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Stephen Menendian

Byline

  • Assistant Director & Director of Research, OBI

Stephen Menendian is the Assistant Director at the Othering & Belonging Institute, where he works on many special projects and critical initiatives. His research focuses on inequality between social groups, how institutions and communities can foster belonging, and the effective design of equitable race-conscious policies as permitted by law, including California’s anti-affirmative action ballot initiative, Proposition 209.

He is the author of many scholarly publications, including more than a dozen peer reviewed journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, nearly 60 research reports, and the landmark books Structural Racism: The Dynamics of Opportunity and Race in America and Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World (with john a. powell) from Stanford University Press.

Stephen’s primary areas of expertise are fair housing and housing policy, civil rights, voting rights, and constitutional law, structural racism, affirmative action, belonging, educational equity, and targeted universalism.

Stephen’s most recent scholarly publications in refereed journals include “The Past, Present, and Future of Zoning Reform in the United States,” an examination of recent zoning reform efforts at the local, state and federal levels for the Rutgers Journal of Law & Public Policy, “Race and Politics: The Problem of Entanglement in Gerrymandering Cases,” which critically explores the divergent constitutional standards governing judicial review of partisan gerrymandering versus racial gerrymandering claims for the Southern California Law Review, and “The Shadow Constitution: Rescuing Our Inheritance from Neglect and Disuse,” a survey of a dozen federal constitutional provisions that have fallen into disuse for the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.

As the first full-time staff member hired at the Institute in 2012 and the former Director of Research, Stephen played a significant role in the development and growth of the Institute, raising funds, hiring many key staff positions, and helping establish many of the Institute’s programs, processes and ongoing projects and initiatives.

Stephen also conceived and led a number of notable projects, including the widely covered “Roots of Structural Racism Project” a multi-faceted, interactive study revealing the persistence of racial residential segregation and its harmful consequences, the Racial Disparities Dashboard, a dynamic interactive tool for assessing racial inequality and progress across a broad range of indicators at different points in time, and the Zoning Reform Tracker, a repository for tracking municipal zoning reform initiatives across the United States. He also produced important legal guidance for advocates and policymakers in the Institute’s “Advancing Racial Equity” guidance and FAQ.

Stephen served on organizing committees of the 2015, 2017, and 2019 Othering and Belonging Conferences, and co-chaired “Race & Inequality in America: The Kerner Commission at 50 conference,” a conference held in the spring of 2018 that brought together the nation’s leading experts on race and housing, the criminal justice system, employment, transportation and heath care in order to envision a contemporary racial justice agenda. The proceedings are archived on our Kerner@50 conference page, including “The Road Not Taken: Housing and Criminal Justice 50 Years after the Kerner Commission Report,” a retrospective report analyzing the failure to heed the warnings and adopt the policy recommendations advanced by the Kerner Commission in the realms of housing and policing, co-authored with Richard Rothstein.

Stephen developed and co-authored the Institute's Amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. the Inclusive Communities Project, which was cited by the Supreme Court in its landmark 2015 decision recognizing disparate impact claims under the federal Fair Housing Act. He also co-authored the Institute’s Amicus brief in Fisher v. Texas asking the Court to uphold the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy in 2016.

Stephen is a regular public speaker and frequently advises or provides trainings to institutions and communities on the subjects of targeted universalism, belonging and bridging, fair housing and affordable housing, racial segregation and inequality, zoning and land use policies, and Proposition 209 and race-conscious policymaking (see presentations below). For example, Stephen testified before the California Reparations Task Force on housing segregation and the racial wealth gap, before a joint hearing of two California General Assembly committees on the subject of racial disparities in homeownership and policies to reduce them.

He has been interviewed, and his work covered, by CNN, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Five Thirty Eight, The Root, Axios, Bloomberg News, the New York Post, and the East Bay Times, among other print media, and many local radio and television stations across the country (see media mentions below).

Selected Publications:

Books:

Journal Articles and Chapters:

Selected Institute Publications:

Media Mentions