Eric Gay/AP/File

Students walk past the University of Texas' iconic tower, in Austin. In 2016, the Supreme Court found in favor of the university's affirmative-action admissions policy. Today, many campuses want diversity, but critics are pushing for more race-neutral decisions.

The waters of the affirmative action debate – left relatively undisturbed since a Supreme Court decision upheld its constitutionality last year – were again agitated this week. 

The trigger: a leaked internal document from the Department of Justice that signaled to some that the Trump administration is devoting resources to the anti-affirmative action cause. Others say that’s an overblown reaction to an innocuous move to investigate one claim by Asian-Americans.

Today, the majority of top-tier universities maintain a strong commitment to the value of diversity and the narrow use of race in admissions to achieve that. But the steady drumbeat of criticism from those who believe society should be colorblind may have contributed to what new research has found: The percentage of competitive institutions publicly stating that they factor race into admissions has dramatically declined.

Ironically, the broad diversity argument in higher education – that it benefits everyone, including white students – has perhaps led to a decline in a focus on racial inequities, says Harvard education professor Natasha Warikoo, and “maybe it’s time to rethink this very shallow way we talk about affirmative action.”

After The New York Times reported this week on an internal document from the Department of Justice that it interpreted as indicating “a new project” to investigate race-based discrimination in admissions, the department responded by characterizing press reports as “inaccurate.” Department of Justice spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told the Monitor in an email statement that “the posting sought volunteers to investigate one administrative complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations in May 2015 that the prior Administration left unresolved.” The Wall Street Journal reports that the complaint is against Harvard University.

“The Department of Justice is committed to protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination,” Ms. Isgur Flores added.

Nevertheless, many civil rights advocates remain concerned that the administration will attempt to undermine the use of affirmative action and roll back progress for African-Americans and Latinos in a variety of areas ranging from education to voting rights.

“I am pretty confident that the DOJ is using the potential of Asian-American discrimination as a means to attack affirmative action,” says Ms. Warikoo, author of “The Diversity Bargain.”

She doesn’t discount the legitimacy of questions surrounding whether Asian Americans are held to higher standards than white students in some elite admissions offices. But she says it’s “a different issue from whether universities should practice affirmative action for black and Latino applicants,” in part because of the history of racial injustice toward those groups and the disparate educational and economic outcomes.

For those eager to see race and ethnicity erased in admissions decisions, however, the fact that these mattered so much in American history is precisely the reason to refuse to let them matter now.

“We should be a colorblind nation,” says Edward Blum, who leads a nonprofit that brought a case against the University of Texas at Austin all the way to the Supreme Court. The high court ruled 4-3 in favor of the university in 2016.

“Having your race as an element in your admission to a college is something that continues to polarize not only our campuses, but our nation as a whole. The sooner we get race out of the equation … the sooner we can move past this burden that we all carry around,” says Mr. Blum, who also leads Students for Fair Admissions in Arlington, Va., which is suing Harvard for allegedly discriminating against Asian-American applicants.

Americans support both points of view 

Complicating the debate is the fact that both sides can point to polls that show a majority of the American people supporting their point of view.

A recent nationally representative survey of full-time college freshmen by UCLA showed them split right down the middle, with 50.6 percent agreeing that affirmative action in admissions should be abolished. 

Among 18- to 29-year olds, a 2013 survey included in a report by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute found that 62 percent said they hadn’t been personally affected by affirmative action in education or the workplace. Of those who had been, 12 percent said it helped them, while 24 percent said it had been to their disadvantage.

"It's a good idea, but … I have black and Hispanic friends who think others think they are only here because of race. It makes them really self-conscious," says Carrie, an Asian-American undergraduate student at Harvard University who didn’t want to give her last name. She also says the admissions process should consider the variety of national origins of Asian-American students. “The highest dropout rates are students from Southeast Asia, and they are underrepresented,” she says.

Universities that have infused into their missions a commitment to diversity can point to reams of research about the educational value of that diversity among the student body. A series of Supreme Court decisions since the 1970s has contributed to that rationale, even as it has required them to refine and narrow the way in which race factors into complex admissions processes.

This desire for diversity has come to dominate the conversation. But it’s not the only reason people cite when supporting affirmative action. Righting historical wrongs, creating more opportunity and equity, and forging a more integrated society are some others.

Rhea Leftbridge, an African-American graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and now an intern at a neuroscience lab at Harvard, frames it in equity terms. “Things have been messed up in America for so long. If the goal is equality, blacks and Latinos have been below for so long, we need to overshoot now to just get to a fair place."

Chloe Pan, a senior who serves as an external vice president for the undergraduate student association at University of California, Los Angeles, notes, "It would be great to have a system of meritocracy, but because we have such an inequitable K-12 system, we can’t really think about [a] merit-based [higher-ed system] when so many students don’t have access at the elementary and high school levels." 

