Publications

California’s affordability crisis has reached every corner of the state, and local governments are examining their assets to find ways to support the preservation and development of affordable housing. This guide documents how local governments can...

Richmond, CA has been called a "refinery town" because of the widely-felt presence of Chevron's oil refinery in the city. But what is the actual web of relationships between the oil refinery and the Richmond community?

This case study report seeks to illuminate the activism, parameters, and intended outcomes of city programs for property redress as a form of reparations.

The California Zoning Atlas is an ongoing project to produce zoning maps and analyses for every region and municipality in the state of California. The goals of this project are, firstly, to document with greater precision than before, and raise...

This report was submitted in July 2022 to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in review of the US government’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

In the age of the politics of emotions, the feeling of belonging has a lot to do with individual experiences. Confidence in the future, or the perception of lack of opportunities, can be a determining factor in a citizen’s relationship with their community...

Introduction The authors would like to thank Othering and Belonging Institute graduate student researcher Shahan Shahid Nawaz for his invaluable assistance in helping build the repository of municipal maps that made this analysis possible as well as...

Introduction To meaningfully advance economic justice, we must enhance existing government systems and create new supports targeted to residents most impacted by inequality. In 2019, more than one in three California residents was considered poor or...

Download a PDF of this report. CRISPR and other methods of gene editing have captured the public imagination, spurring countless lectures, articles, and think pieces about how this technology can shape humanity. Many of these conversations are...

However difficult it is to properly gauge the significance of historical events while still living through them, we can surely already state with confidence that the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine together constitute a truly seismic and transformative sequence of years for the world.

We are pleased to release results from our Spring 2022 survey on long-term policy priorities at the federal level. Our team conducted landscape research of major policy platforms and visions to identify 100+ cross-cutting federal policies in five areas tied to crisis resilience.

This law review article published in the Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality, authored by OBI Director john a. powell, explores the nature of the problem of toxic polarization and what we must do about it. It argues that bridging is necessary but...

The processes of belonging and othering often appear together, as distinct vectors of the same historical moment or process, as alternative social struggles for recognition.

Background Our recently released report, Single-Family Zoning in Greater Los Angeles, examined the pervasiveness of single-family zoning in counties within the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) region. The analysis uncovered a...

Since 2020, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has devastated our communities. COVID-19 has not only impacted physical health of individuals, but it has also impacted our mental health through fear, anxiety, and the need to social distance...