Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy

John M. Goering

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807841563, 9780807817070
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610986
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Housing desegregation is one of America's last civil rights frontiers. Drawing on the expertise of social scientists, civil rights attorneys, and policy analysts, these original essays present the first comprehensive examination of housing integration and federal policy covering the last two decades. This collection examines the ambiguities of federal fair housing law, the shifting attitudes of white and black Americans toward housing integration, the debate over racial quotas in housing, and the efficacy of federal programs.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in federally assisted housing, and Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned discrimination in most of the private housing market. Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy shows that America has made only modest progress in desegregating housing, despite these federal policies.

Providing a balanced assessment of federal policies and programs is complicated because of disagreement over the nature of the federal government's role in this area. Disagreements over the meaning of federal law coupled with white and black disinterest in desegregation have compounded the difficulties in promoting residential integration.

The authors employ research findings as well as legal and policy analysis in examining these complex issues. They consider a broad range of issues related to housing desegregation and integration, offering new sources of evidence and ideas for future research and policymaking.

Originally published in 1986.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Section IV
Racial Desegregation and Federal Housing Policies

Introduction

JOHN M. GOERING

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been kicked out of my home,” one elderly Texas resident recently complained. Another felt they were all being “shoved around like cattle” (Newsweek 1983:18, 20). Seventy-nine-year-old Iva Sewell’s reaction was adamant: “no matter what happens, I’m not moving over yonder to that colored neighborhood” (“Desegregation Order” 1983). These reactions, from residents of federally subsidized public housing, arose after a federal court ordered twenty-five white and a like number of black tenants to swap apartments to achieve desegregation. The public housing authority (PHA) of Clarksville, Texas, had violated the Constitution, the federal judge stated, by creating and maintaining racially separate housing projects, flouting “the law of the land by purposefully selecting and assigning tenants by race for the purpose of segregating them by race” (Lucille Young v. Housing Authority 1983:6).

Such purposeful, illegal segregation is not confined solely to Clarksville. An additional sixty public housing authorities, for example, are currently the subject of intense examination as part of another federal court suit, Young v. Pierce. In this case, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is accused of having “knowingly acquiesced” in the maintenance of racially segregated housing systems throughout East Texas. The plaintiffs are seeking the elimination of discrimination and the desegregation of both public and assisted housing throughout thirty-nine East Texas counties. HUD should, the plaintiffs charge, end its complacency and act to “affirmatively further” the policies of fair housing. This “affirmative” mandate includes movement toward a more racially balanced pattern of occupancy (Young v. Pierce 1982; Clarence Givens v. Prairie Creek 1985).

The Young case has not yet gone to trial, although the issues in the case are similar enough to the earlier Clarksville decision to have sparked considerable activity by HUD. These actions began with four underlying premises. First, whatever actions were taken should not involve the massive, mandatory transfer of tenants as the first or only remedy. Second, the public housing authorities must be given the responsibility of proposing effective solutions that suit the characteristics and needs of their own tenants. Third, HUD would concentrate its attention on PHAs that were already in violation, or apparent noncompliance, with Title VI. Title VI, the 1964 law prohibiting discrimination in federally assisted housing, is the specific legal tool around which remedies would be fashioned. The fourth and final premise for HUD’s actions was that the Title VI enforcement process would be implemented in coordination with HUD’s funding of the rehabilitation or modernization of the physical condition of the public housing stock.

The initial step in this process was a February 1984 notice by HUD’s secretary ordering the “disestablishment” of racially dual public housing systems. HUD, he wrote, was beginning a “more comprehensive and intense” response to the problem of segregated public housing in East Texas than had ever been undertaken (Pierce 1984). Each PHA then submitted a plan for the relocation of tenants to achieve some level of measurable desegregation, using available vacancies and waiting list applicants. No clear record of successes or failures is yet available from this initial effort. Initial indications are that there have been varying reactions from the executive directors and tenants. In some PHAs, only lip service is given to complying with HUD’s order to desegregate. Tenants provide medical exemptions that prevent their moving, there are no vacancies of the right size to accommodate desegregating moves, or there are not enough applicants for available apartments. In other resistant PHAs, white tenants leave their subsidized units and move to private market housing or to subsidized housing in other communities. Another group of PHAs has been cooperative and has achieved modest levels of desegregation in roughly two years. Whites have moved into previously all-black projects, and blacks, often the elderly, have moved into white projects. Some executive directors have gone to all available sources, including churches, clubs, nursing homes, and factories, to find new applicants to balance the racial composition of their waiting lists. There are also some PHAs where it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve significant levels of desegregation. PHAs that have an overwhelmingly minority or all-white population in occupancy and on their waiting lists have few options to achieve system-wide desegregation.

