The One-Way Street of Integration

Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities

Edward G. Goetz

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501707599
• eBook ISBN: 9781501716690
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

The One-Way Street of Integration examines two contrasting housing policy approaches to achieving racial justice. Integration initiatives and community development efforts have been for decades contrasting means of achieving racial equity through housing policy. Goetz traces the tensions involved in housing integration and policy to show why he doesn't see the solution to racial injustice as the government moving poor and nonwhite people out of their communities.

The One-Way Street of Integration critiques fair housing integration policies for targeting settlement patterns while ignoring underlying racism and issues of economic and political power. Goetz challenges liberal orthodoxy, determining that the standard efforts toward integration are unlikely to lead to racial equity or racial justice in American cities. In fact, in this pursuit it is the community development movement rather that has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and social justice efforts.

1

THE INTEGRATION IMPERATIVE

The fair housing position on the siting of affordable housing is based on the empirical observation that most publicly assisted housing is located in central cities, in higher-poverty neighborhoods, and in neighborhoods dominated by people of color. This is not an item of contention. Analyses since the 1980s have demonstrated and reaffirmed this phenomenon.1 This concentration of assisted units is the result of two “impulses,” according to Tulane University law professor Stacey Seicshnaydre. The first of these is the desire to meet low-cost housing needs by building as many units as possible, wherever possible. The second is NIMBYism, the repeated and consistent resistance to affordable housing that is most prominent in more affluent and white communities. The result of these two dynamics is that most assisted housing follows a “path of least resistance” and ends up in disadvantaged neighborhoods.2

Once there, concentrations of assisted housing contribute to further concentrations of poverty and reinforce patterns of racial segregation.3 There is also, according to some, a durability to neighborhood poverty, meaning that once a neighborhood becomes identified as poor or racially segregated, change that would modify those basic characteristics is unlikely.4 Neighborhood hierarchies can be fairly stable over time. Neighborhoods that rank relatively high in incidence of poverty and racial segregation, for example, tend to remain that way over time, according to this argument. In fact, once poverty and racial segregation are established in a neighborhood, according to sociologists Robert Sampson and Jeffrey Morenoff, “further change is likely to be in the direction of its becoming increasingly poor and black.”5 Finally, there is evidence that the disadvantages of neighborhood are inherited, and that families that remain in lower-income or segregated neighborhoods pass on the disadvantages of place from one generation to the next.6

Given these dynamics, the decision on the part of a needy family to live in subsidized housing often carries with it acceptance of certain neighborhood conditions. Since the 1970s, principals within the fair housing movement have considered publicly assisted housing “to be unfair if those who occupy it or seek to occupy it are thereby forced to live within certain designated areas, prescribed by race and/or income.”7 As a result, publicly assisted housing is, according to the fair housing argument, a means of reinforcing racial inequalities. The residents of subsidized housing, disproportionately people of color, are consigned to neighborhoods in which crime is higher, public services inferior, and the environment more threatening.

To continue affordable housing programs in the manner that they have been operated in the past, according to Chicago civil rights attorney Alex Polikoff, is to “knuckle under, to accept the posture of the political establishment as a fact of life, [and] to permit all or nearly all subsidized housing and assisted housing to go into minority neighborhoods.”8 Fair housing advocates assert that “the great need for low-income housing cannot continue to be used as a justification for the inequity and segregation that results from these programs.”9 Unless integration is an explicit goal of housing assistance programs, and unless those programs are operated consciously and purposefully in a manner to achieve integration, they reinforce and intensify racial segregation and poverty concentration.10 Integration thus occupies a privileged place in the objectives of the contemporary fair housing movement.

Race or Class?

It should be clear already that there is significant fusion of race and class in the integrationist argument. This is so for three reasons: (1) there is great overlap between race and poverty in the United States; (2) some forms of racial discrimination operate through class-based mechanisms; and (3) policies that focus on poverty are less unpopular in the United States than are race-based initiatives. Two central concerns of the fair housing movement, the location of subsidized housing and exclusionary zoning, can serve as useful illustrations. Eligibility for subsidized housing is, of course, determined largely by income and certainly not by race. Fair housing arguments concerning subsidized housing, therefore, are based on the fact that people of color disproportionately reside in subsidized housing. Concerns about exclusionary zoning are also based on the race/income correlation, since the offending land-use regulations typically do not reference race per se but rather make it difficult to build lower-cost housing—the type of housing more frequently needed by people of color because of their lower incomes.11 To address the full range of discriminatory and segregationist factors influencing people of color in American housing markets, therefore, one is forced to talk also about class and income-based restrictions. Finally, it should also be noted that although significant progress has been made in liberalizing racial attitudes in the United States, a large gap persists between public opinion support for abstract notions of racial equity and support for specific public policies to achieve greater equity.12 The more integrationists can talk about poverty rather than race, the more likely they are to see their ideas enshrined in public policy. The prime example of this is the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, which was specifically designed with this political constraint in mind.13 Though modeled on the racial segregation remedy in the Gautreaux case, MTO became a program of poverty deconcentration with no official objectives related to race.

The fusion of race and class concerns has led to common cause between fair housing activists and advocates of regionalism or regional equity.14 Regionalists rarely refer explicitly to race, confining themselves, in the main, to issue of class-based place inequities. But the two movements (fair housing and regionalism) share a common vocabulary about access to opportunity and a common solution set centered on the dispersal of subsidized housing throughout metropolitan areas and the creation of mixed-income housing developments.15 Thus, the fair housing / community development divide is similar to what former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk terms “the Inside Game v. the Outside Game.”16 There is further commonality between the fair housing argument and the “mobility” agenda that has dominated housing policy in the United States since the 1990s. Common across all these policy threads is a skepticism of community development (i.e., “the inside game”) as an approach to addressing urban spatial inequities.

