Racial Impacts of Anti-DEI: Results from Year 1 of Trump II
Racial Impacts of Anti-DEI: Results from Year 1 of Trump II

This is a report on the material consequences of federal “anti-DEI” policies on Black people in the U.S. It examines how the Trump Administration’s recharacterization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as “illegal,” “wasteful,” and “immoral” has driven widespread dismantling of DEI initiatives across education and employment, producing disproportionate harms for Black individuals and communities. Although framed as efforts to enforce civil rights law and promote neutrality, these policies operate through funding threats, legal ambiguity, and administrative pressure to curtail programs designed to address longstanding racial inequality. By tracing the material consequences of these policies, the report demonstrates how the dismantling of DEI infrastructure has already constrained access to education, weakened employment pipelines and eroded critical community protections.

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MemorandumRutgers CLiMEStudent Research, Race, Inequality, Civil Rights Initiative
Guidance for Lawmakers on Investors & New Jersey Homes
Guidance for Lawmakers on Investors & New Jersey Homes

CLiME’s Guidance for Lawmakers on Investors and New Jersey Homes responds to the flood of proposed legislation in New Jersey to respond to the growth of institutional investors in single-family homes. This report describes the pending bills in New Jersey and offers expert recommendations on how legislators should understand the combined policy effects of a range of efforts, including bans, opportunity to purchase restrictions, tax strategies, and responses to various harms to renters through tenant-protection laws.

We offer four top level recommendations for New Jersey lawmakers:

  1. Create an executive agency tasked with developing the infrastructure necessary to regulate institutional investors in single-family homes in New Jersey.

  2. Prioritize a first-look law that mandates a wait period before investors may bid on a home once it goes on the market.

  3. Impose limits on property-related tax deductions such as mortgage interest and depreciation to disincentivize investor ownership of single-family homes.

  4. Prioritize various tenant protection bills aimed at responding to specific harms renters face from growing dominance of corporate landlords, including rapid rent increases, increased eviction actions, and habitability concerns.

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Legislative Brief, ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing, Gentrification, Economic Development
UPDATE - Rewriting Racial Equality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump
UPDATE - Rewriting Racial Equality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump

This Update documents the Trump Administration's continued efforts to rewrite the meaning of racial equality in the United States. The administration’s efforts have kept pace with their first ten months, collected for CLiME’s November 2025 report presented as a four-pronged strategy aimed at: 

  • Redefining race discrimination through a theory of antidiscrimination doctrine developed by the overwhelmingly white conservative legal movement, which has resisted racial progress through the courts since the at least the 1970s;

  • Dismantling the federal institutions responsible for civil rights enforcement by eliminating people and offices committed to the work of restorative justice and racial equity and repopulating those spaces with a sparse few ideological loyalists who selectively enforce civil rights laws through this redefined, ahistorical understanding of antidiscrimination;

  • Enforcing this colorblind, reverse-race discrimination ideology by weaponizing the federal checkbook to coerce institutions into ideological compliance and to defund any program or research that may document ongoing, system racial inequalities or support Black, Latino and Indigenous communities in any way; and

  • White washing racial gerrymandering efforts through political gerrymandering, while the Court ends the Voting Rights Act as we know it by subverting claims of racial discrimination to achieve policy goals–the effects of which often involve civil rights retrenchment–all the while knowing that the Supreme Court is ideologically and doctrinally aligned.

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ReportRutgers CLiMECivil Rights Initiative, Inequality, Race
Community Benefits Agreements as Contracts: A Framework for Evaluating New Jersey's EMERGE and ASPIRE Programs
Community Benefits Agreements as Contracts: A Framework for Evaluating New Jersey's EMERGE and ASPIRE Programs

Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are contracts between developers and communities that exchange community support for development projects for material benefits. New Jersey became the first state to statutorily require CBAs in tax incentive programs in 2021 through its EMERGE and ASPIRE programs, though significant workarounds undermine the mandate’s force. This memorandum examines a number of CBAs executed under both programs and argues that, in their current form, these agreements fail to achieve the purpose of ensuring that economic development benefits existing residents and communities. Analysis through dual frameworks of distributive justice and regulatory capture reveals fundamental contract law deficiencies, including vague performance standards, inadequate benefit-to-subsidy ratios below 1%, and missing enforcement mechanisms, rendering agreements aspirational rather than binding. Workforce provisions are entirely absent from an employment-focused program, and enforcement is limited. These failures prevent CBAs from being equity-centered or protective of local residents. Recommendations outline how the state legislature, NJEDA, municipalities, and community coalitions can modify CBA content and enforcement through contract formation requirements, including establishing appropriate parties, incorporating mandatory substantive terms with quantifiable metrics, implementing actual enforcement mechanisms, and enacting statutory reforms to eliminate municipal workarounds. These reforms can transform CBAs from symbolic documents into enforceable instruments that deliver equitable outcomes while ensuring communities receive actual, feasible benefits from publicly subsidized development.

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MemorandumRutgers CLiMEStudent Research, Economic Development, Gentrification, Housing
Falling Behind in Urban New Jersey: A Report on Key Indicators in 12 Cities
Falling Behind in Urban New Jersey: A Report on Key Indicators in 12 Cities

CLiME’s inaugural evaluation of 12 of New Jersey’s most populous cities reveals striking trends that reverse many of the last century’s assumptions about life in the Garden State. Despite dynamic changes in urban-suburban demographics, housing and job growth, one overriding fact prevails: economic inequality has hardened between cities and suburbs and within and across cities. We looked at social and economic trends in the state’s 12 most populous cities – Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Hoboken, Union City, Hackensack, Asbury Park, New Brunswick, Trenton, Camden and Atlantic City – and found:

  • Urban population growth and residential development now outpaces the rest of the state.

  • The 12 cities are home to many working-class and immigrant residents, and more than half households struggle to make ends meet.

  • The 12 cities are home to the state’s poorest children, with poverty rates as high as 48 percent.

  • A lack of affordable housing is a problem statewide, but it’s especially pronounced in the gentrifying cities of the NY metro.

Read more to learn how these factors play out differently in different parts of the state and our recommendations for enhancing the economic prospects of New Jersey residents.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing, Gentrification, Economic Development, Poverty
The Liability of Federal Agents for Civil Rights Violations
The Liability of Federal Agents for Civil Rights Violations

Can people sue federal agents for police brutality? In this memorandum, CLiME explores the very limited bases for finding ICE agents civilly liable for excessive force or deprivation of civil rights. The main issues involve: 

  • restrictive federal legal standards and barriers to bringing a claim 

  • unbridled and undue deference afforded to federal law enforcement agents on the job, and 

  • underdeveloped state laws that have yet to provide legitimate alternatives to weak federal causes of action. 

Courts appear to be generally hostile to government liability and the costs of accountability against federal agents. As a result, unlike police brutality by state and local law enforcement, legal remedies against ICE and other federal law enforcement are largely unavailable. Some scholars have proposed ways to close this legal gap, so far without success.

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MemorandumRutgers CLiMECivil Rights Initiative
Why is the "Rent So Damned High"?
Why is the "Rent So Damned High"?

Why is The “Rent So Damned High”? explores the drivers of high and rising rents and proposes a series of policies to address rental unaffordability in New Jersey and respond to changes at the federal level. Most experts say the chief explanation for high rents is an undersupply of housing and push a “build, build, build” strategy to bring rents down. Our findings challenge the consensus. Through a deep dive of academic and public research, we identified four primary drivers of high and rising rents: inflation, undersupply, widening inequality, and the consolidation and professionalization of landlords and real estate.

Federal policy is embracing building as the foremost solution to the affordability crisis. Trump’s Big Bill permanently expanded the country’s largest affordable housing production subsidy program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Meanwhile, deeper subsidy programs that can reach low-income renters are threatened with large cuts. To make housing affordable, we must also address stagnant incomes and the consolidation of homebuilders and landlords.

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PublicationRutgers CLiMEHousing, Poverty, Inequality
Diverging Dynamics: The 2023 Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix (D.R.I.M.) Update for Newark
Diverging Dynamics: The 2023 Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix (D.R.I.M.) Update for Newark

Diverging Dynamics: The 2023 Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix (D.R.I.M.) Update for Newark explores how the risk of displacement in Newark has changed since 2010. Newark is experiencing the steady erosion of affordability as rents rise faster than incomes. In this latest installment of CLiME’s displacement analysis, diverging patterns of urban change are becoming clearer across wards with uneven but unmistakable signs of gentrification.

