CHAUTAUQUA — To filmmaker and architect Giorgio Angelini, the American Dream equals home ownership.

It also means to attain the American Dream, some citizens must become socially mobile where they have a chance to move up in society to attain wealth.

He told an Amphitheater audience Thursday as part of the theme “More than Shelter: Redefining the American Home,” that being born in the wrong ZIP code means one won’t be able to be socially mobile because of a discriminatory housing policy.

“To diminish a kid’s capacity to dream by forcing them into a kind of urban incarceration is about the cruelest thing I can imagine,” he said.

Angelini enrolled in the Masters of Architecture program at Rice University during the depths of the 2008 real estate collapse, according to assembly.chq.org. It was during this time that the seeds for his directorial debut, “Owned: A Tale of Two Americas,” began to take shape.

His talks also focus on, the website said, how postwar housing policy set America on two divergent paths: one of imagined wealth, propped up by speculation and endless booms and busts, and the other in systematically defunded, segregated communities.

“So much of what the American dream is about is about homeownership. We structure our entire society around home. It’s both our biggest source of wealth. And it’s also our biggest source of opportunity,” he added.

He referred to Raj Chetty, a Harvard University professor and economist, who has been studying the effects of place on upward mobility for the past decade, and created opportunityatlas.org, where one can look at data associated with the question Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chance to rise out of poverty?

“Basically what he concluded is that the single biggest predictor in one’s ability to move up socio economically is the zip code in which they were born. So attaining the American Dream is demonstrably much harder for a kid in Baltimore city than a kid in Boston. Even if they come from similar socio economic backgrounds. So to put it another way, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is simply no match for place,” the filmmaker said.

Angelini said after spending so much time in the field making his documentary film, that the country’s housing economy is one predominantly driven, legislated and controlled by profit-motivated forces. Those narrow interests, he said, are allowed to dictate critical decisions around housing policy around urban planning and infrastructural investments, about the very social fabric of our society, hoping that the profits might also produce the right social outcomes as a convenient byproduct.

“But in practice, the system has produced a country that in many places is more racially segregated than ever before. Schools in particular, are actually more racially segregated than they were in the 1950s,” he noted.

Angelini added that the policies of inequality that defend defined post war housing development like redlining segregated zip codes by race, has only intensified under the current profit-driven system. Former President Lyndon Johnson passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which, banned racist urban planning policies. Very little was done to actually unwind the damage that had been done, the filmmaker noted.

“But it’s simply not simply it’s not only an issue of race. It’s a socio-economic one as well, in nearly 75% of urban counties across the entire country,” he added.

Median income wage earners, he said, cannot afford to buy a home. He noted it’s a system that’s not working for most people. Financially, the United States is more economically unequal than it ever was before the post war era.

“It makes you wonder how we went through such a chaotic 2008 housing crisis yet did so little to fix the underlying issues. When the problems were so blatantly obvious,” he said.

Angelini said the area considered to be model for postwar suburban development is Levittown. It’s where manufactured home development was made and invented. In Levittown, during filming, Angelini met Jimmy Silvestri, a man, that as a child, moved with his family from Brooklyn to Levittown.

Silvestri, Angelini said, in Levittown, made friends, met the love of his life, was drafted and served in Vietnam, came back and became a police officer for Nassau County, and raised his own family in the same house that he had moved into as a child. It represented the best aspects of America to Silvestri except, Angelini said, that housing developers were racist and did not allow black families into Levittown.

“What Jimmy was describing was the unholy mixture of private prejudice and sanction government policy would help segregate this country by race through the rapid expansion of homeownership, mainly for white families. And in doing so we created a massive imbalance of wealth creation between Black and white families. On the private side, Levittown had written into its rent own contracts that they would only allow Caucasians to live there,” Angelini said.

So postwar, Angelini said, The Federal Housing Administration drew maps across the U.S. with red lines around places which were mostly Black and immigrant communities. These communities were categorized by the FDA as too risky virtually freezing out mortgage lending and its benefits to millions of minorities. Silvestri admitted to Angelini that he feels guilty because he thinks he may have received a handout, when other people weren’t so lucky, and feels guilty to a degree, Angelini said.

Following graduate school, assembly.chq.org said, Angelini helped open the boutique architecture firm, Schaum Shieh Architects, with his former professor, Troy Schaum. Their first collaboration was an installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale titled “About Face,” which built on a long-running study of Detroit’s rapidly eroding suburban fabric. Through the construction of architectural interventions, the ambition was to help stitch back together a new kind of public space in the alienating physical vastness that the foreclosure crisis left between homes. The team’s subsequent work, including the White Oak Music Hall in Houston and the headquarters for The Transart Foundation for Arts and Anthropology, won numerous awards from establishments like the AIA and Architect’s Newspaper. Angelini’s experience working on issues of housing both in graduate school and at Schaum Shieh Architects led him to Owned: A Tale of Two Americas. The film toured the country, exhibiting at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and at the Park Avenue Armory as a part of their “Culture in a Changing America” curation series. It recently had its PBS premiere in Spring 2022. Its accolades include the Senator Paul Sarbanes Award for Excellence in Public Service from the Affordable Housing Conference of Montgomery County. Owned also brought with it a new collaboration with animator and artist, Arthur Jones, who provided all the animations and motion graphics for the film.

“The American home economy of today has deluded us into believing that we’re living in times of great scarcity. It’s helped to transform this country into an increasingly anxious, self-centered, and paranoid place.”