Efforts to desegregate the nation’s public housing stock were extended to the entire nation in 1985. In January, all of HUD’s regional offices were instructed to begin the process of eliminating racial segregation that resulted from “official actions.” PHAs are to be examined on an individual basis in order to design remedies that will be hand-tailored as well as effective. In February 1985, public housing authorities were informed that their chances of receiving a portion of fiscal year 1985 funding for the rehabilitation or modernization of public housing units would significantly increase if their modernization plans were linked to housing desegregation. A large portion of the $80 million in funding was made available in 1985 to complement efforts to desegregate authorities illegally segregating tenants. Thus, in 1985, HUD began what appears to be an aggressive effort to use its manpower and resources to reduce the level of segregation in its low-rent public and assisted housing stock.

HUD’s actions, however, are likely to be constrained by the fact that there is incomplete agreement within the Executive Branch of the federal government about how federal resources should be used to promote desegregation. Questions have been raised about the legality of using race-conscious desegregation practices in the absence of a finding of purposeful or intentional discrimination. Budget officials have questioned the wisdom of using federal dollars to “reward” PHAs that have broken the law. Critics wonder why PHAs that have used HUD’s funding for decades to illegally segregate their housing are to be again funded to undo these past practices. No one, indeed, is sure of whether the existing limited resources of the federal government are capable of efficiently and thoroughly reviewing the racial occupancy of nearly 3,000 PHAs and 10,000 projects in efforts to hand-tailor desegregation strategies. Monitoring these individual plans to ensure compliance will be a mountainous task, with no existing data systems in place to record transitions in racial occupancy (Rodrigue 1985).

Proposed reductions in HUD’s funding for the operation and repair of the public housing stock in 1986 and 1987 will also limit its ability to promote desegregation. Scarce resources will have to be targeted on emergency repairs and the most physically inadequate housing, leaving few if any resources to use as incentives for desegregation (Kurtz 1985 :A1; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1985). Congress may also elect to focus on other housing priorities, further limiting HUD’s ability to desegregate or “deconcentrate” its housing.

There is indeed a long history of congressional pressures that have altered many of the original objectives of the federal low-rent public housing program, introducing numerous programmatic changes that have made it difficult to administer HUD’s Title VI desegregation requirements at the same time all of its other rules and requirements are adhered to. There are, in fact, so many potentially conflicting requirements regarding the selection, or preference, systems for tenants that even well-run PHAs have difficulty understanding their multiple obligations. Conversely, skillful public housing managers can readily use HUD’s myriad requirements to mask discriminatory purposes (Wood 1982:71; Struyk and Blake 1982:84-92; Kaplan 1985). That is, the long history of evolving legislative and judicial pressures on the operation of the public housing program has not produced a simple nor readily administrable program, regardless of issues of race. Incompetent public housing managers may readily mismanage all aspects of public housing, including race-related tenant selection and assignment (Miller 1985).

Congressional and Executive Branch concerns about desegregation are not the only obstacles to HUD’s recent initiatives. The sheer size of the problem facing federal planners is awesome. There are nearly 10 million residents of federally assisted housing living in 3.7 million units, with a majority of them in segregated projects. Housing for the elderly is predominantly white and HUD’s family projects are either racially mixed or predominantly black and Hispanic. Newer, Section 8 housing also tends to be more heavily occupied by whites whereas the older, traditional public housing stock is predominantly minority (Burke 1984, 1985).