The East and Central Wards saw the most dramatic increases in new construction activity, the most rapidly rising rents, and the most pronounced increases in residents who are college-educated and/or affluent renters. The West Ward also shows signs of elevated renter vulnerability, with large increases in medium household incomes alongside rising rent burdens. The North Ward has very different housing market dynamics, with large increases in homeownership and much less residential construction. The South Ward shows the greatest signs of tenant vulnerability but also has the most affordable rental stock, compared to other parts of the city.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing, Gentrification, Inequality, Economic Development, Poverty
Rewriting Racial Equality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump
Rewriting Racial Equality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump

Rewriting Racial Inequality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump documents the second Trump administration’s blueprint for radically transforming how the federal government views and enforces civil rights. The new legal order taking shape upends Reconstruction-era understandings of equal protection and related federal statutes while recasting the modern Civil Rights Movement as a defense against anti-white race discrimination. Our close and comprehensive examination of executive orders, enforcement activity and litigation since January 20, 2025, organizes the Trump administration’s approach into four pillars: (1) Redefining racial discrimination, (2) Dismantling the institutional framework for government support of racial equity and cancelling existing investigations, (3) Enforcing policy priorities through defunding and fining institutions, and (4) Encouraging racial gerrymandering of congressional districts in the guise of political gerrymandering.

Rewriting Racial Inequality offers a rare focus on issues of racial equality as a fundamental interest, anti-Black racism and the Trump administration’s civil rights playbook at the crossroads of antidiscrimination law. This critical evaluation is intended as a resource and will be updated in six months.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEInequality, Civil Rights Initiative, Race
Land Grant Exceptionalism: Reclaiming Access & Equity in Admissions from Equal Protection’s Blind Spot
Land Grant Exceptionalism: Reclaiming Access & Equity in Admissions from Equal Protection’s Blind Spot

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard reshaped the constitutional landscape of higher education while leaving important questions of educational mission unanswered. By undermining diversity as a compelling interest under strict scrutiny judicial review, the Court dismantled the decades-long framework under which universities adopted admissions practices in pursuit of self-defined institutional goals. That model may fit elite private institutions like Harvard or UNC, but it fails to capture the full spectrum of American higher education.

This brief proposes that land-grant universities possess a distinct institutional interest in cultivating a diverse student body. This interest is grounded in their statutory mission, the historical purpose of the Morrill Acts, and the judicial deference traditionally afforded to congressional mandates that create and continue to govern land-grant institutions.

SFFA’s reasoning may be too rigid to accommodate the genuine diversity of institutional missions in American higher education. Recognizing this doctrinal blind spot is only the beginning of a broader scholarly conversation.

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ReferenceRutgers CLiMEStudent Research, Civil Rights Initiative, Race
Legal Strategies to Lower Building Emissions in Metropolitan New Jersey
Legal Strategies to Lower Building Emissions in Metropolitan New Jersey

Metropolitan areas in New Jersey need to dramatically lower their building emissions to combat climate change and protect local health. However, metropolitan New Jersey faces several major challenges. First, federal and state law preempt New Jersey municipalities from adopting some stricter laws that could lower building emissions. Second, competition between municipalities creates a collective action problem that disincentivizes legal reform. Third, building emission reduction strategies can create unintended harm such as worsened indoor air quality and gentrification. To avoid these challenges, individual New Jersey municipalities can utilize metropolitan equity strategies to cooperate efficiently. However, the most impactful way New Jersey can decarbonize buildings may be for the state legislature to amend its building emissions benchmarking law to enable the state government to decarbonize buildings more effectively.

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MemorandumRutgers CLiMEStudent Research, Economic Development
Corporate Investors in Single Family Homes in Philadelphia
Corporate Investors in Single Family Homes in Philadelphia

This report explores investor activity in Philadelphia, where corporate buyers are most active in parts of the city which are predominantly home to Black and Hispanic residents in West, North and Northeast Philadelphia. For this report, CLiME teamed up with the Reinvestment Fund and Housing Initiative at Penn, who are based in Philadelphia.

