Category Archives: segregation

Sleeper issue snoozes on

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cnbcdebateWe’ve read through the transcripts of the two GOP-presidential-candidate debates held on CNBC last night, in order that — to steal one of Gail Collins’ recurrent lines — you don’t have to do it.

The two debates, of course, featured the “undercard,” with four candidates, and the “main card,” with 10.

In nearly four hours of discussion, the word “housing” was uttered once. That was when Rand Paul lambasted the Federal Reserve Board for, among other alleged malfeasances, having “caused the housing boom and the crisis…”

The candidates had nothing to say — nor were they asked by their CNBC interlocutors — about the housing unaffordability that afflicts millions of Americans, or about persistent residential segregation by race and income. And they had virtually nothing to say about the bubble-burst that ushered in the Great Recession. Maybe that’s partly because the bubble was fed by the kind of deregulation that small-government proponents are fond of promoting.

True, six of these candidates had been given brief opportunities to hold forth at a daylong “housing summit” in New Hampshire that we noted last week (here’s yet another account of that event, by the way), but it seems unlikely they were each talked out after that experience. Perhaps they, their fellow contenders, and the CNBC panel all agree with Chris Christie’s comment at the summit that housing is an unsexy issue that “kind of depresses people.”

On the other hand, the candidates talked a lot last night about other things they presumably think are depressing, such as ”big government” and taxes. One might have expected that housing could get some attention in a debate that was supposed to focus on economic matters.

Perhaps the candidates believe that their various plans for shrinking government and “growing” the economy will jump-start the private market to spur housing development, raise incomes of working families, and take care of the affordable housing problem. If so, it would be nice if they’d explain in some detail how that will work.

It would be even nicer if reporters would start making them talk about it.

 

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.

 

NJ’s lessons for VT

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The Times’ Sunday editorial was a ringing endorsement of affirmatively furthering fair housing as put into practice in Mount Laurel, N.J. Mount Laurel, of course, was the epicenter of a fair housing lawsuit that resulted in state supreme court rulings in 1975 and 1983 known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine.

mtlaurel1

Essentially, the doctrine held that every town must make room for people of all incomes and can’t legitimately exclude low or moderate income people through restricting planning and zoning policies. The Fair Share Housing Center, a primary litigant in the case that led to the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel that’s lauded by the editorial, calls it “one of the most significant civil rights cases in the United States since Brown v. Board of Education (1954).”

That statement might sound self-serving, but it has some credence, given that other states all over the country – including Vermont – have at least paid lip service to this principle. (For a quick summary of the Doctrine and how it resonates in Vermont, check out our previous blog post on this.

One thing that was missing from the editorial was any invocation of the incisive language in the New Jersey justices’ rulings. Like this, from Mount Laurel I:

“By way of summary, what we have said comes down to this. As a developing municipality, Mount Laurel must, by its land use regulations, make realistically possible the opportunity for an appropriate variety and choice of housing for all categories of people who may desire to live there, of course including those of low and moderate income. It must permit multi-family housing, without bedroom or similar restrictions, as well as small dwellings on very small lots, low cost housing of other types and, in general, high density zoning, without artificial and unjustifiable minimum requirements as to lot size, building size and the like, to meet the full panoply of these needs. Certainly when a municipality zones for industry and commerce for local tax benefit purposes, it without question must zone to permit adequate housing within the means of the employees involved in such uses…” (emphasis added)

Those guidelines are as apt today as when that opinion was written, in 1975 – 40 years ago!

Another thing missing from the editorial was anything more than a passing reference to complexities and controversies that attended efforts to implement the doctrine in municipalities across the state. It’s a long and tangled story, and while it’s true as the Times intones that “some local officials are working diligently to turn back the clock…” and that “Gov. Chris Christie and his allies in some of the state’s wealthy towns would like nothing more than to kill this remedy…” there is an added complication in many communities, and this one has resonance in Vermont, too.

newjersey2

Some of the challenges New Jersey’ Sussex County faces in providing more affordable housing, according to this New Jersey Herald account, may sound familiar here:

“ ….a shortfall of utilities — sewer, water, electric — to accommodate more housing and population; and a lack of practical public transportation in the area that limits the ability for low- and moderate-income people to get to decent-paying jobs.