The size of the problem would in the long run be manageable if there were cooperation from the public housing authorities and jurisdictions subject to desegregation efforts. However, the racially motivated resistance mentioned earlier is likely to be encountered in most localities. A recent, eight-day series of articles in the Dallas Morning News, for instance, uncovered blatant examples of racist attitudes of state and local housing officials throughout many parts of the United States. Public housing officials were openly critical of the federal court order in Clarksville, labeling it “communistic,” admitted they were using “scare tactics” to keep blacks out of the predominantly white Section 8 housing program, and were unwilling to respond to HUD’s new desegregation plans. One PHA board member stated: “Unless we’re forced to (integrate) I don’t see why we’d have to.... Now, if it would be absolutely necessary, if the courts and a judge said so, then we’d have to. But I don’t see any point in it” (Flournoy and Rodrigue 1985:8A). Not only is there likely to be resistance to recent desegregation plans, but there is also deeply entrenched resistance to the location of low- and moderate-income rental housing for families in communities throughout the nation. Suburban jurisdictions often resist accepting housing families because of the fear of an influx of minority poor (Rodrigue and Flournoy 1985).

This opposition has been at the core of previous failures of HUD policies to promote residential desegregation or deconcentration. After the passage of major fair housing legislation in the 1960s, Congress and the courts looked for new means by which HUD programs could reduce the segregation and spatial isolation of minority poor households. The chapters in this section provide assessments of most of the major policy tools designed and implemented during the 1970s that were aimed at fostering racial “deconcentration,” or more “open” patterns of racial occupancy.

Vernarelli provides a basic chronology and assessment of efforts to promote some form of racial “spatial deconcentration.” A variety of internal HUD working groups struggled to provide clearer focus for the 1974 congressional requirement to reduce the spatial isolation of the minority poor. He accurately summarizes many of the judicial and legislative pressures that led to modest demonstrations, to HUD inaction, and, by 1981, to a softening of HUD’s requirements related to the siting or location of assisted housing (Egan et al. 1981). The Regional Housing Mobility Program, for example, was initiated in 1979 to provide incentives to regional planning bodies to expand housing opportunities across jurisdictional boundaries, linking city to suburbs. With $2 million in initial funding for housing counseling programs, Section 8 housing certificates were to be exchanged among cooperating PHAs.

This modest effort to promote spatial deconcentration, however, quickly became the subject of intense criticism. Opponents of the program said there was a conspiracy on the part of the federal government, and others in private research centers, to forceably move black people out of central cities in order to make room for wealthier whites who wished to return (Calmore 1979). The Regional Housing Mobility Program, it was argued (De Bernardo 1979:7), was designed to move inner-city minorities from the cities to suburban “South African-style bantusans or concentration camps.” Organizations that were funded to implement regional mobility plans confronted such criticisms at the local level, with the program characterized “as an experiment devised by insensitive people to toy with other people’s lives” (Truslow 1982).

Black elected officials and some civil rights organizations joined in the attack on the goal of spatial deconcentration. They argued that the program would “destroy” nonwhite political and cultural ties in the city because of the broad prohibitions against building low-income housing in segregated areas (Calmore 1979). “Mayors and even some HUD officials say the policy conflicts with other HUD objectives and is restrictive and arbitrary, ‘allowing housing only where it’s not wanted and not putting it where the people are in dire need,’ in the words of Victor Marrero, HUD’s undersecretary” (Stanfield 1980:1024; McKay 1977:187).

Even a HUD-commissioned assessment of the Regional Housing Mobility Program concluded that “enabling a household to move to a greater number of jurisdictions without increasing the available supply of affordable, decent housing there merely increases the number of areas where a household may look for yet unavailable housing” (Metropolitan Action 1982:89). PHAs were reluctant to participate in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I Perspectives on Housing Integration
• Section II Segregation and Discrimination in Housing
• Section III Social and Attitudinal Factors Affecting Housing Integration
• Section IV Racial Desegregation and Federal Housing Policies
• Concluding Remarks
• Contributors
• Index