Tag Archives: Baltimore

Not so easy

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A key goal of affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH), as it’s envisioned playing out around the country, is to break up concentrations of poverty and to promote socioeconomic and racial integration. That means ensuring opportunities for lower-income people and racial minorities to live in wealthier, “high opportunity” neighborhoods with access to jobs, goods schools and public services.

Two ways to facilitate those opportunities:

  • Promote regional mobility among people with Section 8 vouchers, enabling them to leave high-poverty areas and move into more well-to-do communities. This can require increasing their housing allowance so that they can afford higher suburban rents.
  • Build affordable, multifamily rental housing in those same, heretofor exclusive neighborhoods.

Both of these approaches deserve consideration around here, as Vermonters contemplate how to make their communities more socioeconomically inclusive. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see how they’ve played out in an entirely different environment: metropolitan Baltimore.Baltimore1

First, some background: Baltimore has a long history of racial segregation (click here for a trenchant account), and in the mid-1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was sued by city residents (Thompson vs. HUD) for its failure to eliminate segregation in public housing. In 2005, a federal judge found that HUD had violated the Fair Housing Act by maintaining existing patterns of impoverishment and segregation in the city and by failing to achieve “significant desegregation” in the Baltimore region.

Seven years later, a court-approved settlement resolved the case in a way that anticipated the AFFH rule that HUD issued this past summer.

The settlement called on HUD to continue the Baltimore Mobility Program, begun in 2003 in an earlier settlement phase. The program has provided housing vouchers to more than 2,600 families to move out of poor, segregated neighborhoods and into areas with populations that are less than 10 percent impoverished and less than 30 percent black. The program provides counseling before and after the move and has received high marks from evaluators who cite improved educational and employment outcomes for beneficiaries. A similar regional program is underway in Chicago.

The settlement also called for affordable-housing development in these “high-opportunity” suburban communities – 300 units a year through 2020. To make this happen, HUD was to provide new financial incentives for developers.

Here is where the story takes a dispiriting turn. Three years later, not a single developer has applied for the incentives. No affordable housing projects are even in the pipeline. That’s according to an eye-opening story the other day in the Baltimore Sun.Baltimore2

So, what happened? Why haven’t developers shown any interest? HUD had no explanation, according to the story, which suggested that perhaps the program hadn’t been well-enough publicized: a prominent builder of affordable housing admitted he didn’t even know about the incentives. Could it be that they weren’t generous enough?

Whatever the reason, the Baltimore experience reflects how difficult it can be to introduce affordable housing to privileged enclaves. No one should underestimate the AFFH challenge.

Good news, mostly

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  • Little backyard houses — aka “accessory dwelling units” — are springing up all over Vancouver. vancouver This is a partial remedy to the affordable rental shortage that afflicts municipalities all over North America, including Vermont. It also affords an optional living arrangement for older people who want to age in place. In Vancouver, these appendages are called “laneway houses,” and some of them are pretty handsome. There’s plenty of room for additions like this in Burlington, even if we don’t have alleys — and in plenty of other Vermont communities, too.
  •  A “mobility program” in heavily segregated Baltimore moves families from high-poverty public housing complexes in the city to higher-rent, higher-opportunity suburbs. This is an initiative very much in the spirit of affirmatively furthering fair housing, but it serves a small fraction of the subsidy-eligible families in need and it operates largely under the radar, to minimize opposition. One obstacle: a shortage of affordable housing in suburban communities.
  • Plattsburgh has a new 64-unit affordable housing complex, called Homestead on Ampersand.  plattsburgh2It’s just a couple of miles from the neighborhood where complaints about a proposal for a smaller affordable housing complex prevailed.
  • Columbus, Ohio, plans to transform a vacant downtown building into “workforce housing” – which in this case means housing for people who make $40,000 to $60,000 a year. The made-over building would feature micro units – apartments of 300 square feet or so and targeted, presumably, to single Millennials. We’ve touched on the micro movement before, which seems to be taking hold mostly in bigger metro areas (here’s a roundup with a national map; for a more substantial study of the phenomenon, click here).   But it has also spread to Kalamazoo and, as we’ve noted, Syracuse, so there’s no reason it couldn’t work in an over-priced city like Burlington, where officialdom is forever wringing its hands about how young professionals have trouble finding affordable accommodations.

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.