HOUSING DISCRIMINATION: What To Do

During the last few weeks we’ve examined in detail Richard Rothstein’s path breaking book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  We’ve laid out Rothstein’s support for his basic premise – that segregated housing in America resulted from sustained, deliberate governmental action, not just individual bias. After making his case, Rothstein spends much of the end of the book discussing his ideas about what America should do about the problem now.

Rothstein offers a number of suggestions for remedying the effects of housing discrimination.  To his credit, he recognizes many of them are today impractical, given the nation’s partisan, polarized political atmosphere.  But he puts the ideas out there and our purpose today is to report them, not critique them.  We’ll do that later, in one final post on this subject.

We actually start with one of Rothstein’s simplest suggestions.  Given the public’s almost total ignorance about how government, through courts, federal, state and local agencies, forced African Americans to live in segregated communities, public education about the problem becomes essential.  Teaching the history of these discriminatory practices could go a long way in dispelling the public notion that African Americans are solely responsible for their housing choices and resulting economic plight.

Economic Security

Rothstein would begin by doing something about the major problem that keeps many African-Americans stuck in substandard, segregated housing: not having enough money to buy homes anywhere else. The government, Rothstein argues, could do four things about that: 

1. Adopt a full employment policy.  This, of course, means guaranteeing jobs for everyone, using government jobs to fill in gaps the private sector leaves.  The United States has never done this except, de facto, in war time;      
2. Enact minimum wages that keep up with inflation;
3. Develop transportation infrastructure that allows low income workers to get to available jobs, particularly in suburban areas; and  
4. Provide incentives (including cash, presumably) that would spur housing integration by helping middle class blacks buy houses in suburban areas.

            

                

Zoning Reform

By banning zoning ordinances that prohibit multi-family houses or require very large lots for single family homes,

Rothstein argues black families would have a better chance at moving into integrated neighborhoods. He finds large lot requirements particularly objectionable, because they price homes many middle class black families might afford out of their reach.

Related to this idea, Rothstein advocates changing the federal tax code so as to deny the popular mortgage interest deduction to property owners in suburbs that don’t do enough to attract multi-family housing developments and moderately priced single family homes.

Another zoning reform proposal – called inclusionary zoning – would require that communities make a positive effort at integrating low and moderate income families

into more affluent neighborhoods.  This goes beyond just banning discrimination and imposes a positive obligation to promote housing integration.  Some states are doing a version of this with “fair share” requirements based, not on race, but on income.  These requirements limit development opportunities unless the area requires a “fair share” of moderate and low income housing.  Developers can build more units in places that achieve these fair share objectives, while builders in communities that don’t meet the requirements get shut out of projects.  National “fair share” requirements have been proposed as a way of ensuring moderate/low income, and perhaps racial, representation in all suburban areas and municipalities.  Tax consequences have also been suggested as a way of enforcing such requirements.

Section 8 Housing

The federal government’s Section 8 housing program

receives a great deal of consideration in Rothstein's solutions section.  As expected, he begins with a plea for more Section 8 money so more people can receive Section 8 vouchers that help economically disadvantaged individuals obtain housing.  Rothstein doesn’t stop there because it’s one thing to give more people Section 8 money, but another to give those getting Section 8 money a chance to do something different with the money.

Rothstein proposes making Section 8 grants large enough to give low income, often African-American, recipients a chance to get out of the segregated housing they often find themselves in now.  Most Section 8 recipients now just use the vouchers to subsidize rentals in segregated areas.  Rothstein wants to make the vouchers big enough that Section 8 participants could use them in escaping to more affluent areas.  This, he argues, would change the fundamental nature of housing for many low/moderate income persons and get them out of the cycle they now find themselves a part of – a cycle in which the kind of housing in which they live never really changes and the complexion of the neighborhoods in which they live never really changes.  

The solutions put forward in The Color of Law will not win popularity contests in many places.  Still, they are serious solutions for a serious problem and they deserve careful review.  We’ll get to that in a future post.