We identify the largest investors who are buying up the most single family homes, and who operate primarily as large-scale corporate landlords. The companies doing the purchasing changed during the pandemic, shifting from more local investors to those entering the market already active in other places.

We analyzed purchases of residential buildings before and during the pandemic, looking at sheriff sales, rental licensing, renovation permits, evictions, and code violations to determine the impact of these pur­chases on Philadelphia housing markets. We found that:

  • Larger corporate landlords were much more likely to evict tenants than smaller investors.

  • Larger in­vestors more often took out permits to alter or improve their properties than smaller inves­tors.

  • Investors large and small were much more likely to amass code violations than individual homebuyers

  • The largest corporate investors obtained rental licenses on 67% of the properties they acquired, compared to just 43% among smaller investors

  • The character of the highest-volume investors changed with the pandemic. From 2017 through 2019, eight of the top ten largest investors by volume were locally based. From 2020 through 2022, the four highest volume investors were either new to Philadelphia or had scaled up dramatically from the earlier period.

Philadelphia is a city with a proud legacy of affordable homeownership opportunities and an expanding set of tenant protec­tions. In recent years, concerns about the impact of corporate investors purchasing single fam­ily homes in the city have grown, even as there is an evident need for capital investment in its aging housing stock. This report aims to inform policy interventions to promote stable neigh­borhoods, affordability, and high-quality housing options for all Philadelphians.

A few years ago, CLiME published Who Owns Newark? which showed that corporations were buying half of all 1-4 unit homes in the city. We continue to investigate and explore these issues throughout the region.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing, Race, Inequality
The Great Household Deficit: Rising Costs of Homeownership in New Jersey
The Great Household Deficit: Rising Costs of Homeownership in New Jersey

New Jersey homeowners are sinking in monthly bills. In this brief, we explore the sky-high and rapidly rising costs of being a homeowner in New Jersey. This includes both mortgage and non-mortgage housing costs. New Jersey has the property taxes, and among the most expensive housing prices in the country. In addition, New Jersey homeowners pay 20 percent more in utility costs than the national average, and are now facing soaring electricity bills related to supply challenges and the new demands of AI data centers. New Jersey’s homeowners’ insurance premiums are also going up much faster than other states, related to private companies’ responses to more extreme weather and construction and labor costs. As these various costs add up, more homeowners – especially those with lower incomes – are sinking into debt and many are deferring home repairs and maintenance.

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PublicationRutgers CLiMEHousing, Student Research, Poverty
Reevaluating New Jersey’s Rent Control Exemption for New Construction
Reevaluating New Jersey’s Rent Control Exemption for New Construction

In New Jersey, new construction is exempt from price controls for 30 years, even in municipalities with rent control ordinances. Given the other exemptions available to developers, it is questionable whether this exemption is necessary to spur new construction. This memo examines that question by laying out the history of rent control in New Jersey as well as the history of the new construction exemption, looking at case law involving the exemption as well as arguments for the exemption and critique of those arguments, and proposes alternatives to the exemption as either an abolishment or revision of the exemption. The history shows how the moderate nature of rent control in New Jersey suggests that its effect on new construction is overblown, the legislative intent was more about removing barriers to new construction without considering any balance with the prevention of rent gouging, rent control is relevant towards new construction, and significant revision, if not abolishment, of the exemption would have a beneficial effect for existing affordable housing.

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MemorandumRutgers CLiMEHousing, Gentrification, Student Research, Economic Development
The 'Other' Cities: Migration and Gentrification in Jersey City, Newark and Paterson, New Jersey
The 'Other' Cities: Migration and Gentrification in Jersey City, Newark and Paterson, New Jersey

The Other Cities: Migration and Gentrification in Jersey City, Newark and Paterson describes housing trends and neighborhood transitions in three mid-sized North Jersey cities that elude conventional descriptions of gentrification. All three have experienced population growth, increased immigration, loss of Black residents and a persistent lack of housing affordability. We describe their particular dynamics three ways: "Bedroom City", "Jobless Gentrification" and "Migrant Metro." Jersey City is the “Bedroom City” where population growth and higher prices are associated with its proximity to jobs across the Hudson River in New York City. Newark is in the midst of “Jobless Gentrification” where investment in expensive market-rate new housing and investor-led renovations raise prices without the corresponding job growth seen in traditional gentrification. Paterson is the “Migrant Metro”, a species of municipalities that have become mosaics of working-class immigration whose density alone—not jobs or new housing—has intensified a lack of affordability. These characteristics distinguish them from traditionally gentrifying cities, but their traits are important bellwethers of urban life across the U.S.

