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It is difficult to ignore the fact that, even as the United States becomes much more racially and ethnically diverse, our neighborhoods remain largely segregated. The 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1977 Community Reinvestment Act promised to end discrimination, yet for millions of Americans housing options remain far removed from the American Dream. Why do most neighborhoods in American cities continue to be racially divided?

The problem, suggests Mara Sidney, lies with the policies themselves. She contends that to understand why discrimination persists, we need to understand the political challenges faced by advocacy groups who implement them. In Unfair Housing she offers a new explanation for the persistent color lines in our cities by showing how weak national policy has silenced and splintered grassroots activists.

Sidney explains how political compromise among national lawmakers with divergent interests resulted in housing legislation that influenced how community activists defined discrimination, what actions they took, and which political relationships they cultivated. As a result, local governments became less likely to include housing discrimination on their agendas, existing laws went unenforced, and racial segregation continued.

A former undercover investigator for a fair housing advocacy group, Sidney takes readers into the neighborhoods of Minneapolis and Denver to show how federal housing policy actually works. She examines how these laws played out in these cities and reveals how they eroded activists' capability to force more sweeping reform in housing policy.

Sidney also shows how activist groups can cultivate community resources to overcome these difficulties, looking across levels of government to analyze how national policies interact with local politics. In the first book to apply policy design theories of Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram to an empirical case, Sidney illuminates overlooked impacts of fair housing and community reinvestment policies and extends their theories to the study of local politics and nonprofit organizations.

Sidney argues forcefully that understanding the link between national policy and local groups sheds light on our failure to reduce discrimination and segregation. As battles over fair housing continue, her book helps us understand the shape of the battlefield and the prospects for victory.

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Sidney presents a scholarly study of two national attempts to attack racial and class bias in American residential housing: the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in selling and renting homes, and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which sought to reduce "redlining" of neighborhoods through discriminatory lending. She builds on an approach initiated by Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram in their Policy Design for Democracy (1997), which argued that statutes and their implementation can be shaped to affect weak groups adversely. The present study investigates how the consequences of policy depend in large part on local actors, in particular the strength of advocacy groups seeking to advance the interests of the urban poor. Sidney contrasts the effects of these two laws in Minneapolis and Denver. Relying on informant interviews, she concludes that, depending on contextual factors, the design for both policies weakened alliances among advocacy groups, albeit in different ways. Hence, national policy design can help cripple social mobilization by underprivileged groups. Sidney closes with concrete "lessons for advocacy." While taking an unambiguous normative stance, she develops her thesis on a foundation of thoughtful theory and careful research. In a field where quick generalizations and easy typologies proliferate, Sidney presents solid new ideas. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. T. Goodsell emeritus, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University