Addressing Discrimination
Fleming-Klink is working with the Deputy Mayor’s team to develop a racial equity lens for the City’s policies.
For example, he currently manages a review of policies surrounding unlawful evictions of renters by their landlords. If a landlord circumvents the legal eviction processes which take place in Housing Court, the only recourse tenants have is to call 911 and have police come and respond to the situation.
“Given what we know about the disproportionately harmful impact of the police and state violence on Black, Brown and immigrant communities, we are concerned that police are responding to unlawfully evicted tenants not in a way that helps them, but in a way that is punitive to them,” the Georgetown graduate explains. “What’s more, undocumented folks probably don’t even call the police in these instances, given concerns around immigration, so they don’t have any recourse and are extremely vulnerable.”
“We’re trying to think through what other policy interventions exist to address vulnerable tenants’ needs, perhaps those that don’t rely on institutions of state violence,” he adds.
He’s also been working to evaluate a more comprehensive set of metrics upon which the city could make decisions about how to allocate capital for affordable housing deals that would better address residential segregation, opportunity and achievement gaps, and access to food and parks for people of color.
Extraordinary Young Citizen
Fleming-Klink majored in Culture and Politics at Georgetown with a concentration in urban public policy.
His senior honors thesis, “Dismissed: How Rent Courts Process and Punish Low-Income Tenants in Washington, DC,” was a mixed-method ethnography of DC’s Landlord-Tenant Court and drew from more than a year of fieldwork and administrative record analysis.
“Isaiah is an extraordinary young citizen – intellectually curious, deeply self-aware and genuinely committed to understanding and addressing social inequalities,” says sociology professor Brian McCabe, who supervised the Georgetown graduate’s senior thesis.
The Georgetown graduate says McCabe pushed him to be a “better, clearer, and more compelling researcher and writer.”
Jesuit Values
During his time at the university, he was a research assistant for McCabe and McCourt School of Public Policy professor Eva Rosen’s DC Eviction Project and also assisted Rosen in her research about the Housing Choice Voucher program and private residential market landlording.
“Georgetown provided an exceptional education as well as a formative professional and research environment, given the reality of unaffordability and poverty in our nation’s capital,” Fleming-Klink says. “That, mixed with the university’s drive towards and Jesuit emphasis on making the world around us better, made Georgetown deeply meaningful to me.”
For more information about the Rhodes Scholarship and other fellowship opportunities, please visit the Georgetown Office of Fellowships, Awards, and Resources or email gufa@georgetown.edu.