Segregation Injures

The case for integration begins with the identification of the personal and societal-level costs of segregation. Life in a racially defined ghetto carries with it a wide range of disadvantages that are insidious, extensive, and enduring. One set of hazards relates to personal safety and health; residents of segregated communities of color are statistically more likely to be victims of crime, be exposed to environmental dangers, and have less access to health care than others.17 The life expectancy of blacks is lower than that of whites, and neighborhood mortality rates are higher where blacks make up a larger percentage of the population.18 Racial segregation has also been tied to health disparities in children.19

Ghetto neighborhoods also suffer from fewer and inferior public services, including schools.20 The poor quality of schools results in an inferior education for children living in segregated neighborhoods and contributes to higher dropout rates. Thus, children growing up in racially segregated and low-income neighborhoods emerge with significantly lower levels of human capital than do their counterparts in more advantaged neighborhoods. This produces inequalities of opportunity that reinforce themselves over the course of a lifetime and are reflected in disparities in labor force participation, income, and wealth.

The economic life of high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods is underdeveloped. The relative lack of private-sector investment reduces local retail and commercial options available to residents and can produce “food deserts” in which fresh and healthful food choices are unavailable in large areas within central cities.21 The lack of nutritional grocery options in turn contributes to health problems for residents. Grocery stores that do locate within these neighborhoods often charge higher prices than stores located elsewhere. The lack of economic activity also manifests itself in a dearth of local employment opportunities for residents. To the extent that these ghettos tend to be located in central city neighborhoods that are far from areas of new job growth in the suburbs, a spatial mismatch between low-income job seekers and job opportunities further fuels the level of economic marginality characterizing these neighborhoods.22 “Address discrimination” can add another layer of disadvantage when people are denied employment opportunities because of where they live.

Residents of racially segregated neighborhoods, occupying below-standard housing, are more likely to be disadvantaged in the housing market, more likely to be victimized by predatory lending, and when they own property, more likely to see much lower rates of real estate value and lower rates of appreciation in that value than do residents of other neighborhoods. Oliver and Shapiro, for example, report that from 1967 to 1988, white homeowners saw an average increase in home value of $53,000, compared to only $31,100 over that same period for black homeowners.23 More recent analysis indicates that this gap has endured over time.24 The gap, what David Rusk calls the “segregation tax,” adversely affects the ability of black families to accumulate wealth and thus limits upward mobility and perpetuates socioeconomic disparities between whites and blacks.25

Finally, some have argued that the high crime and poverty of segregated neighborhoods inhibits the formation of the type of bridging social capital that can enhance upward mobility, primarily through access to job information from social networks.26 Here the argument stresses the homogeneity (and therefore the redundancy) of social networks in segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods. When one’s family and acquaintances are similarly situated in the labor market, the information one receives about job opportunities is limited.27

The individual and cumulative effects of these disadvantages produce and reproduce stark inequalities between people of color and whites in America.28 Many of the dynamics mentioned here have lasting implications, as individuals have more difficulty in growing the human capital necessary for economic success, or accumulating the financial capital for greater economic security. Thus, current forms of disadvantage contribute to lasting differences between groups in a self-reinforcing manner.29 Sociologist Lawrence Bobo calls residential segregation the “structural linchpin of American racial inequality.”30 Patrick Sharkey argues that the differential experiences of blacks and whites in their neighborhoods have stifled progress toward racial equality despite the elimination of formal and rigid forms of racial discrimination that characterized American life prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.31

The legacy effect of segregation is one of several features that make it a critical target of fair housing advocacy. By conditioning life chances in the ways described above, racial segregation in the United States perpetuates and accentuates inequalities even in the absence of active discrimination. It is also seen by some in the movement as causing current conditions of disadvantage. Florence Roisman, for example, asserts that segregation is more than merely the setting for adverse neighborhood conditions, but in fact is the cause of problems such as crime, drug abuse, and violence.32 Finally, fair housing advocates point out that the adverse effects of segregation can be separated from the effects of discrimination even when discrimination is implicated in causing segregation in the first place. As Elizabeth Anderson notes, segregation allows the dominant group to “hoard opportunities without having to actively discriminate.” That “segregation propagates many material inequalities on its own,” beyond whatever damages discrimination may cause, establishes it as a separate target of fair housing advocacy.33

Segregation Is a Legacy of Public Policy

Not only is segregation a demonstrable problem in the ways briefly summarized above, but it is an avoidable result of illegal private acts of discrimination and ill-designed public policy. While some argue that segregation can and does result from purely market processes—that is, through the differential purchasing power of whites and blacks, which sorts them into neighborhoods that are also segregated by housing value—there is plenty of evidence that even blacks with higher income (and therefore greater purchasing power in the market) are highly segregated.34 Others argue that some degree of segregation is the result of personal preferences and taste, such as through the desire to live with others who share cultural identities.35 Nevertheless, there are two other causes of segregation that justify a vigorous public effort to eliminate it. First, discrimination in housing markets has a long and sordid history in the United States and has been used to create and maintain patterns of segregation.36 Second, previous public actions at virtually all levels of government have contributed significantly to patterns of racial segregation.37

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Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Alternative Approaches to Regional Equity and Racial Justice
• 1. The Integration Imperative
• 2. Affirmatively Furthering Community Development
• 3. The “Hollow Prospect” of Integration
• 4. The Three Stations of Fair Housing Spatial Strategy
• 5. New Issues, Unresolved Questions, and the Widening Debate
• Conclusion: Everyone Deserves to Live in an Opportunity Neighborhood
• Notes
• Sources
• Index