Meizhu Lui For over 30 years, Meizhu Lui has dedicated herself to economic justice as an educator, organizer, and scholar. Currently, she is the Director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, a national project of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Prior to joining the Insight Center, Ms. Lui was the executive director of United for a Fair Economy, a national nonprofit organization. Under Ms. Lui’s leadership, the organization researched and reported on the growth of pay disparities, the use of tax policy to increase inequality and the importance of wealth more than income in explaining racial inequities, with particular attention to the concerns of immigrants and those that do not speak English as their first language. Previously, Ms. Lui was a kitchen worker, AFSCME activist, and the first Asian-American elected president of her local union in Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized by the Boston Women’s Fund, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, and the Labor Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She is a Trustee of the Hyams Foundation and was selected for the 2007 Barr Fellows Program. Ms. Lui also served on the Center for American Progress Task Force, co-authored The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide and was co-editor of The Wealth Inequality Reader. Most recently, she wrote “Laying the Foundation for National Prosperity: The Imperative of Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.” Ms. Lui has an M.A. from the University of Illinois and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

America’s Housing Crisis: Turning a Raw Deal Into a New Deal

How making changes to public housing can improve the lives of the poor.

When we talk about “public housing,” we’re usually referring to those big decaying boxy buildings surrounded by asphalt located in neighborhoods of color where middle and upper class white folks are afraid to drive, let alone tread.

But in fact, most of our housing could be called “public” — that is, subsidized by the government — including those million dollar McMansions in the ‘burbs. Like the people in the projects, these homeowners get financial help from Uncle Sam, in the form of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction (HMID) and property…

Feminomics: A Woman’s Place - Still in the (Poor) House

Will 2010 be the year of the woman? We asked prominent thinkers to discuss women’s changing roles in the economy. How has the crisis affected them? Are women the key to reform? What economic impact will they have going forward? We’ll explore all this and more in a special ND20 12-part series. Meizhu Lui explains why the gender wealth gap is as important as the more familiar income gap.

They used to say things like “a woman’s place is in the home.” We thought we had that licked.

In the 60’s, women fought to get out of the house and into the…

For Families of Color, New Deal–or Same Old Shuffle?

When Franklin D. Roosevelt first used the term “new deal” in 1932, his metaphor was a game of poker: the American people had been dealt a bad hand.

He enumerated the problems that we see repeated today: “Our ability to pay has fallen….The savings of many years in thousands of families are gone….A host of unemployed citizens face a grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.”  And it is true again today that paradoxically, “plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.” For example,…