Category Archives: civil rights

New HUD AFFH rule – the Good & Some Devils in Details

affirmatively furthering fair housing, civil rights, fair housing, housing development, Opportunities, Place matters, , , , ,

Okay dear readers, this is a wonky article but for those of you interested in HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule it is a good read. (Ted Wimpey)

The Devils in the Details: Key Issues in Implementing the New AFFH Rule

 by Dan Immergluck and Mindy Kao Rooflines post on July 5, 2016

“For most of the Fair Housing Act’s history, its requirement to “Affirmatively Further Fair Housing” has been largely dormant. With the advent of the new AFFH rules in July 2015, however, there is some promise that this provision might be taken more seriously.”

http://tinyurl.com/AFFH-rule-FHA-DetailDevils  Link to ROOFLINES, the Shelterforce Blog,

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Refugees benefit our Country: Let’s build welcoming inclusive communities

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Francis Picture
Abijah Manga (Francis) Social Media Outreach and Coordination Specialist, Intern at the Fair Housing Project/CVOEO

Even as Governors of some states are declaring their unfounded and fearful opposition to the resettlement of refugees from Syria in their states, Vermont continues to be welcoming, not only to Syrian refugees but for many others fleeing war, persecution and political or religious oppression. That is as it should be, not only for humanitarian reasons but because it is good for the nation, the states, communities and the world.

For more than twenty five years, the United States has offered assistance to refugees through the U.S office of refugee resettlement. Burlington, Vermont is one of the designated refugee resettlement communities. In recent years the number of refugees and immigrants coming from Africa, East and Central Asia to Vermont has significantly increased. Every year the U.S. Congress decides the number of refugees that will be admitted into the U.S. during the fiscal year. In 2014, the U.S government admitted a total of 58,238 refugees into the U.S and approximately 50% of the 58,238 or 29,219 admitted to the U.S fell below 20 years of age.

Process

Once refugees have been approved for admission to the U.S., refugee resettlement agencies (Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP) for the state of Vermont) initially helps to resettle  the new refugees  including securing housing for them, and providing basic assistance with community orientation, medical screening, employment search services, English language instruction for those coming from non-English speaking countries as well as school orientation to the New Americans.

image 1Life has not been easy for these New Americans. The International Rescue Committee explains that numbers of refugee families have survived traumatic life events including years of political conflict, exposure to war-related violence and deprivation, and chaos in refugee camps. Potential risk factors encountered by refugee children and youth include separation from family members, lack of access to education and health care, recruitment into armed forces, sexual exploitation, the loss of home, and exposure to war-related trauma.

Additionally, refugee youth in the U.S. face further challenges such as new language acquisition, social isolation and alienation, social adjustment with peers, negative peer pressure, grief and bereavement, discrimination, cultural misunderstanding, and adjustment to a new educational system. According to the International Rescue Committee, “Associated psychosocial stress can hinder refugee children’s ability to learn English, perform adequately in school, and develop peer support networks”. Because of these challenges faced by New Americans, our efforts to create welcoming communities are all the more important.

Economic and cultural benefits to our state

Despite the challenges that New Americans have to overcome, they have proven to be outstanding achievers in educational advancement and demonstrate a strong work ethic. They are highly motivated to advance themselves and to contribute to their new communities in a positive way. In other words they are a plus to our communities not a negative.

image 23In Vermont we should keep in mind that we are losing population, especially younger people; the state has a declining population which is growing older and at the same time it has the 4th lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6 percent. So, many local companies are tapping into the refugee labor pool. Refugees contribute much to the workforce. At the same time, although this is foremost a humanitarian gesture, admitting more refugees can also be a boon for businesses and local economies, particularly in smaller states with labor shortages. There is an interesting recent article to read from PRI about “Vermont businesses” that focuses on a Burlington industry example in particular. New Americans are also market consumers for our local businesses and tax payers – both income taxes and sales taxes – as well as property tax payers as they begin to own real property.

Given both the benefits to our communities and to the refugees themselves of having open welcoming and inclusive communities, we need to continue to welcome and embrace the diversity and economic dynamism that New Americans bring for the good of all concerned.

At the root of school segregation

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It wasn’t the failure of “forced busing” that led to current racial disparities in school achievement outcomes. The problem, rather, is that the nation’s schools have become more segregated over the last three decades, as integration dropped from the agenda of education policy-makers.

So wrote a Syracuse University education professor, George Theoharis, in an interesting piece in the Washington Post Sunday. syracuse1

Two startling observations derive from his home town — which happens to be in our neck of the woods.

He notes the enormous disparities in programs, and outcomes, between a middle school with an 85 percent black and Latino student body and another middle school, 10 miles away, that’s 88 percent white. And he points out that in 1989, the city’s schools were about 60 percent white and 20 percent black/Latino, and that now, the district is 28 percent white, 55 percent black/Latino.

