Tag Archives: segregation

Segregation back on the table

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Here are a couple of readings that expand on some of our previous posts on the inexorable AFFH theme:

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“Segregation 101” takes off from an August Times story on Section 8 (that is, racial) discrimination in metropolitan St. Louis. One obstacle to locating more Section 8 voucher holders in middle-class suburbs, the story notes, is a relative lack of rental apartments in such suburbs — in part because of zoning practices that favor single-family homes.

“Segregation Conversation Goes National” offers another rebuttal to the controversial Edsall op-ed and advocates a dual approach to the housing affordability crisis: investing in poor neighborhoods and, on one hand, and settling more poor people in “opportunity-rich” middle-class neighborhoods, on the other. (That seems to be the strategy that Justice Kennedy implicitly endorsed in his disparate impact decision, as we noted previously.)

There’s also a reference to a regional program in Chicago that helps disperse urban Section 8-holders to outlying suburbs. (For an account in The Atlantic, click here.) Elements of that might translate well to Vermont, where the Section 8 program outside of Burlington and several other cities, is already administered by a “regional” agency (Vermont State Housing Authority) that covers the rest of the state.

Meanwhile, the Times lands another editorial today another segregation motif — racial discrimination by real estate agents around the country.

 

Once more, with feeling

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It’s not every day that we can praise the New York Times editorial board for following in Thriving Communities’ wake. Saturday’s editorial, which borrows its headline, “The Architecture of Segregation,” from a study we posted about last month. The editorial, while noting this two summer’s “positive” developments – the Supreme Court’s disparate impact decision and HUD’s AFFH rule – rightly takes federal officials to task for failing, over many years, to enforce the Fair Housing Act. And the editorial invokes Walter Mondale’s comments at the HUD conference last week about how the act’s intent is “not fulfilled” by exclusionary land-use planning.

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While government deserves a good share of the blame for the present state of residential racial segregation, there are those in the community of fair housing advocates who contend that the real estate industry has been at fault, too. How else to account for the fact that upper-middle-income black families don’t have comparable access to the neighborhoods where their upper-middle-income white family peers live.

Indeed, one factor that may have contributed to segregated patterns is the choice of many whites to opt out of integrated communities, as Stacy Seicshnaydre pointed out in a law journal article last year, “The Fair Housing Choice Myth.” And one way to address that, Seicshnaydre argued, is to defund exclusion — as application of the AFFH rule promises to do, at least in theory.

Meanwhile, HUD conferees were reminded last week, redlining is still with us, and new cases are in the pipeline.

 

Highlights from fair housing conference

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Here’s Fritz Mondale, former VP and co-sponsor of the Fair Housing Act, speaking yesterday about what it took to get the bill through Congress. Among other things, it required support from “Lincoln Republicans” and a nudge from President Johnson.

The venue was HUD’s National Fair Housing Conference, in Washington, for which Mondale was the keynoter.

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And here’s Richard Rothstein, of the Economic Policy Institute, debunking the national myth of “de facto segregation” — and explaining how residential racial segregation has been a result of conscious public policy on the part of federal, state and local governments.

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There but for the grace of God go we

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A report is out from The Century Foundation that exposes interesting national demographic trends that appear, on their face, to have little to do with Vermont. We’re not so sure, though.

“The Architecture of Segregation,” by Paul Jargowsky, argues that the number of high-poverty neighborhoods nationally has increased significantly since 2000 and that poverty has become more concentrated – in part because of policy choices that could be changed to produce a different result. As is typical with national-scale reports like this, the focus is on major metropolitan areas, such as Detroit or St. Louis, so the Vermont reader is left wondering what any of this has to do with us – even if we do want to understand sociological trends around the country that help explain events in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. (Note of regional interest: the metro area with both the highest black concentration of poverty and the highest Hispanic concentration of poverty is a little more than a stone’s throw away: Syracuse, N.Y.)

Well, Vermont may not have poverty concentrations in the scale of the metro areas, but it’s still worth considering whether similar trends feeding disparate residential patterns have been at work here. For example, many suburbs have grown at the expense of cities they surround. Jargowosky’s word for that grown is “cannibalistic.”

