A good comparison is employment discrimination: while it is very difficult to rule that any individual instance of a nonwhite person being rejected from a job counts as racial discrimination, a pattern of such instances does clearly constitute discrimination. As Rothstein later emphasizes, while there is nothing illegal about destroying a park to build a housing project, consistently destroying public land to develop low-quality housing in black neighborhoods, while also making an effort to construct high-quality housing with minimal adverse impacts in white neighborhoods, constitutes an unconstitutional pattern of discrimination. While conducted by the government, this was a relatively informal process, in the sense that it relied on individual government agents’ discretion and willingness to stretch the law. These cases are even more egregious examples of how government used its power to construct public housing and segregate neighborhoods at the same time.
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