Theoharis goes on to discuss how a renewed emphasis on desegregation in educational policy could provide remedies: Redesigning school districts, for example, and putting them together “like pie pieces, so they cut across urban, suburban and even rural spaces”;  or creating magnet schools; or providing incentives to school districts to desegregate.

(Note: Magnet schools were the Burlington School District’s remedy for socioeconomic achievement gaps.)

But Theoharis never delves into the heart of the matter: residential segregation. This has grown worse in many cities since 2000, with an increase in the number of high-poverty neighborhoods, as we noted in an earlier blog post citing “The Architecture of Segregation,” a paper that detailed the demographic trends. In Syracuse since 2000, according to that paper, “the number of high-poverty tracts more than doubled, rising from twelve to thirty… As a result, Syracuse now has the highest level of poverty concentration among blacks and Hispanics of the one hundred largest metropolitan areas,” as shown in this table:

syracusetable

 

 

 

 

 

 

The takeaway is that addressing residential segregation iskey to addressing school segregation. Another analysis of school segregation and racial performance disparities, by the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, put it like this:

“Education analysts frequently wonder why a black–white achievement gap remains, even when individual poverty and family characteristics are similar. Partly it’s because of greater (and multigenerational) segregation of black children into neighborhoods of high poverty, few employment opportunities, and frequent violence….

“It is inconceivable to think that education as a civil rights issue can be addressed without addressing residential segregation … Housing policy is school policy; equality of education relies upon eliminating the exclusionary zoning ordinances of white suburbs and subsidizing dispersed housing in those suburbs for low-income African Americans now trapped in central cities.”

That’s what affirmatively furthering fair housing is all about, right? But you already knew that.

 

What they didn’t talk about

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debate2

The Democratic presidential candidates had a fair amount to say last night about the disappearing middle class, but not about where all of those fallen people can afford to live. Housing unaffordability is a “crisis” throughout the country, judging from news accounts, but it was not among the “pressing issues” deemed worthy of discussion in the debate.

One likely reason is that “pressing issues” for the purpose of this debate were defined, in part, by the volume of traffic they generate on Facebook. Perhaps housing advocates need to devote themselves more devoutly to social media.

Another reason, as we’ve suggested in previous posts, is that any substantial solution to the affordability problem will require major federal investments, in the form of subsidies, public housing and so forth. To be sure, raising wages – as the candidates pledged to do – will help alleviate the problem, but even a minimum wage of $15 will leave millions of people house-poor.

Here’s an idea that might have been introduced during the debate’s back-and-forths about capitalism, but wasn’t: Housing, like education and health care, is basic human need that requires major governmental intervention and that can’t simply be left to market forces. Don’t take our word for it –check out what an establishmentarian magazine, The Economist, has to say about housing as one of capitalism’s unmet challenges.

Another housing topic the candidates bypassed was the pronounced racial segregation that still marks residential settlement patterns in metropolitan areas all over the country, 47 years after the passage of a Fair Housing Act that was intended to undo that segregation.

They had opportunities to discuss this, when they were invited to talk about “issues of race in America” or the unrest in Baltimore, but the focus remained on reforming the criminal justice system, improving educational opportunities, and so forth. Not that these aren’t important, but there’s another perspective on the events of Baltimore and Ferguson that deserves attention. Consider this analysis by the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, published soon after the Baltimore riots:

“Whenever young black men riot in response to police brutality or murder, as they have done in Baltimore this week, we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality—training officers not to use excessive force, implementing community policing, encouraging police to be more sensitive, prohibiting racial profiling, and so on. These are all good, necessary, and important things to do. But such proposals ignore the obvious reality that the protests are not really (or primarily) about policing.

“Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population. A legacy of these policies is the rioting we have seen  ….Whether after the 1967 wave of riots that led to the Kerner Commission report, after the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, or after the recent wave of confrontations and vandalism following police killings of black men, community leaders typically say, properly, that violence isn’t the answer and that after peace is restored, we can deal with the underlying problems. We never do so.

“Certainly, African American citizens of Baltimore were provoked by aggressive, hostile, even murderous policing, but … (w)ithout suburban integration, something barely on today’s public policy agenda, ghetto conditions will persist, giving rise to aggressive policing and the riots that inevitably ensue. Like Ferguson before it, Baltimore will not be the last such conflagration the nation needlessly experiences.”

