Justice and the American Metropolis

2. Public Reason and the Just City

. 59 2 P U B L I C R E A S O N A N D T H E J U S T C I T Y loren king I n t h i s c h a p t e r I c ons i de r some problems of urban inequality in light of a particular dimension of justice: the importance of good reasons for imposing burdens on others. This will require saying something about what counts as a good reason, what sorts of burdens demand such reasons, and what counts as imposing a burden on others (as distinct from being blamelessly implicated in harm to others). In their introduction to this volume, Clarissa Hayward and Todd Swanstrom suggest that a recent lack of official public concern with issues of justice in and around our cities may be rooted in the thickness of many distinctly urban and more broadly metropolitan injustices: the complexity and historical depth of these moral wrongs, and their rootedness in particular locations, may “make it difficult to assign moral responsibility for injustice, and to motivate collective political action to change it” (Hayward and Swanstrom 2010, 9). I agree, but there is at least one other way in which both moral responsibility and political redress may be difficult to find. Attending to public reason in urban and metropolitan life may help us distinguish cases of thick injustice from reasonable disagreement over the demands of justice. Let me begin, however, with the first side of that distinction, by exploring a particularly distressing way in which inequality can be a moral problem: a historical example of unequal voice implicated with unambiguously bad reasons for imposing burdens on others. Race and Realty in St. Louis Throughout the first half of the twentieth century and into the 1960s, St. Louis realtors and their trade association, the St. Louis Real Estate 60 . L O R E N K I N G Exchange, engaged in explicitly racist practices, helping to sustain starkly segregated residential neighborhoods. In 1915, the Exchange lobbied aggressively for racial zoning, issuing pamphlets and mailings with racist language depicting the threat to property values and public safety of the “Negro invasion” of neighborhoods in the north and west of the city, and extending into incorporated municipalities such as Clayton and University City. The racial ordinances were short-lived—the practice was condemned as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917—but realtors and their exchange continued to be active in promoting racial restrictions in private-deed covenants (Gordon 2008, ch. 2). St. Louis was hardly unique in these respects, but as Colin Gordon explains, the real estate industry here “played an unusually active and formal role in drafting and sustaining restrictive deed covenants” (2008, 79). The city was host to the named parties in the famous supreme court decision Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which deemed state enforcement of racial restrictions in deed covenants a violation of equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. That decision allowed such restrictions in private covenants between consenting parties, but state action was deemed unconstitutional. Eventually the court did reject private racism as a grounds for restricting ownership in Jones v. Mayer (1968), appealing to the Thirteenth Amendment, which addresses the legacy of slavery and demands equal property rights for all citizens, regardless of race. Legislative efforts, such as the Fair Housing Act (1949), and subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as Hills v. Gautreaux (1976), provoked modest and sporadic efforts at reform throughout the country, but the damage of almost a century of unbridled racism in urban and suburban housing markets had arguably been done. Subsequent efforts at racial integration in housing, on the one hand, and slum clearance and public housing, on the other, were, in St. Louis as in so many other cities, largely ineffective and often pernicious , involving heavy-handed and paternalistic efforts that did little to address either the complex legacies of racial injustice or the deeply inegalitarian vagaries of urban capitalism. Local Politics and the Just City Those of us concerned with justice in the city can cite, almost reflexively , a litany of well-studied problems evidenced by this example: dramatically unequal life chances along sharp divisions of race and P U B L I C R E A S O N A N D T H E J U S T C I T Y . 61 class; racist attitudes and practices by both private...