Questions about how admissions work

The debate – and the fact that universities rarely have to reveal the details of how they choose among their applicants – contributes to misunderstandings of how affirmative action policies work.

“Some seem to think applicants are just admitted based on test scores and GPAs. That’s patently false” at competitive institutions, says Michele Moses, a professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For one, different campuses vary in their history and their approach to crafting an entering class. “These admissions practices are based on philosophies of access, opportunity, and holistic reviews of applicants,” Professor Moses says.

Harvard sent a statement to the Monitor reiterating its commitment to diversity and noting that its "admissions process considers each applicant as a whole person, and we review many factors, consistent with the legal standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court.” For the first time, Harvard reported Wednesday, the university admitted a majority of non-white students into its incoming freshman class.

For UCLA graduate student Margie Feng, originally from Shenzen, China, people’s perceptions of race-based policies matter. “Too much affirmative action is another kind of discrimination – but not against white students,” she says. “It's like saying I got in because I’m Asian. I got in because I’m qualified.”

More aggressive enforcement by the Department of Justice would be welcome by those who believe colleges and universities have not been true to what the Supreme Court has required.

Blum and others claiming discrimination against Asian-Americans use statistical analyses of admissions trends in which the proportion of those students has remained fairly constant despite a surge in their representation in applicant pools. They say de facto quotas are being applied that limit the number of Asian-Americans accepted. Lawsuits can result in more detailed scrutiny of admissions procedures.

Under the Obama administration, several such complaints involving whites and Asian-American students, were investigated by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and were closed without finding the universities at fault.

Some supporters of affirmative action worry that the continual push against it has created a chilling effect, and that this week’s news about Department of Justice plans could intimidate universities. Already, the less competitive but still selective schools – many of them with fewer resources at their disposal to potentially defend against investigations and lawsuits – may be backing away from using race in admissions in large numbers.

From 1994 to 2014, the percentage of selective colleges and universities that publicly state they use race in admissions has declined from more than 60 percent to just 35 percent, researchers Daniel Hirschman of Brown and Ellen Berrey of the University of Toronto found in a paper published in June. The decline has been strongest among lowest tier of competitive schools.

More research is needed to unpack what that means. The decline in public statements by universities about their use of race doesn’t necessarily mean “they’ve given up the fight” for equitable access and a diverse student body, says Art Coleman of Education Counsel in Washington, and a deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights from 1997 to 2000.

One theory is that more institutions are proving what the courts have been noting – that in some cases, race-neutral policies could be sufficient to achieve their goals. Some are focusing more of their diversity efforts on attracting low-income students, and many are recruiting more students internationally, for instance.

But with African-American and Latino students still heavily underrepresented in historically white-dominated competitive institutions, “we need to continue to think about race as a key factor in admissions,” says Wil Del Pilar, vice president of higher education policy and practice at Education Trust, an advocacy group working to close opportunity and achievement gaps. "We should be using state and federal dollars to look at disparities in k-12 funding."

Staff writers Jessica Mendoza and Story Hinckley contributed to this report from Los Angeles and Cambridge, Mass. 

Tough decisions are coming thicker and faster than the Gulf of Mexico in southern Louisiana these days – and the water is coming up faster than anyone in the region can remember. Stand on the main road in Jean Lafitte, for example, and you can smell the Gulf's salt in the air.

Faced with a multipronged assault of environmental changes combining to wash away the state’s coastline at an unprecedented rate, state officials and local communities are absorbed in nothing less than an existential struggle against an increasingly hostile and proximate ocean.

“The very basic recognition that the coast is in deep trouble and we really need to take action, that’s very widely recognized” in the state, says Torbjörn Törnqvist, chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Indeed, the science has become hard for Louisiana officials to ignore. The state is losing about a football field of land every hour due to a combination of subsidence, or gradual sinking of land; sea level rise; and a century of human development including levee building and oil and gas exploration that has disrupted the Mississippi Delta’s natural marshland-building processes. The land loss is leaving coastal communities increasingly exposed to storms and flooding events, which are predicted to become even stronger in the future due to climate change.

Louisiana is not the only state facing these issues – Alaska and Virginia, to name two, have their own challenges – but in the absence of broad federal support the Bayou State is arguably making the most concerted effort to deal with them.

The state is 10 years into an ambitious 50-year, $50 billion (and rising) master plan to protect and restore its coastline. The plan, which is reviewed every five years, analyzes the latest scientific research to predict how the coastline may change over the next five decades, then recommends various projects across the state to help protect and mitigate the effects of the changes.

In the most recent iteration of the plan, the best-case estimate for sea level rise almost matches the worst-case estimate for sea level rise in the 2012 plan. It also describes as many as 200 projects in development – including levee construction, barrier island restoration, and diversion of freshwater sediment to gradually rebuild eroding marshland.

