Housing, Race, and Opportunity
HOUSING JUSTICE AND racial justice are profoundly linked in this country because one of the primary ways we have created racial disparities in this county is through spatial segregation. Over my past forty years of working on racial justice issues, from both legal advocacy and research standpoints, I have argued both for the centrality of housing policy and for linking housing policy to other social policies. I have asked that we consider how housing fits into an overall landscape of structures that reproduce racial hierarchy and entrenched inequality. In this chapter, I want to look at both how my understanding of these things has changed over the past four decades and about how the discourses around fair housing have been shaped by activists, landmark legal cases, increasingly sophisticated research, and changing racial narratives within the United States.1
During my lifetime, we have seen considerable evolution in our understanding of race, of racialization and racial disparities, and about what socially just housing means. We have been somewhat successful in removing the racist actor from arguments about racially disparate impacts of poor housing policy (see later section on Thompson v. HUD2). We have slowly moved from in-place strategies of development to race-neutral dispersal strategies (such as Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing) to a more nuanced understanding of how opportunity plays out across a region in dynamic and racially specific ways. And, just this past decade, we saw the unexpected and catastrophic effects of bundling subprime loans into highly leveraged “financial weapons of mass destruction” (“Buffett Warns on Investment ‘Time Bomb’” 2003) and are still coming to terms with what happened. Lastly, as cognitive science and social theory advance, we are also beginning to understand housing not only as a distributor of material opportunities but also as a key way in which we define our selves and our communities. We have long known that housing was a key intervention point for asset building, but what has not been so clear is that housing is also a key way in which we construct identities—self-identities, group-identities, and our ideas of community.
A Brief Story
I would like to start this chapter with a story that represents the first time I saw something shift in housing justice work; when recognition emerged that housing work went beyond what we were doing and that other strategies for addressing housing issues were possible. This was the first glimmer of the work many of us would continue doing. We began to think about housing not as just a single issue, but as an issue with a complex set of benefits and one of the key sites of intervention that could affect access to opportunity in a wide variety of areas.
I first started working on landlord-tenant issues and eviction as a young attorney at Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle in the early 1970s. It struck me then that we were working on symptoms and not core issues. We were essentially attacking a systemic problem one tenant at a time. First, the client had to find us and get through the screening process. Then, there had to be a legal claim or defense based on the law. Then, we might prevail. And sometimes when we prevailed, we still were facing the same landlords over and over again. Even in a limited view of victory as being able to get single landlords to change their practices, we were not always successful.
This is not to suggest that the work did not have value. It did. We helped many people get into or stay in their homes. But, as with all symptomatic work, the impact of it was limited. We were the proverbial “baby catchers,” pulling individual babies out of the water without ever getting to look upstream.
We were not naïve. We did annual need assessments. We talked with our clients. We knew one of the main problems was an overall lack of affordable housing in the community. However, we believed that this was the province of policymakers and not Legal Services attorneys. After all, what could we possibly do about the supply of housing?
Eventually, a small group of us started to explore and push the idea that we could do something about the overall supply of affordable housing. We had some support from the leadership of the office, but, of course, there was pushback. We were taking resources away from the things we could do to focus on the things we could not do. In part, our critics were right. We did not have the technical skills for building the supply of affordable housing. However, we could work with law firms that did, and we did this. So, we began to work with tax attorneys to figure out better ways of subsidizing and incentivizing the development of affordable housing.
At one point during this process, Sean Bleck, an attorney in the office, decided that we should develop some of the needed specialized skills internally. He decided that he would go back to New York University (NYU) to get a master of laws degree in tax law with a focus on housing syndications. The howls of disbelief followed: an NYU tax attorney working for Legal Services! Many thought that if he left, he would not come back. They were wrong. He earned his degree, came back, and was an incredible asset for the work that would follow.
The work that was done out of that office in Seattle in the 1970s and 1980s has many lessons, and many valuable friendships were forged that endure today, almost forty years later. It shaped my view that our work, no matter how we pursue it, is about social justice. Sometimes the law is a useful instrument for that work, and sometimes it is not. As an aside, the supervising attorney at that office, Steve Frederickson, is still doing innovative work for social justice (and we are still friends!).