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“In virtually all metropolitan areas, suburban rings grew much faster than was needed to accommodate metropolitan population growth,” he writes. That has a ring of familiarity around here. Burlington’s population has been fairly stagnant; the big housing growth is indeed in the suburbs. But to what extent does the new housing reflect the income distribution in the population? What share of the new rental complexes rising from the fields in Williston, for example, are “affordable”?

Jargowskyomes to two conclusions that could have some application here, or at least are worth thinking about:

“Our highly dispersed and profoundly unequal distribution of housing is not inevitable; indeed, it is not the norm around the world. The two main changes that need to occur are simple to state, but hard to bring about. First, the federal and state governments must begin to control suburban development so that it is not cannibalistic: new housing construction must be roughly in line with metropolitan population growth.”

Exactly how state government here (in the absence of county government) would attempt to assert such “control” is an open question.

“Second, every city and town in a metropolitan area should be required to ensure that the new housing built reflects the income distribution of the metropolitan area as a whole. To some, this suggestion may seem like a massive intervention in the housing market.  In fact, exclusionary zoning is already a massive intervention in the housing market that impedes a more equitable distribution of affordable housing.”

This brings us back to beating the drum for inclusionary zoning, which is sadly missing throughout the state, including the booming suburbs of Chittenden County.

 

Ferguson and beyond

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The Times had a story over the weekend on housing segregation in St. Louis region, including Ferguson. Focus was on African American holders of Section 8 vouchers who found themselves limited in where they could move. St. Louis County, it seems, does not have protection for them.

We note here that programs that have sent minority voucher holders to low-poverty areas, in suburban Chicago and Baltimore, for example, have brought benefits in education and employment. We also note that in Vermont, receipt of public assistance is a protected class, so refusing to rent to a Section 8 voucher holder is illegal.

 

 

 

Fair housing backlash?

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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.

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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.

 

New push for integration

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When the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its AFFH rule yesterday, it was the second cause for celebration among fair housing advocates in the last two weeks.

The first was the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the disparate impact doctrine — a key civil rights enforcement mechanism, under which housing policies can be found discriminatory on the basis of their effects, not merely their intent.

The second was the long-awaited AFFH rule. AFFH stands for “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” language contained in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 but not fully elucidated until yesterday.

Essentially, as HUD summarizes it, the rule is a means of overcoming segregation and fostering inclusive communities. This is entirely in keeping with the intent of the Fair Housing Act’s original sponsors – chief among them Sens. Walter Mondale and Ed Brook, who can be seen flanking LBJ as the president signs the legislation into law on April 11, 1968.

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The main point of the Act according to Mondale, “was to replace the segregated living patterns with ‘truly integrated and balanced living patterns.’” To Brooke, the act was meant to break the “dreary cycle of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs and the rapid deterioration of the central city.” (They said as much in their amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the disparate impact case.)

Their vision hasn’t exactly played out over the last half-century, as most major metropolitan areas remain highly segregated. Consider Boston, for example, which has a white/black dissimilarity index of 68. On a scale of 0 to 100, 0 represents total integration and 100, total segregation. Any place that registers over 60 is considered highly segregated. (The State of Vermont, by contrast, came in at 38.8, according to a 2012 report.)

In this map of the Boston area, based on 2010 Census data by Eric Fischer, red dots represent white people; blue dots, black people; orange, Hispanics; and green, Asians.

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Similar maps, some even starker in the depiction of racial separation, can be seen for most major U.S. cities. The AFFH rule, which makes operational the Fair Housing Act’s intent, is seen as a tool that will help overcome these longstanding segregated patterns.

Even though Vermont is 95 percent white, AFFH will have broad application here. After all, a major thrust is to break up pockets of poverty and promote inclusive settlement patterns that give people in protected classes – among them, racial minorities and disabled people – the choice to live in low-poverty areas with access to transit and good services. Vermont has plenty of room for more housing development in keeping with AFFH standards.