Signs of desperation

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desparation

The housing affordability problem, which sometimes seems intractable in the current political climate, is generating some novel ideas around the country – would-be solutions and would-be explanations, among them:

  • A school district in the San Francisco Bay area is contemplating building housing for teachers who otherwise can’t afford to live there. Imagine that: A school board going into the development business just so it can hold on to the faculty.
  • NIMBYism apparently pervades wealthier suburbs outlying Chicago, which have less than their share of tax-credit supported low-income housing, according to a regional analysis. Advocates of “affordable housing” admit that the term itself can draw discriminatory, responses and that they might have more success if they called it something else. But alas, resistance to inclusiveness is more than a public relations problem.
  • Further signs of desperation in California: One county is considering a tax on Airbnb to help fund affordable housing development. Another is contemplating rent control. And a renters’ federation is complaining that the Sierra Club (the Sierra Club!) is standing in the way of needed housing density.
  • Denver’s housing crisis has been exacerbated by marijuana legalization, or so some surmise. That seems like a stretch, but the argument goes like this: (a) Legalization has pulled in a surfeit of millennials, driving up rents. (b) Growers are snapping up old industrial areas and driving out the artists who inhabit them. Mercifully, artists seem to have other options in Colorado.

Racial disparity: here we go again

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debt

ProPublica has a fine expose on racial disparities in debt-collection litigation. Reporters examined court judgments in St. Louis, Chicago and Newark and found that court judgments were twice the size in predominantly black neighborhoods compared to predominantly white neighborhoods – even controlling for income. African Americans significantly more likely than whites to be sued by debt collectors.

So what, you might ask, does this have to with housing, or more particularly, housing discrimination (AKA fair housing)?

Two things:

  • One inference from the findings is that blacks tend to have less resources – less wealth – to fall back on in hard times. Specifically, they have less wealth in the form of home equity to pass on one from one generation to the next, and that’s a legacy of housing racial discrimination that was promoted and enforced by governments at all levels – and notably, by the federal government from the 1930s on.

As the ProPublic article puts it:

“Experts cite many reasons why blacks might face more lawsuits, foremost among them the immense gap in wealth between blacks and whites in the U.S. It’s a gap that extends back to the institution of slavery and, more recently, to 20th century policies that promoted white homeownership while restricting it for blacks.”

That gap has even widened since the Great Recession, according to the Pew Foundation. The typical black household has a net worth more than 10 times less that of the typical white household:

wealthgap

 

 

 

 

 

  • The other connection to fair housing is that the racial disparity in debt-litigation cases runs parallel to the racial disparity in predatory lending that was revealed during the housing bubble years of the early 2000s. In many areas, blacks were steered to expensive home loans even when they could have qualified for standard mortgage loans. The debt collectors insist they’re treating everyone the same and not screening cases by race. That may be true, but the mass effect is similar to that produced when minorities were are targeted by predatory lenders in the years leading up to the Great Recession.

For a brief description of how a bank was called to account under the Fair Housing Act, check out this synopsis of a case that the civil rights law form Relman, Dane & Colfax filed against Wells Fargo in Baltimore, or this summary in the Baltimore Sun.

Variations on a sordid theme

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“Forty families on one lot, using one water faucet. Living in barren one room huts, they were deprived of the glory of sunshine in the daytime, and were so poor they could not even at night use the electricity that is to be generated by our great river…

“I found one family that might almost be called typical. Living within one dreary room, where no single window let in the beneficent sunlight, and where not even the smallest vagrant breeze brought them relief in the hot summer – here they slept, here they cooked and ate, here they washed themselves in a leaky tin tub after carrying the water for 100 yards. Here they brought up their children ill-nourished and amid sordid surroundings…”

The speaker was Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, in his home district of Austin, describing the “slum tarnish” he observed during a Christmas Day walk through town. He made his remarks in a radio address to his constituents (this was well before LBJ himself got into the radio business), hoping to win their support for something new in town: public housing. The address became known as his “Tarnish” speech.

Here’s a photo (albeit not from Texas) that seems to capture what he was talking about:

slumscene

 

 

 

 

 

Thirty years before he orchestrated the passage of the Fair Housing Act as president, Johnson – whose ambition as a young congressman is captured by this 1937 photo of him shortly after his election, with FDR in Galveston – prevailed in that housing campaign.

lbj1938B

The first public housing in the country built under the 1937 housing act was in Austin. It was segregated, like most public housing that sprang up around the country over the next few decades, but less sordid than what they replaced. LBJ used that word – sordid – to good effect at HUD’s inauguration, when he declared: “Our cities and our new urban age must not be symbols of a sordid society.”

“Sordid” might be an apt description for some blocks of big-city, high-rise public housing, thoroughly segregated, underfunded and bereft of hope, if not sunlight. High rises came into planners’ favor in the ‘40s, but a couple of decades later they were not. For a tidy history of public housing, click here.

Some argue that public housing outside the big inner cities has worked quite well, and perhaps that can be said for places like Vermont, which apparently got into public housing fairly late in the game. (Burlington’s housing authority dates from 1961, and the state’s, from 1968.) If a history of Vermont’s public housing hasn’t been written, it’s a thesis topic in waiting.