But if anything, all the activity has only created more short-term problems and unlocked tougher debates, such as how communities should respond, where money can be scraped from, and where the money should go.

“There’s going to be these local debates among people: what areas get protected; what areas get inundated with fresh water; what areas get protected from future development,” says Robert Verchick, an environmental law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. “All those things are going to affect individual people, individual families, and individual businesses.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Property and homes are for sale along the Louisiana coastline where residents elevate buildings to protect from flooding, May 23, 2017 in Cocodrie, Louisiana. The Louisiana coastline has lost more than 1500 square miles in the past 50 years.

'A strange blessing in disguise'

In the tight-knit bayou communities of southern Louisiana, all of these debates are inherently personal for local residents. Just ask Reggie Dupre.

Reclining in a leather chair in his office one hot morning in late May, Mr. Dupre – raised in the unincorporated town of Pointe-aux-Chenes – points to a picture of the 2008 Louisiana state Senate, the last time he was a member of the chamber. By that point he was already almost two decades into a political career heavily devoted to coastal issues. Some of his former colleagues, like Steve Scalise and Bill Cassidy, would later rise to national prominence. But Dupre chose to return home to lead the Terrebonne Levee & Conservation District.

He admits that his law degree doesn’t make him much of an expert on civil engineering, but “I was trying to save my population from extinction, that was my ultimate qualification.”

This morning, he is preparing to give a group of community members a bus tour of his pride and joy. That would be the Morganza to the Gulf project, almost 100 miles of levees, floodgates, and other coastal defenses protecting 1,700 square miles of land southwest of New Orleans that he has been working to fund since he was a Terrebonne Parish councilor in the early 1990s.

“My number one priority in public service has been the sustainability and survivability of coastal Louisiana,” he says.

On the bus, he dabs sweat from his forehead, pointing to a levee here, a floodgate there, some dead cypress trees killed by saltwater intrusion. He explains with pride how the entire 35-mile alignment was built without a cent of federal appropriations. (Half of the system was paid for by state master plan funds.)

While Congress authorized the levee system in 1992, and has spent tens of millions of dollars on feasibility studies, it was hesitant to permit and fund construction. After hurricanes Gustav and Ike combined to flood more than 15,000 homes in two weeks, the parish decided it would fund construction itself in partnership with the state.

“It’s sort of a strange blessing in disguise that the federal government never gave us any money,” Dupre says. “It gave us the courage and the ability to start to tax ourselves and start building this on our own. ... We realized the cavalry wasn’t coming.” 

But driving back to his office after the tour, Dupre admits that his decades-long efforts to build the system will only bring temporary relief.

“My ancestors arrived in South Louisiana in the 1780s, eight generations ago. We don’t have eight generations in the future,” he says. “What I’m trying to do here is buy another 75, 80 years. What’s going to happen in 150 years? I think this is probably all underwater.”

SOURCE:

Couvillion, et al., US Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Map 3164

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Unintended consequences

Before the last big flood in Jean Lafitte, Jerry Victoriano thought he’d done everything right. As a lifelong resident of the small town, an hour south of New Orleans, he’d learned to put all the family's valuables high up in the house before they left. His family had become so used to it they joked that evacuations were “e-vacations.” 

When they got back the last time, however, his wife opened a bottom drawer and found a scrapbook – pictures of all their children were soaked and ruined.

“She sat down on the bed, took the pictures out, and cried like a baby,” recalls Mr. Victoriano. “She said, ‘Never again, never again.’ ”

Of course, he notes, his wife had said that after the big flood before that one. “We’ve already had two ‘last times,’ ” he says. But next flood, he insists, they won’t be moving back.

Tim Kerner, the town’s mayor since 1991, is close to achieving the modest goal of building a series of six-foot-high tidal levees around the town (thanks to state master plan funding). The development may help preserve the town’s population, at least in the short-term, by keeping residents like Victoriano dry.

But the town is perhaps more prominent as a poster child for one of the chief unintended consequences of the state’s coastal protection efforts.

Over the next decade or so, the state will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to divert freshwater sediment from the Mississippi River into open saltwater to help rebuild marshlands. While this method of coastal protection takes the longest to implement, it would provide effective and long-lasting coastal protection, engineers say.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Richie Blink (l.) and Corey Miller, both outreach employees with The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, display before and after images of restoration at their office on May 22, 2017 in New Orleans.

Near Jean Lafitte, for example, the state is planning to spend $1.3 billion diverting 30,000 acres of sediment-laden water to build new marshland.

Local fishermen vehemently oppose the diversions, however, because they would alter the salinity regime of the water. The shrimp, fish, and oysters they have spent generations catching in the brackish coastal waters may migrate out of reach for some fishermen.

At Nunez Seafood a few miles south of Jean Lafitte, John Collins – a retired fisherman and oil field worker – says “the cure is as bad as the disease.”