I opened the chapter with this story because I think it might be useful. It might help others to dream. Rather than focusing on what we think we can or cannot do, it is useful to focus on the nature of the problem and then explore how that could be shifted. If we can do this, new ways to apply our skills open up, or we have the impetus to learn new skills. We need not be constrained by what we think is possible because we surely do not know what is possible until we have a better understanding of the problems facing us.
Evolution of a Problem Statement
Over the past forty years, I have watched my own understandings of what exactly the “housing problem” is change, as well as the field’s. Sometimes this has been in tandem, and at other times, I have been at odds with many other advocates in what I was arguing. Many times, I have been told, just as we were told in Seattle, that I was sacrificing what could be done by arguing for something that could not be done.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, most legal service offices doing housing work were focused strictly around the parameters of the landlord-tenant contractual relationship: unpaid rent, health and safety violations, broken promises, etc. In Seattle, nearly all of our clients were low-income households. This makes sense because we were antipoverty lawyers and we all took our jobs with the knowledge that part of our mission was to make sure that even the poorest among us could have a fair date in court. (That these court dates were rarely “fair” is another thing entirely.) However, it was apparent that most of our clients were not just low-income individuals, but that they were also people of color. Even in Seattle in the 1970s, not the most diverse place on Earth, there were times when the majority of our clients were nonwhite.
So, does it matter that many of our clients were not white, and why? What would it mean to suggest that our work was deeply racialized? The easy answer is simple statistics: people of color were disproportionately likely to be poor, and because we represented poor people, we were more likely to represent people of color. (In other words, we did not need to have a racial analysis that went beyond understanding that nonwhite people, through some set of mechanisms, were more likely to be poor.) While this may be descriptively correct, it is analytically vacuous. It offers us no insight, much less tools, to address the differences between black poverty and white poverty, between concentrated poverty and dispersed poverty, and between being low-income and being poor.
It was during this time that some of us, including myself, began to push for a more explicit racial analysis in both housing debates and larger debates around equity, poverty, and fairness. Many advocates and policy workers began to articulate what Gunnar Myrdal had observed in the 1940s: that the condition of poor blacks and poor whites in the US had never been symmetrical (Myrdal, Rose, and Sterner 1944). We argued that to understand the particular challenges of addressing black poverty in the United States, people needed to understand more deeply the way that racial hierarchy functioned in the US. I believe that this view has been advanced quite a bit over the past forty years, and is now a prominent view of many organizations working on poverty issues. At least among advocates and activists, the early “color-blind” paradigm of justice has mostly disappeared.
However—and I will come back to this point at the end of the chapter—I believe there is a parallel assertion that can be made that has not been advanced nearly as far. Lani Guinier and Gerarld Torres (2002) made it eloquently in The Miner’s Canary, and it is this: The structural forces affecting marginalized people of color in the US also threaten white people because they are signs of a malfunctioning democracy, of mechanisms that are reproducing inequality, and of a prison-industrial system run amuck. One cannot understand the poverty that the white community faces without understanding racial dynamics in the US. Moreover, segregation and structural racism harm white people—most especially (and materially) low-income white people, but also, on a more existential level, all of us (powell 2012a).
In much of my earlier writing and thinking, I have asserted that in the US and other mature democracies with relatively strong economies, poverty is more about status than objective conditions of deprivation. To be sure, being low-income matters, but what poverty connotes in our society is a lack of basic membership (powell 2012b). Here, I draw on the work of Amartya Sen and others in talking about opportunity deprivation. Sen would argue that a famine is not truly possible in a democracy (Sen 1983). I would argue the same about racialized inequalities and segregation. Segregation is not possible in a true democracy, and neither are intractable disparities. If we see these disparities, it must be because people have unequal access to decision power—to the power to shape their lives.
Charles Tilly (1998) talks about “durable inequality”—the inequalities that are reproduced across time and generations, especially those that are group-based. I tend to use the phrase “structural racialization” to make the point that there are processes at work that promote racially unequal outcomes. These need not be racist processes—which is one thing that the courts have had trouble grappling with in regard to fair housing law. These unequal groups need not even cleave along racial lines. We could expect any society that has uneven access to opportunity structures to reproduce inequality (and probably widening inequality because wealth tends to multiply exponentially and access to opportunity tends to increase access to further opportunity). However, in the US, many of these structures emerged at a time when racial hierarchy was quite explicit. Thus, even though the overtness of that hierarchy has diminished, the structures continue doing the work of racialization, and, in many ways, the hierarchy has become more entrenched.