“But the most glaring problem is that with the population declining and the economy volatile, the county is not an ideal place for developers to invest.”

 

We’re full, so go somewhere else

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density1When someone says that a town or a city is “built out,” what does that mean? It often means simply that the speaker doesn’t want any more people moving in – even though it might be possible to design more space, in keeping with local standards, that would accommodate more people.

The common claim that a city has run out of room reflects not a physical reality, but rather, an exclusionary prejudice, as Emily Badger suggests in a thought-provoking piece in the Washington Post. She points to widely varying population densities of major “First World” cities (Seattle, 3,000 people per square mile; New York, 4,500; Paris, 9,500; London, 14,600). How can anyone in San Francisco, even with its topographical challenges, argue that that city is “built out” at a mere 5,400 people per square mile? In fact, according a Berkeley economist, the city could accommodate 30-40 percent more people without losing its character.

Building higher and shrinking parking lots can seem reasonable as planning options, but there are limits. In Burlington (2,730 people per square mile), for example, any building higher than about 12 stories would likely be seen as excessive, and no one is ready to enforce a dramatic reduction in vehicles plying the city’s roads. There is such a thing as overcrowding, too (HUD’s so-called Keating memo calls for a limit of two people per bedroom), but of course most American communities are nowhere near their limit.

The most densely populated municipality in Vermont is undoubtedly Winooski , about 4,800 people per square mile.

winooski

And Winooski, when you meander through it, doesn’t come across as particularly dense – much of its 1.5 square miles is occupied by single-family lots, after all. It could get denser and still be less so than LA (6,000 people per square mile) or Madrid (12,100) – never mind Mexico City (25,100) or Jakarta (24,500).

Nationally, exclusionary land-use practices have had the effect of holding down housing supply and pushing up housing prices. Consider California, where housing prices began to soar above those in the rest of the country starting around 1970. One reason California diverged, according to an legislative analysis that came out earlier this year, is housing construction has been limited – by community resistance, environmental policies and other factors – in coastal urban areas. That has driven up prices there and inland as well.

The legislative analyst called for policy changes that would lead to significantly more housing along the coast. Here again, the suggested remedy for unaffordability was a familiar one: increase the housing supply. But does anyone believe that can be left simply to market forces?

Moreover, merely eliminating exclusionary policies and increasing density, while favoring more affordability, aren’t necessarily sufficient to promote inclusiveness, or integration. The pro-density strategy has to be combined with affirmatively fair housing, as Jamaal Green argues in this Shelterforce article.

 

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.”

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.

Carrots and sticks

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Affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) is a recurrent theme on this website, so if you’re still not conversant with the phrase, today’s post is another opportunity. Essentially, the AFFH rule issued by HUD over the summer represents a reinvigorated push to promote inclusive communities and to break up concentrated areas of segregation and poverty that the 1968 Fair Housing Act was intended to dispel.

AFFH

If for no other reason, you should become familiar with AFFH because it’s a key addition to contemporary American civil rights vocabulary. You can bone up on previous posts here,  or here, or delve in to some of this website’s Resources.

And if you’re a citizen committed to supporting affordable housing development in mixed-income, higher opportunity areas, your role may be important than you thought. Consider this excerpt from an essay by Michael Allen, a partner in the civil rights law firm of Relman, Dane & Colfax and one of the leading legal lights nationally in fair housing litigation:

“What HUD produced is a Final Rule long on ‘carrots,’ but painfully short on ‘sticks.’ To compound that problem, HUD does not currently have—and is very unlikely to acquire—sufficient resources to police the compliance of 1200 block grant recipients and 3400 public housing agencies. As a consequence, the promise of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) mandate is likely to be realized only in communities where grassroots and legal advocates mobilize and create their own enforcement strategies. The success of the Final Rule will depend on this grassroots mobilization, on a community-by-community basis, all over the country. That means advocates, collectively, need to step up to the plate and provide the tools and resources for a sustained ‘ground game.’”

As for “carrots” that municipalities can offer for affordable housing development, the Fair Housing Project’s own Ted Wimpey offered a nice summation in his August testimony to the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: inclusionary zoning, density bonuses and impact-fee reductions, among others.