book, Rothstein argues that, if it can be shown that housing segregation in America is the result of de jure factors rather than simply de facto, then all Americans have a constitutional obligation to remedy the problem. The book is devoted to arguing that intractable segregation in America is de jure in nature, being the result of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels. Focusing on post-Reconstruction racial segregation in the United States, the book provides a history of subsidized housing, the phenomenons of white flight and blockbusting, and the concept of racial covenants, which all factor into the history of housing segregation in America. In the book's discussions of the history of subsidized housing, it exposes policies in FDR's New Deal that oversaw construction of public housing, built with federal tax dollars, in which African Americans were systematically excluded. Among discussions of other government programs to the same end, the book finds that African Americans were excluded from most FHA insured loans, due to the high risk of providing mortgages on homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and shows a pattern of US courts upholding private exclusionary agreements, known as covenants, which forbade the sale of homes to minority groups. Content The book is composed of twelve chapters and includes an epilogue as well as an appendix of frequently asked questions. The first chapter of the book, "If San Francisco, then Everywhere?", argues that the racially disparate policies instituted by the otherwise liberal governments of cities such as San Francisco is evidence of a widespread problem. Chapter two discusses the history of subsidized housing in the United States. The third chapter covers policies of "racial zoning", where local zoning ordinances lead to the segregation of white and black neighborhoods. Chapter four discusses a program by the US government, the Own-Your-Own-Home campaign, that systematically made it easier for white people to buy and pay off new homes in suburbs in the early 1900s. The fifth chapter discusses police and court enforcement of private agreements forbidding the sale of homes in white neighborhoods to blacks and other minorities. Many of these agreements were in the form of covenants in a house's deed which explicitly blocked sales of the homes to anyone not of the "Caucasian race". Chapter six discusses white flight and blockbusting tactics used by real estate agents to accelerate the migration in order to make a profit.