So much of the work I and others have done—in the arena of housing, but also in other arenas over the past forty years—is both widening and sharpening our problem statement so that new solutions emerge. Over the past two decades especially, I have argued not only that is it impossible to talk about poverty without talking about race (powell 1996) but also that it is impossible to talk about concentrated poverty without talking about concentrated wealth; that it is useless to talk about the ghetto without talking about the exurbs; and that, perhaps most importantly, it brings us no closer to wholeness to talk about how well or poorly white America is doing without also asking the same of brown, black, and Native America.
We do ourselves no favors if we trap ourselves in limited and false dichotomies. Thirty years ago, I rejected the assertion that we could either have affordable housing or integrated housing, but not both. Today, I reject the paradoxical assertion (that the Obama administration has used many times) that we can be more effective in addressing racial disparities if we do not talk about race and focus our interventions on poverty in general. I do not believe that suburbs and cities are in a zero-sum resource game—regions thrive as a whole. I do not think we can talk about education policy without talking about housing and taxation policy. I do not think we can fix things simply by pouring more resources onto a stacked playing field.
In some very important ways—both in our discourse and in the legal remedies and arguments available to us (which I will track in the rest of this chapter)—we are able to address segregation and racial hierarchy in more sophisticated and explicit ways than we were able two, three, or four decades ago. However, in some equally important ways, we are still not adequately addressing the structural factors that reproduce racial inequality—where housing is key.
Key Housing Developments: A Shifting Legal Landscape and Imperfect Remedies
Prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, there was almost no large-scale housing desegregation success. Restrictive covenants, segregation, and racial steering were the norm. In 1948, Shelly v. Kraemer3 held that restrictive covenants were judicially unenforceable (although not necessarily illegal or unconstitutional), and in the 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) won two legal victories4 that banned segregation in public housing. However, despite these victories and the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, federal housing programs remained largely segregated. (Indeed, as Florence Roisman (2007) points out, the Supreme Court’s desegregation mandate in Brown v. Board of Education5 may have intensified housing segregation to avoid school integration.)
Gautreaux
Another major court case that dealt with race and housing is Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority6—a huge breakthrough in housing desegregation. In 1966, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on civil rights grounds (for a history of the litigation, see Polkoff 2005). In it, black plaintiffs argued that the CHA had deliberately selected public housing sites in the “black ghetto” to avoid placing black families in white neighborhoods and that HUD had assisted in this practice with financing and other support. The plaintiffs won.
The significance of the Gautreaux case was not only the declaration that the defendants had segregated public housing but also finding an expansive remedy for the issue. The district court ordered HUD to initiate interdistrict, metropolitan-wide relief, and the Supreme Court affirmed. The district court also ordered the CHA to develop the next seven hundred units in predominantly white sections of Chicago and for 75 percent of all public housing to be located in predominantly white areas of Chicago or Cook County.
In a pattern we have seen repeated in other desegegration cases (both school and housing), multiple delays and refusals to cooperate marked the litigation, which led to a 1972 order joining the City of Chicago as defendants and invalidating a state law that required approval before construction could begin. The Supreme Court’s affirmance of the remedy in 1976—bolstered by the intervening passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968—initiated one of the largest public housing mobility efforts up to that time.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the Gautreaux case is the sociological data on the effects of the move on the 7,100 African American families that relocated to less racially and economically segregated neighborhoods. These families were studied for decades, and the relationship between race and place became more central in not only our jurisprudence but also our social science research and national conversation (Rosenbaum and DeLuca 2008; Rosenbaum and Rubinowitz 2000; DeLuca and Rosenbaum 2009; Rosenbaum and Zuberi 2010; Rosenbaum, Kulieke, and Rubinowitz 1988). The Gautreaux studies demonstrated marked benefits that accrued through adulthood of those who moved under the program. They would set the stage for the ambitious Moving to Opportunity experiments that would take place a few decades later.
