One Berkeley Resident's Fight to Desegregate the City Dorothy Walker has spent decades working to eliminate housing discrimination. In February, the city council finally agreed. April 1, 2021, 9am PDT | Diana Ionescu | Nathanael Johnson profiles Dorothy Walker, a Berkeley resident who, decades ago, undertook a fight against racist real estate covenants. As a white woman married to a Japanese-American, Walker witnessed the effects of internment and race-based policies in mid-century America, policies which reverberate to this day. Despite federal efforts to eliminate housing segregation in the early 20th century, writes Johnson, cities found new ways to replace explicitly racist covenants with "ordinances that entrenched segregation by income and wealth instead, reserving certain parts of town for people who could afford their own house and a roomy yard." Walker has proposed eliminating single-family zoning for decades, but her proposals have always fallen on deaf ears. "I was basically a voice in the wilderness crying out for density," she says. "It was just so radical. It fell like a stone."