“This is a long-term project, but in the short-term the oyster fishermen are suffering,” he adds, sitting at a table on a hot Friday afternoon in early June. “My opinion is the freshwater diversion is just as bad, or worse, than the erosion.”

A few minutes later, a large red-and-white shrimp boat comes in to dock and begins unloading buckets of white shrimp. Darrel Fricke, the owner, built the 40-foot, $130,000 vessel himself. Thirty-foot boats used to be big enough to shrimp in coastal Louisiana, he says, but now the water is so wide open boats have to be between 50 and 70 feet to withstand the stronger winds and waves. That means ice and fuel expenses are higher, and he’s struggling to break even before he can even think about the damage sediment diversions could bring.

“Freshwater diversion ain’t no good at all,” he says. “In river water, there ain’t nothing but catfish.”

An invasion ignored?

Some observers say Louisiana shouldn’t have to tackle such an immense challenge on its own – particularly given the likelihood that other states will soon be facing similar hurdles. In this respect, the limited role the federal government has played so far is inexcusable, they say.

“If there were a foreign power raiding beaches and threatening people’s towns and villages, we would have a national response,” says Loyola's Professor Verchick. “Hundreds of thousands of people in the next five years are going to be at risk because of climate hazards, yet we have no real federal plan – or even a process of developing a federal plan – to address that.”

He adds: “It’s going to be impossible to address these issues in an efficient, humane, cost-effective way unless we have the federal government developing a unified strategy.”

One map in the 2017 state plan is a color-coded rainbow of areas marked for levee construction, marsh creation, sediment diversion, and other types of projects. The town of Empire is just inside a region marked out as an “area of opportunity” – no large-scale projects have been planned.

Pinched between the Gulf and the Mississippi River, Empire has seen 33 places removed from nautical charts recently – which occurs after a landmark is judged to be "not prominent enough to have any real value," according to the US Coast Guard – and arguably has the fewest opportunities of any coastal community. But Richie Blink, who grew up there watching his “entire world washing away,” is trying to make the “area of opportunity” a reality.

He recently received a $10 million grant to design and build a floating high school, for example. His own high school was destroyed by hurricane Katrina the year after he graduated, but he hopes to design a school on a barge that could be pushed upriver to safety before a storm.

And he’s hoping the next few decades will bring similarly innovative solutions to the daunting challenges the region faces.

“I have a lot of faith in the people [here] that they’re going to come together and figure out how to make these really tough choices, and how to live in a better way,” says Mr. Blink, who works as a local outreach coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation in New Orleans.

“Change is sometimes a really good thing,” he adds. “Just because something’s different doesn’t mean it’s bad. I’m really hopeful we find innovative ways to deal with this.”

This report is the third installment of a four-part series. For the first installment, watch the video below. Click here for Part 2, a look at two towns' very different paths to relocation. And click here for Part 4, a window into one archaeologist's efforts to document Louisiana's coastal history before it washes away.

Jose Cabezas/ Reuters

Women participate in a demonstration in support of Evelyn Hernandez, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a suspected abortion, in San Salvador, El Salvador on July 10, 2017. The banner reads "Justice for Evelyn."

Mirna Ramírez was arrested for attempting to murder her daughter on the day she was born.

Ms. Ramírez was seven months pregnant when she suddenly went into labor at home, where she delivered her daughter. Neighbors rushed to help and arrived right after the birth. Afterward, though, saying they suspected she had been trying to abort the baby, they reported her to authorities. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

“It was the worst day of my life,” says Ramírez, who was freed on parole three years ago, after serving 12. “They didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t try an abortion. My daughter was left alone.”

El Salvador has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. For 20 years, the procedure has been banned without exceptions. The Constitution defines life as beginning at conception. Most controversially, however, abortion is criminalized. Dozens of women who say they suffered miscarriages or stillbirths have been imprisoned.

That may be poised to change. A bill introduced in the legislature this spring would permit abortions in a few cases, such as the rape of a minor, or to save the life of a mother. That debate would not have taken place even a few years ago, some activists say. They point to “Las 17,” as the original group of imprisoned women are known, for helping to shine a spotlight on an overlooked side of the law – its consequences for families left behind – and on the lack of justice for women who have suffered miscarriages, convicted through trials that critics say assume guilt and often proceed without direct proof.

After Ramírez began her sentence, her daughter, Briseida, grew up with her mother’s family. She saw her mother only on Sundays, when Ramírez was allowed to visit home. 

“Every Sunday, as we said goodbye, she asked me not to leave her,” Ramírez says. “I saw her grow up, but I was never around…. They say the law against abortion intends to protect families, but it almost ruined mine.”

Catalyst for change

El Salvador’s laws popped into the international spotlight last month, when a judge sentenced Evelyn Beatriz Hernandez Cruz to 30 years in prison. Ms. Hernandez, who became pregnant at age 18 after being raped repeatedly by a gang member, said she did not realize she was pregnant. She gave birth in a bathroom, and her child was stillborn.

