Metzger’s research focuses on local, state and federal housing policies, examining how these policies often reproduce patterns of segregation. She strives to build and share research with a host of community partners, in order to move housing policy toward the goals of racial equity and economic justice.
Metzger’s major projects have included a community-based participatory research project on public housing preservation in Chicago, a national analysis of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, and a collaboration with the St. Louis Housing Authority, in which she and her team interviewed Section 8 renters about their housing preferences. She is an active member of the St. Louis Public Schools Parent Action Council and a board member at the World Community Center and DeSales Community Development.
Brown School students in the “Community Development Practice” class engaged with community partners and contributed to projects in pedestrian safety, neighborhood planning and public safety to improve neighborhoods in south St. Louis.
Molly Metzger, senior lecturer at the Brown School, has been named one of this year’s Hedy Epstein Memorial Open Door Awards honorees by the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council.
Molly Metzger, senior lecturer at the Brown School, and students in her policy course have partnered with Webster Groves city council members and St. Louis’ Green City Coalition on a series of projects connected to the planning of community land trusts.
Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing and Civil Rights Acts, a new book, “Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society,” brings together influential scholars, practitioners and policy analysts to reflect on how to use public policy to reduce segregation.
We have gotten skilled in this region at dropping the term “racial equity” when politically expedient. It is time to back that language up with some action on tax incentives. The growing number of St. Louisans who care about racial equity can tell the difference between empty rhetoric and tangible results.
Tax increment financing (TIF) and other development incentives have become American cities’ primary means of encouraging local economic development. A new study by the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis finds that TIF incentives could promote racial equity by using greater transparency and more equitable targeting of the locations where tax incentives are used.
Evidence for the negative effects of segregation and concentrated poverty in America’s cities now exists in abundance; poor and underrepresented communities in segregated urban housing markets suffer diminished outcomes in education, economic mobility, political participation, and physical and psychological health. Though many of the aggravating factors underlying this inequity have persisted or even grown worse […]
