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.         

GETTING THE FACTS WRONG ABOUT HOUSING DISCRIMINATION

In January, we posted “A Little Light Reading: Our Top Three Books on Understanding Race in America.”  We identified three relatively recent works we consider essential for understanding America’s ongoing racial issues. The Warmth of Other Suns, The Half Has Never Been Told, and The Color of Law explore, respectively, the twentieth century black migration from the South, slavery, and housing discrimination.  We intend to return to those books from time to time, exploring their major points and examining their contributions on America’s racial issues.

  

We start with Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  Rothstein proceeds from a simple point aimed at disabusing many Americans of a myth.  Housing segregation was not, he writes, “merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy.”  It was “a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders.”  This contention leads to the major theme of The Color of Law – that Supreme Court justices, who’ve ducked imposing broad remedies for the consequences of housing discrimination on the ground government didn’t cause the problem, got their facts wrong.

Rothstein highlights two Supreme Court opinions, 33 years apart, in school desegregation cases in which the justices claimed governmental action wasn’t at fault.  In a 1974 Detroit area case, Justice Potter Stewart declined to include white students from suburban areas in a desegregation plan, concluding African American students were concentrated in the city, not spread throughout the suburbs, because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.”  In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle for the same reason.  Housing patterns, he determined, resulted from “private choices,” not governmental action, meaning no “constitutional obligation” required the proposed remedies.  Rothstein devotes the remaining 300 or so pages of Color of Law to proving just how wrong both justices got their facts.

Public Housing = Ghetto

Government policy, beginning with the Franklin Roosevelt administration, forced blacks into urban ghettos, “as big a factor as any” in promoting segregated housing.  As World War II approached, the federal government built housing units for workers

involved in defense-related industries.  Federal policy and practice provided this housing either for whites only or in segregated projects.  Despite the fact both blacks and whites worked in defense plants, nearby government subsidized or constructed housing either served only whites or separated black and white workers.

After the war, congressional Republicans opposed to any federal participation in the housing market, gave progressive legislators a choice – accept segregated housing or get no federal housing program at all.  GOP amendments to the housing bills required desegregation, when everyone knew southern Democrats would kill the legislation if it included such amendments.  Northern and eastern Democrats favoring a public housing program backed down and accepted segregated housing.

A little later, federal regulations set strict upper income limits for public housing residents.  These limits forced middle-income tenants out of most public housing, leaving projects poor and mostly African American.  Taken together, these policies assured segregation in public housing projects in the United States, a result that endures today.

Racial Zoning

Local government actions significantly contributed to America’s segregated housing patterns.  In cities like Baltimore, blatant zoning ordinances stopped the development of integrated neighborhoods.  Baltimore’s ordinance, enacted in 1910, forbade blacks from buying houses on blocks where whites constituted a majority of the residents and vice versa.  These ordinances spread to Atlanta, Miami, St. Louis, Richmond, and other places.  The Supreme Court struck them down in a 1917 case originating in Louisville, Kentucky but, as Rothstein shows, many cities ignored the ruling, claiming their laws differed in some way – usually minor – from the Louisville ordinance.  West Palm Beach, Florida, for example, adopted a racial zoning ordinance 12 years after the Supreme Court decision in the Louisville case and it remained in place until 1960.

Promoting the Suburbs

Public housing policy and local ordinances didn’t stop higher income African Americans from buying houses in certain places, given market forces.  The federal government, however, enforced policies that enticed white families to move to single family homes in suburbs and out of apartments located in cities.  The government then made it exceedingly difficult for blacks to follow suit by implementing blatantly

discriminatory Federal Housing Administration (FHA) lending rules.  The FHA underwriting  manual, first issued in 1935, said, “to retain stability [in a neighborhood] it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes” and “a change in…racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.” 

The FHA, therefore, in many instances, just wouldn’t approve loans to black buyers. In connection with a single family housing development in one New Jersey community in the early 1940s, the agency flatly stated “no loans will be given to [black] developments.”  The FHA would approve properties only in neighborhoods where “compatibility” existed among residents.  Generally, this meant whites only.  These discriminatory policies remained in effect well into the 1950s and, in some cases, beyond, locking in segregated housing patterns.

In coming posts, we will explore other ways government policies created segregated housing and examine solutions Rothstein proposes.  Many of those are controversial and we don’t agree among ourselves on the wisdom of many of them.  The problem remains though, and not talking about it or the ways of addressing it, won’t make it go away.