Gang violence has turned El Salvador into one of the world's most violent countries, particularly for women: it has the world’s highest rate of femicide, and domestic violence is prevalent. In more than half of rape cases in recent years, the alleged victim is under the age of 15, and only 10 percent end with a conviction.

Earlier this spring, momentum grew around a proposal to loosen restrictions in cases of rape of a minor, human trafficking, unviable pregnancies, and when the mother’s life is at risk. The bill received support from church groups, doctors, and activists.

“Las 17” – most of whom are still in prison – have made the current debate possible, according to Laura Aguirre, a Salvadoran doctoral student at the Free University of Berlin who researches sexual violence. One story had a particular impact, she says.

In 2013, “Beatriz” – a pseudonym – was 22 years old and expecting her second child. Doctors said that the fetus could not survive; meanwhile, preexisting medical conditions put her life in danger as the pregnancy progressed. The supreme court ruled that she could not have an abortion, but one doctor caring for her decided to perform a C-section at seven months. Her baby died within hours.

Beatriz’s story “stirred the waters in El Salvador,” says Ms. Aguirre. “In this country we always debate the rights of fetuses, but we rarely debate the rights of existing children. There’s the belief that the mother must be willing to sacrifice everything for her child, even her life, but that belief doesn’t apply to the children that are left alone when these women are sent to jail.”

Beatriz “changed the focus” by stressing that “her son had the right to grow up with his mother,” she adds.

Helping kids, but keeping the law

Supporters of El Salvador’s current laws see the stories of “Las 17” differently.

These cases “distort reality,” according to Ricardo Velásquez Parker, a legislator who last year introduced a bill to increase the maximum penalty for abortion from eight to 50 years. 

The women are “in jail because they have murdered their babies,” not because of abortion, Mr. Velásquez Parker says. “When a mother goes to jail, what happens to her kids is sad and I understand the drama, but killing people is wrong.”

Karla Hernández, also a legislator, says the focus should be on improving the lives of these children once their mothers are arrested.

“It should be possible for these kids to grow up healthily around their mothers in jail, but the living conditions there are unacceptable,” she says, adding, “We should be debating the lack of policies to help the families of these women” instead of liberalizing abortion laws.

Uneven impact

Opponents say that El Salvador has not curbed abortion: Between 1995 and 2000 alone, there were nearly 250,000 abortions in the country, according to the Global Health Council. Instead, they argue, the current law “creates an atmosphere of suspicion,” as Amnesty International wrote in a 2015 report, and has a disproportionate impact on poor women and families. The wealthy are able to seek care abroad, or at private clinics.

María Teresa Rivera’s son, Oscar, was six years old when his mother was sentenced to 40 years in prison for murder after suffering a miscarriage. Ms. Rivera, who was raising her son on her own, says she did not realize she was pregnant, and that no doctors were present to testify at her initial trial. Both of her parents had died, and Oscar’s father wasn’t around; his parental grandparents took care of him.

“It was a really dark moment for us,” Rivera remembers. She had always worked hard to pay his private school fees, trying to keep him away from gangs’ influence. A decriminalization advocacy group, Agrupación Ciudadana, helped pay his school fees, but Oscar became depressed, she says. 

“He had to face the other kids telling him his mother had killed his brother. He wanted to give up,” Rivera says. His grandparents were “a big support, but they can barely read or write. He lost a year in school.”

Rivera was exonerated in 2016. A few months after she was released from jail, however, prosecutors appealed for the original verdict to be reinstated. With the help of Agrupación Ciudadana, she fled the country with her son, and was granted asylum in Sweden earlier this year.

“I wasn’t the perfect mother, but I always try to do what is best for my son,” she says. “Had I known I was pregnant, I would have done the same with my second son.” 

An unlikely debate

Dennis Muñoz is known in El Salvador as the “abortion lawyer.” For almost a decade, he has defended women prosecuted on abortion-related charges.

“The Constitution of El Salvador considers family unity as a main principle, but the stories of these women counter that,” he says. But given the current debate, Muñoz says he’s feeling hopeful that a mentality shift is taking place.

“Seven years ago we didn’t dare dream there would be a bill in parliament. When the law was introduced everyone said it would be rejected. But here we are, still debating it,” he says.

For now, the proposal seems stalled in the legislature. Velásquez Parker says that the vast majority of Salvadorans “think abortion is wrong,” and that no major changes will happen soon. “Any politician who supports abortion will be massively rejected by the population,” he says.

A recent poll, however, suggests that a majority of the country now supports reform. Nearly four-fifths of respondents say that abortion should be decriminalized in at least some circumstances, according to a survey conducted by a local women’s group and the polling firm Untold Research.

