Capital as a Civil Right

What Growing Up in Public Housing Taught Me About Economic Rights

James Carras,

June 29, 2026

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James Carras, Principal, Carras Community Investment, Inc.; Adjunct Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School

I grew up in the Mission Hill Extension housing projects in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was the early 1960s. The streets were alive with Greek immigrant families, Black Bostonians who had migrated north during the Great Migration, and working-class Irish households who hadn’t yet made it to the suburbs. We were neighbors across race and ethnicity in ways that would have seemed remarkable from the outside. But what we shared most fundamentally was something rarely named as a rights condition: we were all, in one way or another, cut off from capital.

Our families couldn’t get mortgages. Local banks didn’t lend in our neighborhoods. Small business owners couldn’t access credit to expand or even to survive a slow season. Federal policy had systematically designated neighborhoods like ours as too risky to invest in — a practice we now call redlining. The maps the Home Owners Loan Corporation drew in red ink during the 1930s became a blueprint for disinvestment that persisted for decades. The rights our families held on paper, equal protection, freedom of contract, the formal apparatus of American citizenship, meant something quite different when you couldn’t borrow money to buy a home, start a business, or weather an unexpected loss.

This is the central contradiction at the heart of American economic life: formal legal equality coexists with profound material inequality, and the gap between them is not accidental. It is structured, reproduced, and in many cases protected by law and policy.

America has never seriously embraced economic rights as rights. Unlike much of the democratic world, the United States declined to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed “Economic Bill of Rights” in 1944, which would have recognized rights to employment, housing, medical care, and education, died with him and has never been seriously revived. What we built instead was a patchwork: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Fair Housing Act, the Community Reinvestment Act. Each was significant. Each remains incomplete.

But there is another American tradition, and it is the one I have spent nearly fifty years inside. The civil rights movement understood from the beginning that political rights without economic access are a hollow promise — that the right to sit at the lunch counter means little if you cannot get a loan to own one. Out of that insight, and out of decades of organizing by ordinary people in neighborhoods like mine, came one of the most consequential and least celebrated laws of the twentieth century: the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which made explicit that banks have an obligation to lend in the communities from which they take deposits. My own career began with the anti-redlining research in Boston that helped inform how that law was enforced. We documented, street by street, what everyone in the projects already knew: the money flowed out, and almost none came back.

What that organizing built was not merely a regulation but an infrastructure. Community development financial institutions, community development corporations, community loan funds — these are the working machinery that translates the formal promise of equality into the material capacity to act on it. That same year, 1977, I helped found the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation, one of countless community institutions that emerged to do what the market and the state would not: move capital into places that had been written off. I have come to think of these institutions as rights infrastructure, the plumbing of economic citizenship. A right you cannot exercise is not yet a right. The institution that lets you exercise it is what makes it real.

I have learned to see capital access less as an arithmetic problem than as a hydraulic one. The conventional debate asks whether there is enough money. That is the wrong question. There is enormous capital in this country. The real question is whether channels exist to carry it into communities that have been historically excluded, whether the pipes are built, connected, and open. Where the channels exist, capital flows and neighborhoods stabilize. Where they don’t, no amount of aggregate wealth reaches the family trying to buy a first home or the entrepreneur trying to make payroll.

The challenge today is that the gap I grew up inside has not closed. The racial wealth gap remains roughly where it was a generation ago. Small businesses owned by people of color are denied credit at markedly higher rates than comparable white-owned firms. The mechanisms have grown more sophisticated, algorithmic underwriting, automated scoring, the quiet retreat of bank branches from low-income neighborhoods, but the pattern is the one I recognized as a boy. Capital still finds the places that already have it.

So, what would a rights-centered economic system require? Not merely a prohibition on discrimination, which we already have and which has proven necessary but insufficient. It would require something affirmative: a commitment to building and sustaining the infrastructure that delivers capital where markets alone will not. It would mean treating access to capital as something closer to a public good like clean water or a functioning road rather than a private privilege rationed by zip code and inheritance. It would mean a federal posture that capitalizes community lenders at the scale of the problem, not the scale of our discomfort. We do not consider the right to vote fulfilled simply because no law forbids it; we build polling places, train officials, and fund the machinery of participation. Economic rights demand the same seriousness.

America at 250 is, among other things, an unfinished argument about what citizenship is worth. The children I grew up with in the Mission Hill Extension project were every bit as American as the families on the other side of the red line. What they lacked was not rights on paper but the means to make those rights operate. Closing that distance, between the promise and the practice, is the work I have given my life to, and it is, I believe, central to the next chapter of the American project. A democracy that takes equality seriously cannot leave its citizens standing at the door of an economy they are formally free to enter but financially unable to join.