Fair Housing Act
Against the backdrop of the Gautreaux case was the passage of the Fair Housing Act. In 1968, the Kerner Commission issued its remarkable inquiry into the various causes of civil disorder in the major metropolitan areas in the United States. The report opened with a warning that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal” and warned that the failure to address this schism threatened the fabric of the nation (Kerner Commission 1968, 1–2). Despite this impetus, both Congress and President Johnson refused to pass a fair housing act. It was not until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which threatened further unrest, that the Fair Housing Act became law. The Fair Housing Act is not simply an antidiscrimination measure; it also requires HUD to affirmatively further fair housing, a legal requirement that has been expanded over the years to cover any urban redevelopment activity receiving HUD funds.7 Unfortunately for advocates, this responsibility has never been specifically defined. The overall orientation of the Fair Housing Act was individualistic, and the various exceptions and exemptions meant that patterns of segregation would largely be unaltered.
I have written elsewhere about the problems with the antidiscrimination and tort approach for remedies and why the Fair Housing Act may actually undermine its own stated purposes (powell 2008). Just as Southern-sponsored “freedom of choice” school options following the Brown case left patterns of segregation intact, provisions designed to increase freedom of choice for home buyers have done surprisingly little to address entrenched patterns of racial residential segregation.
Mt. Laurel as a Response to National Decisions
The same year as the Fair Housing Act, the Supreme Court upheld litigation under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in the surprising landmark decision of Jones v. Alfred Mayer Co.8 on the grounds that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed under the Thirteenth Amendment and could therefore regulate private behavior without state action. However, broader efforts at structural reform were stymied in the 1970s by both the Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Corp.9 and Washington v. Davis10 cases. The Arlington Heights case involved a zoning request to rezone a parcel from single-family units to multifamily to accommodate a plan to build units for low- and middle-income families. The refusal to grant the rezoning request was justified on the grounds of lowering property values, but had a clear racial impact.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to overturn the Arlington Heights case and the zoning refusal essentially sanctioned zoning efforts that insulated white privilege and residential segregation. Exclusionary zoning became one of the principal means of maintaining residential segregation patterns. The Supreme Court held here and in the Washington v. Davis case that plaintiffs had to establish invidious intent and not just rely on a discriminatory impact. This focus on the need for a racist actor, with racist intent, has haunted the movement for racial justice ever since (see powell 1996).
So instead, advocates turned to state courts, and in the mid-1970s, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned exclusionary zoning ordinances in the Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel Township11 decision. Like the Gautreaux case, this case also focused on geography, but unlike Gautreaux, race got deliberately lost. Race issues were in the early pleading but were not in the decision. During this period, advocates were increasingly aware of race, but there was ambivalence to addressing it head-on. Advocates thought that possibly the race issues could be solved by just using a poverty lens—or worse, that using racially explicit arguments and frameworks for decision making would impede the progress that could be made in more racially neutral ways. I have always thought this attitude was wrong. We have seen many times that the more narrowly focused an intervention, the more likely it is to be undermined by forces that lay outside of its definition of the problem. This brings us to the Moving to Opportunity experiment.
Moving to Opportunity
Both the strengthening of the Fair Housing Act in 1988 and the relative success of the Gautreaux remedy helped spur the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment in five cities across the US. With a robust experimental design, MTO set out to test the effects of moving families into low-poverty neighborhoods. It was thought of as a sort of Gautreaux-plus, hopefully making the case for mobility and poverty deconcentration strategies. It was exciting. It was big. It was regional in scope. It was explicit about fairly siting low-income housing around the region and the reasons to do so. Yet, its successes were underwhelming.
The project did succeed in moving families to safer neighborhoods. It showed both physical and psychological benefits, especially for children and women. Obesity and diabetes, for example, were significantly affected even without any sort of health supports built into the experiment (Acevedo-Garcia et al. 2008). However, it failed to achieve any measureable employment benefits or much of an educational benefit. I argued in my expert report for Thompson v. HUD that MTO was significantly flawed because it used a single indicator approach—neighborhood poverty rates—as well as vouchers without identifying and removing other barriers to integration (powell 2005). By doing so, many MTO participants wound up in a different neighborhood within the same school district, in a downwardly transitioning area, or in a lower-poverty neighborhood, but one that lacked access to good jobs (Briggs, Popkin, and Goering 2010; Ferryman et al. 2008; Tegeler 2007).
