Rutgers CLiME

08/04/2026

Coming soon! Reckoning the Racial Reckoning: From Backlash to Accountability After George Floyd is an upcoming book by legal scholar and Director of CLiME David Dante Troutt. It is scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press on August 6, 2026. The book serves as a post-mortem on the social and political shift that occurred after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Troutt argues that the short-lived period of widespread systemic racism awareness quickly dissipated without producing structural accountability, ultimately yielding to a punishing conservative backlash.
Get your copy below!

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/law/us-law/reckoning-racial-reckoning-backlash-accountability-after-george-floyd?format=HB

05/31/2024

Earlier this year, CLiME released a report that was the result of a collaboration to assess property owned by the City of Newark. "What we found was a gold mine of opportunity to address critical policymaking needs with the city’s undesignated property," said Director David Troutt.

Read more here:

Study Finds ‘Gold Mine’ of City-Owned Land in Newark Could Benefit Public.

03/28/2023

“The initiative, ‘Equitable Investments in Newark Communities’ is a response to reports by the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) and the NJ Institute for Social Justice that document the enormous wealth gap between white and black/brown families in New Jersey. The reports also show that homeownership, the major path for families to build wealth, is being eroded in Newark by the widespread purchase of residential properties by corporate buyers.”

Official Page of Newark, NJ News: NEWARK SEEKS EXPERIENCED CONTRACTORS, DEVELOPERS, NON-PROFITS FOR MAJOR NEW EQUITABLE GROWTH HOUSING INITIATIVE

09/30/2022

Lakeland Bank in New Jersey admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to set up a $12 million homeownership fund and open two new branches in minority neighborhoods.

09/29/2022

CLiME Director, Professor David Troutt, comments in NYT article about Lakeland Bank's settlement based on allegations of redlining by Justice Department. “Accountability has been almost entirely missing in discussions of redlining, past and present.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/nyregion/redlining-is-racist-12-million-settlement-ends-lending-inquiry.html?smid=url-share

The report, "Who Owns Newark?" that is mentioned in the article is available here: https://www.clime.rutgers.edu/publications-filtered/who-owns-newark

Lakeland Bank in New Jersey admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to set up a $12 million homeownership fund and open two new branches in minority neighborhoods.

09/12/2022

The Rutgers Law School Center for Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) is hiring Senior Research Fellows! Please check out the available positions below:

Senior Research Fellow - Public Health & Equity
https://jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/182454
Senior Research Fellow - Equitable Finance & Econ Analysis
https://jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/182455
Senior Research Fellow - Housing Policy, Law & Community Dev't
https://jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/182453

06/15/2022

Read about the publications CLiME released this year, upcoming work, and recent news highlights:
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/CLiME-s-Year-in-Publications.html?soid=1109696887844&aid=5pa1rSrQUvA

05/13/2022

“Housing stability is really the essence of family stability and workplace stability,” Troutt said. “It affects child welfare, peoples’ access to schools, healthcare, and the experience of their lives without so much stress that they can’t figure out what their next move is going to be.”

Read more about Newark's plan to commit $20 million to affordable housing and CLiME's recent research on housing trends in the city:

NEWARK, NJ — Newark officials are investing $20 million into multiple development projects through an initiative to make affordable housing more accessible to residents earning less than the area...

05/02/2022

As investor buyers target predominantly Black residential neighborhoods across many American cities, CLiME releases its investigative report on the unprecedented impact this trend is having on 1-4 unit homes in Newark, New Jersey. In Who Owns Newark? Transferring Wealth from Newark Homeowners to Corporate Buyers, David Troutt and Katie Nelson tell the detailed story of large-scale rent seeking by investors, taking advantage of the city’s foreclosure crisis, high percentage of renters and declining homeownership rate. Among the first neighborhood-level analyses of an American city for sale to outside investors, Who Owns Newark? highlights the risks this trend poses for renters, low-income residents, first-time homeowners and a city seeking neighborhood stability and offers recommendations for how local governments can regulate in the public interest.

Read Who Owns Newark? here:

This report shows that the national trend in investor buying of 1-4 unit homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods is most acute in Newark, New Jersey where almost half of all real estate sales were made by institutional buyers. The trend grew out of the foreclosure crisis that wiped out significan

04/20/2022

How can states incentivize economic growth where it’s most needed? What would equitable tax incentive policy look like? CLiME’s collaboration with SPAA scholars details the state of New Jersey’s business tax incentives through the lens of equity. Read Investing in the Equitable State here:

This report and accompanying matrix are a critical evaluation of New Jersey’s tax incentives programs through the policy lens of equitable growth. Persistent inequality between New Jersey’s communities and households hurts all of New Jersey. We assumed that the expenditure of taxpayer dollars fo...