Tag Archives: Vermont

Socioeconomic segregation: On the rise?

July 20, 2015Uncategorizedfair housing, integration, socioeconomic segregation, VermontTed Wimpey

Across the country, residential segregation by race has declined slightly over the last 40 years, since the Fair Housing Act was passed, but it’s still pronounced in major metropolitan areas. Residential segregation by income, however, has been on the rise since 1970.

So say three sociologists in a journal article published this month, “Neighborhood Income composition by Household Race and Income, 1990-2009.” This one of several scholarly articles in recent years documenting the increase in socioeconomic segregation nationally.

Studies like this typically focus on urban areas, so one might wonder how much their findings apply to a demographic outlier like Vermont. Still, it’s worth considering whether some conclusions resonate here. Here’s one:

“(M)iddle-class households are typically located in neighborhoods that are more similar to those of low-income households than to those of high-income households. That is, high-income households re more segregated from middle-class and poor households than low-income households re from the middle class and the rich.”

This is consistent with an earlier study of residential segregation by income that found that “During the last four decades, the isolation of the rich has been consistently greater than the isolation of the poor.”

Why might that matter? “The increasing geographic isolation of affluent families means that a significant proportion of society’s resources are concentrated in a smaller and smaller proportion of neighborhoods.”

How Vermont’s neighborhood and regional compositions by income are changing is a dissertation topic waiting to be explored. The 2012 “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” offers a mere snapshot from the 2010 Census. Of the state’s 184 census tracts, there were 23 where at least 51 percent of the residents met the criterion for low-to-moderate income status (less than 80 percent median income). Here they are again:

Is the number of LMI districts on the rise in Vermont or not? Perhaps the upcoming state assessment, to be undertaken under HUD’s new affirmatively furthering fair housing rule, will offer some clues.

Affordable housing in ski areas, or not

July 17, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, employment, ski areas, VermontTed Wimpey

When Vermont’s “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” was completed in 2012, it listed as one of Vermont’s “fair housing achievements” the designation of ski areas as possible sites of affordable housing development.

The analysis noted that ski areas are “generally rural, more affluent, and predominantly White areas with high cost housing.” Locating affordable housing in these areas would help spread such housing around the state and avert concentration in urban centers. Moreover, some resorts promote themselves as year-round destinations, so the housing needs of their employees aren’t necessarily seasonal.

In fact, the Vermont’s Allocation Plan for federal and state affordable housing tax credits explicitly mentions, as one of the possible qualifications for receiving such credits, providing “workforce housing in ski areas” – particularly when locating such housing in the nearest town center is not feasible and when the community’s need for affordable housing is underserved.

Fine. How much affordable housing has been developed in ski-area towns under those criteria over the last three years?

None. This fair housing “achievement” is in the vision, not the doing.

OK, so how do ski areas stack up when it comes to providing affordable housing?

Again, we can look at these areas as employment centers (how many jobs they offered in 2014, from the Labor Department’s site)

and total their subsidized housing units, if any, from the Directory of Affordable Housing on the Housing Data website. As you might expect, the results vary widely.

Killington, for example, had 1,735 jobs in 2014, but no subsidized housing units.

Here are two others that come up empty…

Jay: 2014 job total “confidential,” 0 subsidized units.

Stratton: 887 jobs, 0 subsidized units.

Ski-area towns that are at least on the board for affordable housing:

Stowe: 4,155 jobs, 95 subsidized units

Ludlow: 1,554 jobs, 85 subsidized units.

Waitsfield: 1,355 jobs, 42 subsidized units

Jeffersonville/Cambridge: 1,390 jobs, 39 subsidized units

Dover: 1,161 jobs, 33 subsidized units.

Woodstock: 2,115 jobs, 26 subsidized units.

Warren: 1,029 jobs, 18 subsidized units.

Putting AFFH under your pillow

July 16, 2015UncategorizedAFFH, affirmatively furthering fair housing, fair housing, Times Argus, VermontTed Wimpey

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

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?

July 15, 2015Uncategorizedaffirmatively furthering fair housing, fair housing, integration, segregation, Vermont, Westchester CountyTed Wimpey

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.

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.

Jobs and affordable housing, Part 3

July 14, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, employment centers, subsidized housing, Vermont, workforce housingTed Wimpey

A while back, we introduced the workforce housing index – namely, the number of subsidized housing units for each 100 jobs in a community.

And we listed Vermont municipalities with 2,000 jobs or more — we called them “major employment centers” — with their respective indices. Winooski topped them all, followed by Barre City and Springfield.

Well, what about the rest of the state – especially the municipalities with 500 to 2,000 jobs, which we’ll call “medium employment centers”? How do they rate?

Let’s start with the municipalities that have zero subsidized units — that is, places that are fairly strong on employment opportunity but weak on housing affordability. Here they are, with their 2014 jobs from a Department Labor database in parentheses:

Cambridge (1,390 jobs in 2014), Charlotte (524), Clarendon (1,292), East Montpelier (685), Fairlee (540), Ferrisburgh (547), Highgate (616), Hyde Park (690), Jay (730 jobs in third quarter), Killington (1,735), New Haven (641), Shaftsbury (530), Stratton (529) and Thetford (621).