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ReportRutgers CLiMERace, Housing, Gentrification
DEI and Public Universities: Guideposts for a New Era
DEI and Public Universities: Guideposts for a New Era

This report analyzes the compliance challenges public universities face since the issuance of several executive orders that threaten investigation and defunding for a broad range of activities associated with “DEI” and other undefined terms. In Part I, we examine the language of the federal directives in light of universities’ historic obligations and current circumstances. Many institutions have so far chosen some version of either pre-emptive obedience, wait-and-see inaction or offensive defiance. We suggest that institutions will face some combination of four possible courses of action: continue to obey civil rights law, anticipate new standards, manage risks and defend current practices.

Schools’ circumstances are not uniform. Yet all must conform to current legal standards, which are often inconsistent with the new federal policy directives. To clarify, this report sets out the existing state of the law since Students for Fair Admissions, including the scope and limitations of that Supreme Court decision, the continued allowance of race-neutral means to achieve racially diverse learning environments and the applicable tests used by the Court under Title VI. Since many organizations and institutions have already challenged the federal administration in court, we conclude with an analysis of the legal defenses—mostly on First Amendment grounds—that have so far succeeded in securing injunctions against certain banned practices. Part II of this report sets out best practices universities across the United States have used to stay in compliance with civil rights law yet still maintain environments that are diverse, inclusive and consistent with equitable principles.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEInequality, Civil Rights Initiative, Race
Urban Renewal’s Grandchildren: Remedying the Persistent Effects of Post-War Race Planning

Urban renewal, a mid-century federal-local redevelopment program that transformed American cities and displaced millions of Black migrants from the South, was a race-conscious government policy responsible for the enduring suppression of Black wealth. Its racial history and character are untold in legal scholarship. This Article argues that the 25-year regime enacted in the Housing Act of 1949 was a response to the Great Migration of Black workers and families to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It was codified to interact with other segregation policies, such as highway construction, restrictive covenants, redlining, and public housing through the colorblind veneer of rational planning principles. Race planning created durable conditions of “racial bargaining,” the discounted value of wealth-producing transactions in segregated Black communities. Since its mid-century enactment, urban renewal federalized a race-conscious segregation policy that eluded civil rights remedies and framed contemporary urban development programs. This Article shows how this framework sustained the racial wealth gap at the core of this country’s continuing struggle with structural inequality.

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ArticleRutgers CLiMEInequality, Civil Rights Initiative
Memorandum: Campaign Against Federal Affirmative Action Programs
Memorandum: Campaign Against Federal Affirmative Action Programs

New Jersey's Assembly Bill A4 represents a landmark effort to comply with the Mount Laurel Doctrine and the state's growing affordable housing crisis by reforming how municipalities meet their fair share housing obligations. At the heart of this legislation is a standardized formula that requires each municipality to calculate its present and prospective affordable housing needs, along with other factors like population growth, land, and income capacity. By decentralizing housing planning, A4 shifts responsibility to local governments from the state and gives them a ten-year window to meet their fair share housing obligations.

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MemorandumRutgers CLiMEInequality, Civil Rights Initiative
Legislative Briefing: Affordable Housing Reform: New Jersey A4
Legislative Briefing: Affordable Housing Reform: New Jersey A4

New Jersey's Assembly Bill A4 represents a landmark effort to comply with the Mount Laurel Doctrine and the state's growing affordable housing crisis by reforming how municipalities meet their fair share housing obligations. At the heart of this legislation is a standardized formula that requires each municipality to calculate its present and prospective affordable housing needs, along with other factors like population growth, land, and income capacity. By decentralizing housing planning, A4 shifts responsibility to local governments from the state and gives them a ten-year window to meet their fair share housing obligations.

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Legislative BriefRutgers CLiMEHousing