Tag Archives: affirmatively furthering fair housing

Hey, what about us backwaters?

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

We’ve mentioned before that much of the literature on affordable housing and affirmatively furthering fair housing focuses on major metropolitan areas and their urban demographics. We’re not immune to all those gnarly issues here in Vermont, but we can’t help but wish for more analysis with a rural focus.

Help may be on the way from HUD, via its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Tool, which promises to provide maps, housing and demographic data for jurisdictions in all parts of the country, including the rural ones. We say “promises” because we can’t seem to get the tool, which is still in development but available for interim inspection, to work for Burlington or the rest of Vermont — the two jurisdictional options. The mapping tool does work on our desktop for New Hampshire and Maine, so it’s possible to get an idea of what sorts of data plots we’ll be able to see for Vermont one of these days.

You can try your luck by clicking here. Then click OK, choose one of the 12 maps you’d like to see (e.g., race/ethnicity, housing choice vouchers, demographics and transportation, etc.), then the state and jurisdiction. If you can get it to work for Vermont, great; if not, choose another place just to get an idea.

When this system is fully functional, it will be accessible to anyone and perhaps will spare HUD grantees the expense of hiring consultants to do the requisite fair-housing analysis.

Meanwhile, rural places like Vermont do have another helpful data source, the Housing Assistance Council, which provides interactive maps with data on the state and county level. Here’s what the Vermont map looks like:

www_ruraldataportal

The darker counties have higher poverty rates. We don’t know how to make the map interactive on this blog, so click here to explore it on the Council’s website. You can click on each county for a wealth of data. You’ll notice that the rural percentage of each county’s population is listed – 100 percent, in most cases, 0 percent in Chittenden County, our very own megalopolis.

 

Putting AFFH under your pillow

Uncategorized, , , ,

You’ve been lying awake at night wondering what affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) will mean in Vermont, right?

cows

Just kidding. If AFFH isn’t on the tip of your tongue yet, we understand. It is, however, an important part of the public policy lexicon, so you might as well start getting used to it. Ted Wimpey’s op-ed in today’s Times Argus is a nice entry point.

Among other things AFFH will afford a fresh look at fair housing choice in Vermont, drawing from data that HUD will provide. This will take the form of “assessment” reports – to be done for Burlington (a federal grant area in its own right) and for the state as a whole.

Chances are, the findings in these reports won’t come as a huge surprise. Consider the “State of Vermont’s “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice,” completed in 2012.

That report addressed, among other things, racial residential patterns. According to the 2010 census, Vermont was 95.3 percent white. Blacks accounted for 1 percent of the 2010 population; Asians, 1.3 percent; and Hispanic residents, 1.5 percent. That analysis defined areas of concentration as double those levels. So, in the case of African Americans, there were 22 census tracts where the percentage of African Americans was 2 percent or higher, five of which were in Burlington.

Compared to concentrations in other, more urban states, Vermont’s numbers are quite low. Still, as Vermont’s draws increasing numbers of people of color, these numbers – and the patterns of concentration – bear watching, and it will be interesting to see how they play out in the coming AFFH assessment.

Fair housing backlash?

Uncategorized, , , , ,

An interesting op-ed in the Times today suggests that two recent boons for fair housing – the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the disparate impact doctrine and HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing rule – might generate a backlash from an unlikely quarter: white liberals. White liberals tend to be supportive of fair housing initiatives, the argument goes, but not necessarily when then that means stepping up racial integration of their own neighborhoods.

The example cited in the op-ed is New York’s Westchester County, where a Republican executive has been fighting a desegregation order for years, apparently with support from white Democrats in a preponderantly Democratic district. A summary of the Westchester fair housing case, as described by the organization that brought the suit that led to the order, can be found here.

TappanZeebridge

The recent push for racial integration in Westchester is sometimes portrayed as an example vigorous fair housing enforcement – or “affirmatively furthering” of fair housing – that has been mostly lacking around the country over the past four decades.