“Little by little, the way Salvadorans see the abortion law is changing,” says Morena Herrera, who leads Agrupación Ciudadana. The stories of “Las 17” are “helping change mentalities.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of its Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative.

Dina Rudick/The Boston Globe/AP/File

Maria Arabatzis, and Brian Egan, left, look over marketing materials during an open house while Dana Seabury, a realtor with Gibson Sotheby's, at right, signs in upon arrival in Dorchester, Mass. The housing market has become more accessible this year, but certain potential buyers, including, non-whites, Millennials, people of modest incomes, and first-time buyers, still face headwinds.

Some progress is happening in one of the most crucial parts of the US economy: In the long-challenged housing market, the rate of homeownership may finally be turning a corner after a long period of decline or stagnation after the Great Recession.

Increasingly, newly formed households are becoming buyers rather than renters, and the overall rate of ownership rose to 63.7 percent of all US households in the latest quarterly report by the US Census Bureau, released July 27. That’s a recovery from 62.9 percent a year before – perhaps a “hit bottom” moment for the ownership rate.

An upturn would be significant because homeownership has long been one of the most promising paths for families to build some wealth over time. But the latest progress isn't an all-clear sign in the housing market. In fact, a decade after a devastating real estate crash rolled across America, housing is still a trouble spot right at the heart of the US economy.

What’s been roiling isn’t a price collapse or foreclosure wave, but a slow and persistent squeeze. Millions of working households feel caught between high rents and rising prices as many metro areas have a thin supply of available homes.

And the housing market, which tends to play a central role in both family budgets and the economy’s ups and downs, now also faces the prospect of significant changes in federal policy. The potential shifts include budget cuts to housing programs, rising interest rates, and loosening of Obama-era regulations that were aimed at fairness and stability in banking.

Americans like Kimberly Ramirez don’t have much choice – they’re navigating the difficult market as best they can.

“How do you save when you’re paying for rent?” asks the young Chicago resident. “Like many Millennials, I have student debt that I’m dealing with.”

Ms. Ramirez’s story, though, symbolizes that progress is possible even amid the challenges. She bought her first house this past June. “My family has always rented. Not only am I a first-time homeowner, I’m also a first-generation homeowner,” says Ramirez, whose parents emigrated from Central America.

She did it by finding little ways to save (bagging lunches rather than visiting restaurants near the health clinic where she works), but, more importantly, with help from local organizations and a home-buying market that is becoming more open, in the form of some easing of tight lending standards and a rise in inventory meant to let more buyers in.

“Overall I’d say I’m optimistic,” says David Kottmann, who manages a lending division of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, the nonprofit group that helped Ramirez make her homeownership dream a reality.

Housing assistance, threatened

Three years ago, Ramirez began thinking seriously about how to become a homeowner rather than a renter. To learn the complexities of credit scores and how to bid on a home, she attended NHS Chicago workshops. When she and her partner were finally ready to buy, that same group arranged a loan with down-payment assistance.

Mr. Kottman at NHS sees an improving economy helping more potential buyers get prequalified for loans. And between nonprofits, commercial banks, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) he says attractive lending deals are available.

At the same time, however, certain policy changes in Washington could threaten those efforts at widened access. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that already, “because of chronic underfunding of rental housing assistance programs, just one in four of the poorest people in America get the housing assistance they need.”

Yet the Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks a 13 percent cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), further limiting help to low-income households. 

Republicans also have efforts under way to roll back or repeal big chunks of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that was designed to safeguard the financial system – and to shield people from predatory or risky home loans – in the wake of the Great Recession. Of particular concern to critics: The Financial CHOICE Act, already passed by the House, seeks to curb the powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Where supporters of the new measure say it will restrain needless extra layers of oversight, supporters say the CFPB has already proven its worth by winning victories against unfair lending practices.

Also facing uncertainty is the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, up for review as Congress considers an overhaul of the US tax code. Bipartisan support makes it unlikely that this incentive to build affordable housing will disappear, but legislation could make it stronger or weaker. 

The changes loom as experts say a critical challenge is helping more people like Ramirez – non-whites, Millennials, people of modest incomes, first-time buyers – achieve homeownership. Ramirez says she sees the difficulties for these groups, especially for people of color, all around her.

Research bears that out. For example, a recent report by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies notes that the homeownership rate for whites is 72 percent. For Hispanic-Americans, it is just 46 percent, and for African-Americans it is 42 percent.

The numbers illustrate how housing has long been one of the main drivers of inequality. African-Americans have continued to be disadvantaged, despite the fact that overtly racist real estate practices having been outlawed for decades.They were hit particularly hard by the housing bust that began in 2007, and have struggled to recover since then. The black-white gap in homeownership currently is at its widest since World War II, according to the Harvard center’s data. Rolling back programs and regulations meant to help underserved groups could serve to widen it even further. 