It was during this time that I really started shifting my analysis from a place-based indicator approach to a multi-indicator framework that ultimately focuses on both regions and people. I envisioned a process of measuring opportunity in a more complex way, and hired staff with geographic information system (GIS) expertise at the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University to help me accomplish this goal. For the next few years, we developed a model called opportunity-based mapping that could summarize an array of indicators and relevant factors into a clear, spatial representation of the distribution of opportunity (Kirwan Institute 2012). The opportunity-based housing concept was influenced by my earlier work mediating a dispute between advocates of in-place affordable housing strategies and mobility-based affordable housing strategies in the Chicago region.
While MTO was primarily an antipoverty effort with little attention to race, education, or other factors, the opportunity approach is far more robust, relying on a broad array of indicators. Dynamic real estate markets and employment opportunities affected MTO effectiveness over time. An opportunity-based remedy must account for the need to adjust targets for changed circumstances while recognizing that demographic patterns shift and the opportunity structures themselves change over time. As new data become available, particularly the decennial census, there is a need to update and revise remedial processes to achieve target goals.
Thompson v. HUD
It was in this context that I was asked to be a lead expert in the Thompson v. HUD case, one of the most significant fair housing cases in recent years. In 1995, a suit was filed by the NAACP and the ACLU on behalf of fifteen thousand public housing residents in Baltimore, Maryland, alleging that HUD had effectively restricted minority families to segregated neighborhoods in the central city. In 2005, Judge Garbis ruled that HUD had violated Title VIII of the Fair Housing Act by failing to affirmatively further fair housing.
In response to this ruling, the Supreme Court asked the parties to brief the court on a potential remedy. In my report, I developed an opportunity index for the Baltimore region made up of over a dozen variables related to opportunity (see, for example, Kirwan Institute 2005). The multifactor analysis was an attempt to move past the simplistic single indicator or binary divides of urban and suburban, black and white, and rich and poor. The emphasis in my report was on affirmatively connecting public housing residents to multiple opportunity structures (education, health, and employment), as well as reducing the concentration of poverty in Baltimore’s inner-city neighborhoods (powell 2005).
Most recently, the Thompson parties have settled and have explicitly agreed to adopt the opportunity approach. It continues the current and successful poverty deconcentration program, the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, through 2018. It also requires HUD to conduct a regional opportunity assessment to inform its efforts. Furthermore, HUD will conduct civil rights reviews of housing proposals submitted for approval, paying specific attention to creating strong and inclusive communities.
These recommendations were not only adopted in this case, but by HUD as a part of its five-year plan to reanalyze its public housing programs. In 2011, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan visited with me at the Kirwan Institute to get a greater understanding of what it means to have an opportunity-based evaluation framework that takes explicit account of racial integration. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (2012) quotes Donovan: “[when] you don’t have mobility, you don’t have access to opportunity. That’s because when you choose a home, you choose so much more than a home. You also choose access to jobs, to schools for your children, to public safety. You choose a community—and the choices available in that community.” Donovan further stressed that HUD is “committed to mobility efforts” like the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, which will be continued by this settlement, because “it represents . . . justice for families who were wronged.”
Subprime Crisis
While at the Kirwan Institute, my colleagues and I convened nearly two hundred civil rights, housing, and legal activists and scholars for an in-depth look at the subprime and foreclosure crisis. One of the things we were all in agreement about was that the subprime loan process had deeply disproportionate effects on communities of color.12 Rugh and Massey (2010) have done an excellent job quantifying this hypothesis. Their model shows that black residential segregation explains significant amounts of the variation of foreclosures in metropolitan areas, and actually exceeds that of other causative factors that have been commonly cited as contributing factors (oversupply, housing price inflation, etc.).
An interesting legal avenue is emerging based on the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, which prohibits discrimination not only in lending but also in the securitization of mortgages. Since disparate impact liability, not just disparate treatment liability, can be established under the Fair Housing Act, all targeting of minority neighborhoods for subprime loans can provide a basis for litigation under the act. Unfortunately, there is almost no case law under these regulations so far. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has, for example, targeted Goldman Sachs for fraudulent investment practices, but the case has not been made that these practices were not only fraudulent but also racially discriminatory. However, the ACLU is, as of this writing, about to file a major suit on these grounds.