On the other end, the “medium employment center” with the most subsidized units per 100 workers is Brandon. Brandon had 1,374 jobs and 156 subsidized units, for a workforce housing index of 11.4 — that is, 11.4 units for every 100 workers employed in the town.

Going down the list of municipalities that had between 500 and 1,999 jobs):

Williamstown: 11.3 (subsidized housing units per 100 workers)

Enosburg: 10.1

Townshend: 9.7

Windsor: 9.4

Chester: 9.0

Fair Haven: 8.5

Vernon: 8.5 (note: data preceded Vermont Yankee closing)

Richford: 7.3

West Rutland: 6.9

Ludlow: 5.5

Hardwick: 5.2

Johnson: 5.2

Bradford Town: 5.2

Northfield: 4.9

Poultney: 4.8

Swanton: 4.8

Barton: 4.4

Londonderry: 4.3

Arlington: 4.0

Pittsford: 3.8

Castleton: 3.7

Jericho: 3.3

Putney: 3.2

Waitsfield: 3.1

Dorset: 3.0

Dover: 2.8

Barre Town: 2.8

Norwich: 2.5

Fairfax: 2.4

Bristol: 2.4

Richmond: 2.2

Hinesburg: 2.1

Warren: 1.7

Waterbury: 1.6

Derby: 1.5

Royalton: 1.4

Westminster: 1.1

Georgia: 0.9

Wilmington: 0.6

Rockingham: 0.6

Now, when we bring income data into the mix, we find that there’s a rough, inverse correlation between median family income and the number of subsidized housing units. That’s not surprising. One might expect richer towns to have less housing for low-income people. The pattern doesn’t always hold, though.

Of the 14 municipalities that have no subsidized housing units, 10 have median family incomes above the state average, and four below.

And in the list above, four of the first five municipalities — the ones with the most subsidized units relative to their numbers of employees — are above average in median family income.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that there’s plenty of room to grow affordable housing in the more well-to-do municipalities. After all, shouldn’t lower-paid employees who work in those towns be able to live there? That’s in keeping with the goal of promoting fair housing choice for everyone in low-poverty, high-opportunity locations — places with ready access to good services, schools and transportation.

Where is Vermont’s biggest multi-family housing gap?

July 10, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, Caledonia, Franklin, Grand Isle, low moderate income, multi-family housing, Orleans, VermontTed Wimpey

When housing advocates talk about increasing the stock of affordable housing, they’re typically referring to multi-family rental housing. Not that programs to expand home-ownership for lower income people aren’t important — they are. But it’s generally agreed that the most cost-effective way to alleviate the affordable housing shortage is by developing multi-family complexes.

Vermont is a rural state, of course, and multi-family housing tends to be concentrated in urban and semi-urban areas, such as Chittenden County. Nevertheless, it makes sense to think about other parts of the state where there’s a clear but unfilled need for multifamily housing.

Consider these two maps from the 2012 Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice, which the state Department of Housing and Community Development filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The first map shows 14 census tracts identified as areas where low and moderate income persons (LMI) are concentrated:

The second map shows where multi-family housing is located, as a percentage of all housing. This map also outlines the LMI areas:

So, which counties with concentrations of lower- and middle-income people are short on multi-family housing, and which counties could clearly accommodate more multi-family housing than they have?

Grand Isle, Franklin, Orleans and Caledonia.

New push for integration

July 9, 2015UncategorizedAFFH, affordable housing, Boston, Ed Brook, Fair Housing Act, integration, LBJ, segregation, Vermont, Walter MondaleTed Wimpey

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.

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.

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.

Side trip to Seattle

July 8, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, Burlington, housing density, multi-family housing, Seattle, Seattle Times, single-family zoning, Vermont, zoningTed Wimpey

While our “Thriving Communities” campaign focuses on Vermont, we’re not going to wallow in the parochial. An interesting public dialogue on zoning, affordability and housing density is going on in Seattle, and who knows, maybe there’s a takeaway for us.

What does big-city Seattle have in common with small-town Vermont, besides a foliage season?

Well, much of Seattle is zoned for single-family residences, as are many Vermont municipalities. The news is that a housing advisory panel is poised to recommend scrapping single-family for zoning that allows duplex, triplexes and so forth. Part of the rationale is that single-family districts are perceived to have had an exclusionary effect, by race and socioeconomic class.

The housing advisory panel reportedly wants to forestall Seattle’s becoming a haven for the rich, and one approach is to promote more density — not just in single-family neighborhoods, but also in zones where multifamily housing now limited to four stories could be redrawn to allow six.

If there’s a lesson in this for Vermont, it’s certainly not in the particulars. Seattle’s population exceeds Vermont’s, after all, and Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, could be fit into one of Seattle’s neighborhoods. (Below is an overview photo of two storied Seattle neighborhoods — Queen Anne and Magnolia — that are laced with single-family residences.

No, the Vermont takeway is that people here, too, should be thinking about making their zoning and town planning more accommodating of greater residential density near municipal centers. Not high rises, of course, but affordable multi-family housing on a Vermont scale.