‘No such thing as building more land’

Adding to the wider affordability problem is what many say is a shortage of new housing units, especially moderate-priced ones. The climate for builders has been cautious since the recession, which has helped slow the development of affordable units. Additionally, in many areas zoning rules have made it difficult to find new places to build.

“Yes there is a shortage. There needs to be more homes, affordable homes in particular,” says Jennifer Hines Arrington, who helps lead lending done by the Housing Opportunity Commission in Montgomery County, Md. The nonprofit agency assists first-time homebuyers and others. “They're not building any more land. We've got to figure out a way to house folks.”

Yet amid the uncertainty over policy, many people on front lines of the housing market also see some reasons for hope.

Promising signs

Ms. Hines Arrington says that in Montgomery County, Maryland, developers generally must devote 12.5 percent of new units to affordable housing. “That does help us.”

In the San Diego area, another hot housing market, “there are definitely more buyers than sellers,” says Melinda Opperman, executive vice president of Credit.org, another nonprofit that provides workshops and education about loans to first-time buyers.

But she notes that the supply of homes is not so tight in other markets – a bit further from the coast – that Credit.org serves in Southern California. And in Los Angeles, the city council recently moved to offer down-payment assistance to households near the area’s median income. [Editor's note: The previous two paragraphs have been updated to correct Credit.org's name and clarify its mission.]

And at the national level, a July move by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac opened the door to more people getting loans: The mortgage giant adjusted its automated green light for debt-to-income levels up to 50 percent, up from 45 percent before, notes Sheryl Pardo at the Urban Institute's center on housing finance policy. 

Ramirez and her fellow home shoppers are a reminder that, even with ownership rates on the rise, it's still out of reach of many Americans. Buying a home isn't like paying for groceries or utility bills, after all. 

“Most people would love to own a home,” Ramirez says. But “it takes a lot of self-discipline.... It also takes a lot guidance.”

They squeal and take a deep breath before they jump at the count of five into the murky water. For these five boys, it’s just a day of summer fun in a pool.

For the adults looking on though, swimming in a Parisian canal – long associated with rubbish and nighttime revelry – represents the reclamation of leisure from the creeping development and pollution that has long kept paddling off limits.

Now that Paris has gotten closer to hosting the 2024 Olympic Games – after Los Angeles relinquished its competing bid this week – this scene might one day not be such an anomaly, one that prompts passersby to snap photos and film videos.

Paris has proposed that Olympic competitions not just be organized throughout the city built on the Seine, but in the Seine itself. And the idea is that, by then, Paris waterways will be so clean that residents and visitors will be splashing in designated areas as part of everyday life.

Guillaume Tavitian, a Parisian who was taking a walk with his father over a footbridge spanning the canal, says he remembers when former President Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, announced in 1988 that he’d swim in the Seine within five years. He never did. “Now I think it’s really possible by the Olympics,” says Mr. Tavitian.

'Much better than the park'

These waters were not always banned. This spring when Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo permanently closed down the roadway along the right bank and turned it into a park, the inauguration featured an exhibit called the Banks of the Seine.

Archival images showed Parisians jumping off the Pont d’Iéna, steps from the Eiffel Tower, in August 1945, and dangling their feet into the Seine under it. It featured swimmers at the famed floating pool Deligny, dating back to the end of the 18th century.

But the banks were ceded to transport and industry. Swimming in Parisian waterways has been officially banned since 1923, due to poor water quality, heavy traffic, and strong currents. But it only became truly off limits after the post-war boom and development that ensued. Until this summer, it has been mostly nighttime rulebreakers who have dared to take a dip.

Sara Miller LLana/The Christian Science Monitor

The new Paris canal swimming pool is packed - particularly the baby pool - on a recent day. It’s so novel that passersby can’t help but take photos, but the city hopes that it will become more commonplace, here and in the Seine, by the Summer Olympics of 2024.

When the pool opened at the Canal de l’Ourcq in July, with three basins including a baby pool and capacity for 300 swimmers at a time, the mayor’s office deemed it “an ecological conquest.”

It opened as part of Paris Plages, an annual summer event that since 2002 has turned the banks of the Seine and canal into a veritable “beach” with volleyball courts, lounge chairs, and views of sailboats and barges passing by. An awesome sight (at least for urbanites who find beauty in the reuse of space), it only lacked one thing: the actual “beach.”

“The water feels perfect,” says one little girl as she climbs out of the basin. When asked if this is her first time at the pool, she looks incredulous. “I’ve been here every day,” she says. “This is much better than the park.”

Swimming in the Seine itself is still prohibited, but the city has promised to clean the water in preparation for the triathlon and swimming competitions of the 2024 Games, which are expected to be officially announced in Paris’s favor on Sept. 13 after a deal between Los Angeles (which agreed to host the 2028 edition), Paris, and the International Olympic Committee. It would be the first time in a century that Paris hosts the Olympics – the last time coming the year after swimming was banned in city waters.