In Vermont, where racial minorities are less than 5 percent of the population, affirmatively furthering fair housing might have a somewhat different thrust – toward socioeconomic integration. The goal would be to ensure that lower-income people generally have housing choices in low-poverty, high opportunity areas. Granted, low income is not a protected class, per se, under the federal Fair Housing Act. But disability is protected class, and people with disability are more likely to be of lower income; and under the state fair housing law, receipt of public assistance is a protected class, too.

Well then, how are liberal Vermonters likely to respond to socioeconomic integration? Drawing on the Westchester analogy, might some people who profess support for diversity and tolerance object to proposals for affordable housing in or near their own neighborhoods? We’ll see.

 

Blast from the fair-housing past

Uncategorized, , ,

As one might expect, the Obama administration has roused fresh criticism by HUD’s release of the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” rule.

The rule has been castigated as a new example of federal “overreach” and as “social engineering”; to which administration defenders reply that the rule isn’t really new, but rather an exposition of a 47-year-old law (the Fair Housing Act), and that the nation’s residentially segregated housing patterns are themselves the product of social engineering.

Before the public debate over AFFH gets too partisan, however, consider the following presidential words:

“Effective enforcement of our nation’s fair housing laws is also essential to ensuring equal opportunity. In the year ahead, we’ll work to strengthen enforcement of fair housing laws for all Americans.”

The speaker was not Obama, but Ronald Reagan, in his 1983 State of the Union address.

reagan

Later in 1983, in a July 9 radio speech, Reagan elaborated on his support of the Fair Housing Act and his intent to fortify it:

“We believe in the bold promise that no person in the United States should be denied full freedom of choice in the selection of housing because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. We’re proposing a series of amendments that will put real teeth into the Fair Housing Act.”

Those amendments included adding disability and familial status as protected classes, a revision accomplished by congressional year passage five years later. Reagan also proposed stepped up enforcement and stiff fines.

“We believe this is an important step for civil rights,” Reagan concluded. “For a family deprived of its freedom of choice in choosing a home, our proposal will mean swift action and strong civil penalties to prevent discrimination in the first place. As I said, we’re committed to fairness and we’re committed to use the full power of the Federal Government whenever and wherever even one person’s constitutional rights are being unjustly denied.”

So much for the notion that vigorous enforcement of the Fair Housing Act is merely a liberal cabal.

Here we go!

Uncategorized, , , , ,

Thriving communities house (2)Welcome to the new website devoted to our “Thriving Communities” campaign. We’d like this space to become a Vermont forum for a continuing discussion of fair housing and affordable housing. These are two distinct but overlapping public policy concerns. They have something in common that we’ll get to in a moment.

Fair housing means the absence of housing discrimination. The federal Fair Housing Act, passed in 1968, sought to give Americans the right to live where they choose without begin discriminated against on the basis of race, color, national origin, or other protected characteristics. Vermont followed up with its own fair housing law about two decades later, expanding the list of protected categories.

Alas, housing discrimination is still with us. Thousands of individual complaints are filed across the country every year, and Vermont has its own share of violations. But beyond the individual cases are systemic, or organizational obstacles to fair housing choice, often in the form of planning, zoning or governmental policies that effectively restrict where certain people – particularly, those of lower income – can live. Nearly half a century after the Fair Housing Act was passed, much of our nation remains heavily segregated by race and by economic status.

Affordable housing, by the standard definition, is housing that doesn’t consume more than 30 percent of a household’s income. Families who pay more than that are termed “burdened”; and those who pay more than 50 percent, “severely burdened.” Unfortunately, these terms apply to a large share of Vermont’s renters. That’s because (a) market prices put housing out of reach, and (b) there aren’t anywhere near enough subsidized housing units to accommodate lower-income renters.

One goal of “Thriving Communities” – and of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a key sponsor – is to reduce pockets of poverty and to proactively promote inclusive communities of high opportunity. We want to encourage municipalities to welcome more affordable housing – multi-family housing, in particular – that’s located in mixed-income neighborhoods, in close proximity to town centers, transit and other vital services.

OK, so what do these two issues – fair housing and affordable housing — have in common? They’re both off the political radar.   Housing segregation and unaffordability are both major national problems, disadvantaging tens of millions, but they get very little attention from presidential candidates or Sunday talk shows.

Why the disconnect? We welcome your comments on this or on our posts to come. We’ll try to be newsy.