers has serious consequences for workers' own health, for the wellbeing of those they care for, as well as for public health," says assistant sociology professor Daniel Schneider, the Shift Project's founder and a co-author of the report. "During a global pandemic, these consequences become all the more urgent." As this reporter points out, an emergency coronavirus law has expanded paid sick leave in the U.S., but it exempts employers with 500 or more employees.

It's more expensive to build government-subsidized apartment complexes for low-income residents in California than anywhere else in the U.S., and yet job losses connected with the coronavirus pandemic will likely send demand for affordable housing soaring. According to associate city and regional planning professor Carolina Reid, faculty research advisor for Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation and the author of a new study on the topic, the economic impact of the crisis is also likely to significantly lower government tax revenue, in turn reducing the amount of money available to fund new construction. It will also increase the need to overhaul how low-income housing is built in the state. "If you look at how we build affordable housing, every single one of the actors in it, from cities to developers to construction workers, is going to face stress from the coronavirus for years," she says. "This public health crisis adds more urgency to making the reforms we had already needed." Link to Professor Reid's study at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. A story about the data collection for this story also appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

A study co-led by acting associate public health professor Ziad Obermeyer MD, finding that a software program commonly used in the health care industry is racially biased, has won the Editor's Pick award in the 2020 STAT Madness contest for the best innovations in science and medicine for the year. According to this reporter: "The artificial intelligence software equated health care spending with health, and it had a disturbing result: It routinely let healthier white patients into the programs ahead of black patients who were sicker and needed them more. ... It was one of the clearest demonstrations yet that some, and perhaps many, of the algorithms that guide the health care given to tens of millions of Americans unintentionally replicate the racial blind spots and even biases of their developers. ... The researchers didn't just publish their work and move on. Instead, they worked with the builders of the algorithm to fix it. And after hearing from insurers, hospitals, and others concerned that their algorithms, too, might be racially biased, they established an initiative at the Booth School to work pro bono with health systems and others to remedy that." For more on this study, see our press release at Berkeley News.