There is still an urgent need to talk about access to credit and lending practices that could be used to build wealth in communities of color in sustainable ways. Fair access to credit means little if that credit only allows someone access to a house in an opportunity-poor and segregated area. I and other racial justice advocates have argued that the federal government has an affirmative duty to further fair housing and fair credit—a duty that should be operationalized and monitored, with policy adjustments to meet targets (Rogers et al. 2010). Enforcement has also been extraordinarily lax over the past two decades—partly through rollbacks and partly by regulation schemes that simply have not been able to keep up with the technology of securitization. As the housing market slowly moves towards a new equilibrium, we cannot simply keep focusing on efforts to prevent more foreclosures from taking place. We need to focus on skewed incentives, a monopolistic banking landscape, and large-scale financial reform. On this, the federal government has unfortunately taken its usual strategy of not wanting to explicitly talk about race. For example, as the Kirwan Institute noted, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission listed twenty-two areas of interest in investigating the causes of the crisis, and not one of which includes any mention of the history of racial segregation in credit markets, redlining, predatory lending targeted to communities of color, etc. (Rogers et al. 2010).
Principles of Fair Housing for the Twenty-First Century
While I am excited by HUD’s movement towards embracing regional and opportunity-based solutions for public housing, it is clear that more needs to be done (and we cannot singularly rely on HUD as our only federal avenue to fair housing and fair credit). While we have made progress in quantifying opportunity, more robust theories and methodologies need to be developed to be able to visualize the dynamic nature of opportunity across a region. This is especially true as the old city-suburb divide is rapidly breaking down. Some of this suburban diversity should be celebrated, but much of it represents old patterns in new spaces. We need more sociologists, geographers, public policymakers, legislators, and others working on models of opportunity that focus on successful, stable, and sustainable communities.
The housing and credit crash, ongoing employment challenges, and the possibility of shrinking exurbs represent both a profound crisis and an opportunity for shaping metropolitan dynamics. On the one hand, we have a shrinking pie, which means that fragmented fiefdoms will potentially fight even harder to hold on to the privileges that they have. On the other hand, we have this moment of great uncertainty and rapid change where anything is possible. Just as urban sprawl (combined with white flight and jurisdictional fragmentation) was one of the key forces maintaining white privilege in the second half of the twentieth century, the reversal of those forces can be used as tools to create more equitable and integrated communities in the twenty-first century. However, it will not happen without foresight, planning, and all the policy tools we have at our disposal.
The opportunity communities model I have helped advance focuses on in-place, mobility, and linkage strategies. Added to the traditional arsenal of neighborhood development and individual approaches that focus on building social capital, these strategies focus on the mobility and degree of access people have to high-opportunity areas and include regional housing, tax-base sharing and school integration, and public transit expansion strategies. Without these linkages, in-place development or personal development is much less effective. An example I often use is of a leaky bucket: we surely need water to fill the bucket, and we may need even more water than we thought because the bucket is leaking, but unless we fix the structural parameters, all the water is going to leak back out again.
Thoughts on Segregation, Integration, and Opportunity
Elsewhere, I have written that “housing lies at the very heart of a system of institutional relations that reproduce inequality” (powell 2008, 606). Thomas Pettigrew (1979, 122) referred to it as the “structural linchpin of American race relations.” Massey and Denton (1993) refer to it as an American form of apartheid. It is clear that not only does housing act as a key opportunity structure for access to employment, education, and much more, but the way we think about race is deeply impacted by the presence of white exurbs and racialized concentrated poverty in parts of central cities and inner-ring suburbs.
In her book The Failures of Integration, Sheryll Cashin (2004) talks about the cost of the ghetto. What she is talking about here is not only the very real costs (both material and nonmaterial) to having neighborhoods of concentrated black poverty, but the way that the social and cultural norms of such spaces become a part of the meaning of the category of black in this country.
At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that the costs to whites had not been grappled with by social justice advocates. Historically, much of the resistance to policies that share both risk and opportunity—metropolitan tax pools, fair housing quotas, universal health insurance, taxation, and social welfare programs in general—has been animated by a strong semiconscious fear of the underserving other. This is true even when those policies would help the very people (poor whites) that are most strongly against them. In The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Society Stronger, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2010) demonstrate empirically how high levels of inequality weaken the fabric of society and reduce quality of life and health outcomes, increase crime and violence, and lead to a higher level of dissatisfaction for everyone—both the favored populations and the marginalized populations.
