What Ben Carson needs to know about the long history of housing segregation in America

This week, president-elect Donald Trump announced that he would pick retired neurosurgeon, Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development in his administration. Carson has expressed his opposition towards policies which would work to end segregation, dismissing them as ‘social engineering’. But, writes Richard Rothstein, much of America’s urban racial segregation results from decades of social engineering at the local and federal level. If Carson is opposed to social engineering, he writes, then he should take steps to reverse this segregation such as increasing housing voucher subsidies, advocating for greater spending on transit infrastructure, and reversing the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing policies.