OUR TURN: Jones Walker Wiley on the Rothstein Solutions

We now conclude our look at Richard Rothstein’s The Color

of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  His book shows, without real room for debate, that governmental action created the substandard housing African Americans have lived with and in for over 100 years.  We reported his solutions last time with little comment on what we think of them other than recognizing, as he does, many are controversial and have little chance of enactment in our divided political environment.  Still, he’s put good ideas out there and they merit discussion. 

Henry’s thoughts

As Rothstein notes, “We have greater political and social conflict because we must add unfamiliarity with fellow citizens of different racial backgrounds to the challenges we confront in resolving legitimate disagreements about public issues. …[R]emedies that can undo nearly a century of de jure residential segregation will have to be both complex and imprecise.  After so much time, we can no longer provide adequate justice to the descendants of those whose constitutional rights were violated.  Our focus can be only to develop policies that promise to fully untangle the web of inequality that we’ve woven.”  

Nevertheless, two suggested solutions at least attempt to fray the Gordian knot.  If we can explode the myth of de facto residential segregation, focused remedies might lead to informed understanding.  Development of transportation infrastructure allowing citizens to flow in and out of urban and suburban areas without currently existing barriers might

reduce suspicions based on unfamiliarity.  If we get to know one

another we can move toward dialogue, understanding, shared interest, and solutions.  A minimum wage that provides economic stability, and other incentives and remedies suggested below, might also produce progress.

Woodson’s ideas

I have White and African American friends who believe America’s ghettos, and the poor housing many African Americans live in, result from genetic and sociological pathologies inherent to African Americans. They remain unaware laws – local, state, and federal - made it illegal for lenders to loan money to African Americans in communities where property values would appreciate. These friends do not know for more than a hundred years it was illegal for most African Americans to live in integrated neighborhoods, though the major method for wealth building in America has been and remains the freedom to buy a home where the value of that home appreciates over time.  White and African Americans must know these facts, if we are to have any chance in enlisting both in the fight for equality.

Ultimately, this information must make its way into primary, secondary, and college curriculums. I suggest the President of the United States should, by Executive Order, create a commission that would travel the nation, holding hearings on where and how governmental policies have impacted housing in minority and majority communities and exploring the impact of de jure and de facto segregation.

I would model this commission on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) created following the end of apartheid in South Africa. The TRC took testimony from victims of apartheid and its beneficiaries. It sought to reconcile historical adversaries so they could find a path forward, correcting the wrongs of the apartheid past. Similarly, the American commission could examine housing discrimination, educate the public on its history, and analyze solutions. The commission’s end goals: (1) correcting the history books; (2) affecting the curriculum of public and private schools; and (3) helping and encouraging legislative bodies in addressing past injustices.

A remedy that might come from this process involves a calculation of the monetary damages African American home buyers suffered by being denied FHA financing and the opportunity to buy homes in integrated neighborhoods. A simple mathematical calculation defines this point. The commission could identify homes of African American home buyers and calculate the current value of those homes had African Americans been able to purchase homes in white neighborhoods with FHA guaranteed financing. The federal government would pay the damage claim. The devil is in the details, but that’s the case with all damage claims.  Congress is unlikely to appropriate money for such a program  unless and until the public more completely understands the government’s complicity in damaging the African American home buyer, making the educational piece all the more important.   

   

Rob’s View

I am most intrigued by zoning reforms Rothstein suggests.  Substantive and practical

reasons make me think those ideas might achieve something.  Substantively, banning exclusionary zoning ordinances that require very large lot sizes for single-family homes in neighborhoods could and should open more areas to moderate income people and, therefore, make those neighborhoods less racially homogeneous.  I also see the merit in “fair share” zoning proposals that provide developers incentives to build more housing for moderate and low income buyers.  

Practically, I find these proposals attractive because zoning-based solutions don’t require changes in federal law.  State and local action could get such programs in place.  Cities and towns prove every day, on energy and environment matters, federal disinterest or hostility doesn’t have to mean nothing gets done.  Given Washington’s current dysfunction, little chance exists for meaningful federal action on housing discrimination.  States and municipalities can enact zoning measures on their own.

As we said at the outset, we see Rothstein’s book as essential for understanding how we got to where we are on race in America.  Housing discrimination isn’t, of course, the whole story, but it’s a big part of it.  We hope our exploration of The Color of Law will encourage our readers to read it themselves and reach their own conclusions.  What say you?   

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.