Jobs and affordable housing, Part 2

July 6, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, employment centers, jobs, subsidized housing, Vermont, workforce housingTed Wimpey

It’s not uncommon to hear Vermont employers complain that the high cost of housing is a deterrent to recruiting employees. Everyone knows Vermont needs more affordable housing. The question is, where should new affordable housing best be located?

The Fair Housing Project contends that it should be located near town centers, in mixed income areas that have good access to employment, transit and other services.

Some municipalities offer more affordable housing than others. In an effort to throw some light on where the needs are, we introduced the workforce housing index in our last post. This is the number of subsidized housing units for every 100 jobs in a town. Subsidized units are affordable, by definition, to people earning up to 80 percent the region’s median income, including workers in relatively low paying jobs. (Granted, affordable housing is also in short supply for middle-income workers – teachers or police officers, for example. A more comprehensive workforce housing index would take their needs into account, too.)

Without further ado, here’s how Vermont’s “major employment centers” rank in providing affordable housing. Again, the index is the number of subsidized housing units per 100 jobs:

Winooski: 24.5

Barre City: 9.9

Springfield: 7.5

Brattleboro: 6.9

Burlington: 6.8

Randolph: 6.3

Vergennes: 6.3

Rutland City: 6.1

St. Johnsbury: 5.9

St. Albans Town: 5.7

Bennington: 5.5

St. Albans City: 4.1

Manchester: 4.0

Montpelier: 3.9

Colchester: 3.7

Middlebury: 3.3

Newport: 3.2

South Burlington: 3.2

Lyndon: 2.9

Rutland Town: 2.7

Essex: 2.5

Stowe: 2.2

Morristown: 2.2

Hartford: 2.0

Williston: 1.7

Shelburne: 1.6

Waterbury: 1.6

Derby: 1.5

Milton: 1.4

Woodstock: 1.2

Rockingham: 0.6

A couple of observations: Municipalities with public housing authorities tend to rank high on the list, as might be expected. As for other towns that don’t have public housing authorities, well, some are clearly pulling their weight more than others.

In Chittenden County, Burlington and Winooski have the great majority of subsidized units, but they account for less than half the jobs. (The jobs total of Williston, South Burlington and Essex alone exceeds that of Burlington-Winooski.) Clearly, other Chittenden County towns have a ways to go in meeting the affordable housing needs of their workforces.

Jobs and affordable housing, Part 1

July 3, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, diversity, housing, jobs, Vermont, Winooski, workforce housingTed Wimpey

“Workforce housing” has become a popular term among housing advocates. Its definition varies, but for our purposes, it simply means affordable housing that’s fairly close to the workplaces of lower-and middle-income people.

Now, the ideal is that all the people who make a town’s economy run — the cashiers and the teachers, the home health-care aides and the police officers, the waitresses and the accountants, the secretaries and the tradespeople, from carpenters and plumbers to electricians — should all be able to live in town, if they want. That’s a form of population diversity — in skill sets, in housing options — that the Fair Housing Project wants to encourage: affordable housing for people of mixed incomes near their work sites.

Well then, one might well wonder how the job locations and the affordable housing units in Vermont match up … or don’t, town by town.

There’s no easy way to get at this, but here’s a proxy approach:

Look at municipalities that are employment centers and see how many units of subsidized housing they have.

Of course, “subsidized housing” typically refers to housing for people earning up to 80 percent of the median income, so it’s not the same as housing that accommodates a wide-ranging workforce of middle and above average incomes. But at least we can get an idea of which employment centers are more or less accommodating of lower-paid workers — the cashiers and personal care aides, for example, the two occupations with the most numerous openings in Vermont, according to the Department of Labor. We’ll assume that full-time cashiers and personal care aides qualify for subsidized housing. (Cashiers’ median hourly wage in Vermont last year was $9.73; personal care aides’, $10.99. By contrast, Vermont’s “housing wage” — the hourly rate needed to afford an average apartment without paying more than 30 percent of income– was $19.36.)

As for “employment centers” there were more than 80 Vermont municipalities that offered 500 jobs or more in 2014, according to Department of Labor statistics.

Of those, more than 30 had 2,000 jobs or more. Arbitrarily, we’ll call those the “major employment centers.”

To find out how many subsidized housing units each municipality has, we simply go to the Directory of Affordable Housing on the Housing Data website , pull up all the site-specific units for each town, and add them up.

With these two figures for each municipality — number of jobs and number of subsidized (affordable) housing units — we can derive a seat-of-the-pants workforce housing index: How many subsidized units for each 100 jobs. The higher the index, the more “workforce housing” that community provides.

Well, it turns out that all but one of Vermont’s major employment centers have a workforce housing index under 10 – that is, they each have fewer than 10 affordable housing units for every 100 workers.

The exception is Winooski, where the index is a whopping 24. (The city occupies a mere square mile, much of which is included in the aerial photo above.) Winooski had 2,799 jobs in 2014 and 687 subsidized housing units — the friendliest affordability ratio in Vermont by far.

Which major employment centers in Vermont had the fewest subsidized units? Stay tuned.