It is part of a revival of urban river swimming around the world. Already Danes swim in the waterways of their capital, Copenhagen. In Boston, the city offers “splash” days in the Charles River, while dozens of urban planners study similar possibilities.

'It's nice only for a look'

Not everyone is enticed. “Do you see that algae?” says Chantel Cajazzo, who was taking a walk with her children at the Paris canal.

The pool, in fact, was briefly closed for a day last month after higher-than-normal levels of bacteria were found, according to local press reports. It reopened the following day. But Ms. Cajazzo says that while the new pool is “nice to look at” and brings back a sense of life – and vacation to those who can’t afford the sea – “it’s nice only for a look.”

Cajazzo says she believes the city won’t ever be able to open swimming to the masses, after decades of industrialization and deindustrialization that has strained waterways. “We can’t return to the era before that,” she says. Nor should we, argue some. Such plans have been dismissed as a “bobo” (bourgeois-bohemian) ideal that puts leisure ahead of the realities of jobs, trade, and transport.

Still, the city of Paris keeps purifying.

The graphic design company Klar worked with the city, and illustrator Simon Roussin, to advertise Paris Plages this year. The scene of the canal is a colorful, whimsical illustration that recalls a vintage poster. A man sits on a pier, looking out onto boaters and swimmers in the distance. A woman climbs down a ladder that leads into crystal blue waters.

“The brief from the mayor’s office was to represent Paris as a seaside resort,” says Alix Hassler, project manager at the company. “It’s representing a Paris that is a bit fantastical, imaginary.” Yet with the canal pools just down the street, she notes that their poster also represents the “real drive of the current mayor,” and slowly is turning into reality around them.

Except, perhaps, for the color of the water.

AP Photo

Anti-government demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela, hold a vigil July 31 in honor of those who have been killed during clashes with security forces .

Pollsters try to measure it. Politicians compete for it. Protesters clamor for it. Journalists try to track it.

This illusive “it” is legitimacy, or the public’s support of leaders who best express a people’s values and principles. And perhaps nowhere has legitimacy shifted so swiftly in a country than in Venezuela over the past year. In recent days, signs of this change have been on view for the world to witness, offering lessons in how a nation struggles to renew its social contract and its popular sovereignty.

The clearest sign is a plan by the coalition of Venezuela’s opposition parties to set up a “parallel government” to the ruling regime of President Nicolás Maduro. The president’s popularity has sunk so low that the opposition, called the Democratic Unity alliance, feels assured of public backing. And Mr. Maduro is so worried by the prospect of an alternative state that he threw two opposition figures, Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma, into military prison this week.

Another sign is that the opposition-run legislature, which has been sidelined by Maduro, went ahead and appointed new judges to the supreme court (which Maduro has co-opted). He then had three of the judges arrested.

On July 16, the opposition was so confident of its legitimacy that it held a nationwide referendum on Maduro’s plan to change the Constitution and give himself near-dictatorial powers. Voter turnout was more than 7 million of the 20 million voters. By comparison, the turnout on July 30 for Maduro’s referendum on the constitutional change was only 3.6 million, according to pollster Innovarium.

Maduro’s slipping legitimacy can also be measured by his coddling of the military in order to keep their guns on his side. Venezuela now has more active generals than all of NATO. The president is also accused of allowing many officers to engage in illegal businesses.

When a leader’s legitimacy dips, he often misjudges the ultimate source of power. It is not out of the barrel of a gun. It rests on the highest aspirations of the people, reflected in their hopes for freedom, individual rights, peace, and prosperity. Under Maduro, the basic qualities of governance have eroded, caused by his misrule as well as a drop in world oil prices since 2014.

Venezuela is home to the world’s largest petroleum reserves. But you wouldn’t know it by the scarcity of goods, the level of crime, and the flow of people fleeing the country.

The opposition coalition, however, must be careful in how it claims a right to rule. It must work within the 1999 Constitution. It must not let its most radical members instigate violence during peaceful protests, which have now lasted since April. It must keep a door open to officials in the regime who may want to join it in creating a government of national unity.

Most of all, it must reach out to the rural poor who are the base of Maduro’s support. These Venezuelans feel left out from the privileged lives of the rich and middle class. Maduro has bought their loyalty through a system of patronage enforced by armed militias. As historian Bernard Fall once wrote, when a country is near civil war, the group that can “out-administer” the other in delivering goods and safety will win.

Legitimacy in Venezuela also rests to a degree on the views of other countries. Most big nations in Latin America now side with the opposition. But the region’s attempts to mediate a solution have so far failed.

A government’s legitimacy to rule is based not on brute force or free handouts. It relies on a leader’s relationship to the people’s noblest ideals. Those are often gauged by elections, polls, or protests. But they lie in the hearts of individual citizens, who are free to direct them to the most legitimate leaders.