I will make three bold statements about the state of housing and racial justice in the United States:
1. We will not achieve racial equality if we cannot achieve residential integration and eliminate concentrated black poverty.
2. We cannot address poverty unless we fundamentally transform exclusive structures into inclusive structures—that is, structures of separation and racialization into structures of concern and shared well-being.
3. This is a spiritual and moral project, as well as a political project.
In other words, when we talk about transforming housing policy, we are moving beyond housing as a right, or even housing connected to opportunity, and talking about housing policy as being a key way in which we create meaningful communities in the US. Racialization has always been about creating an “other”—and in the presence of that other, there is a block, a cognitive and imaginative block, on a shared sense of vulnerability and concern.
Here, I am not even giving a prescriptive policy (or set of policies), but instead animating the idea for a framework for thinking about policy changes. Sen (1999, 283) wrote: “It is not so much a matter of having exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face.” Similarly, another one of my favorite social theorists, Roberto Unger (2007), talks about becoming attached to various institutional forms (and forms of dissent) rather than having political praxis that is guided by a sort of revolutionary pragmatism—the ability to question, reshape, and transform socioeconomic structures so that they can create not only a better society, but better selves.
In fact, it is important that we do not get locked into certain strategies while still continuing to pursue them even as conditions change. This is one of the ways that racial hierarchy has proven to be so durable—by finding new ways to inscribe itself. Fifteen years ago, it made sense to write an article with the title, “What We Need to Do About the ‘Burbs?” (Wing 1999). However, today, the city-suburban opportunity divide is not nearly so clear. There are inner-ring suburbs that are diverse, but they are declining rapidly in terms of opportunity and tax base.
We have come a long way from talking about affordable housing through a color-blind and contractual lens. We also understand, at least theoretically, the complex interplay of structures across time and space. Occasionally, as in Thompson v. HUD, even our legal institutions get it mostly right (albeit with a two-decade delay).
Final Thoughts
I started this chapter by talking about my early learning; I will end by talking about some of my emerging learning. If I had to sum up this learning with one word, it would be relationship. Far too often in the advocacy field we end up focusing so singularly on something—a proposed policy or a particular social problem—and we think that if we can win this battle, we will win the war. But we ignore how this particular problem is created within a web of structures and causal relationships that go in both directions. These directions are no longer just regional, but also global.
Furthermore, we tend to forget that we are also talking about how we are constituted as selves within larger social structures. Segregation has been a key part of creating the modern white identity and the process of racial othering. All of the processes of racialization distribute meaning—categorical meaning and existential meaning, as well as material benefits and burdens. In very important ways, we are not just trying to get things right, but trying to get us right. New strands of cognitive science and neuroscience are emerging that show that many of the decisions we make are happening below conscious awareness—including many of our racial attitudes. We need to find more ways to shape these deep parts of ourselves in accordance with our higher principles of who we want to be.
We still need to forcefully articulate our vision of social justice and how both our selves and our structures fit within that vision. There is a way of thinking about the individual that is not in opposition to connection, but rather sees the self as both relational and autonomous. This self finds safety in a sense of shared vulnerability. It finds freedom not in independence but in interdependence. What would fair housing look like if we understood that housing is a key way in which we build relationships? What would our strategies for fair housing justice look like if we embraced and created better tools for analyzing the complex web of employment-, educational-, financial- and health-related opportunity structures that it intersects with? What if we brought racial justice to the foreground rather than the background of our fair housing efforts? If we were truly living and working in Dr. King’s vision of a “beloved community,” a fully integrated society, what would our housing look like?
References
Acevedo-Garcia, Dolores, Theresa L. Osypuk, Nancy McArdle, and David R. Williams. 2008. “Toward a Policy-Relevant Analysis of Geographic and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Child Health.” Health Affairs 27 (2): 321–33. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.27.2.321.
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1. There are many people who have dedicated their lives to housing justice in this country. My work has always been a bit broader and less sharply defined, dedicated to social justice in general and racial justice in particular. So in this work, I stand on the shoulders of giants, on activists who have done tremendous amounts of good work around housing, and academics who haven’t lost touch with their roots in organizing and advocacy. I dedicate this piece to them. Thanks to Stephen Menendian and Eric Stiens for assistance with this chapter.
2. Thompson v. HUD, 348 F. Supp. 2d 398, 406, 467 (D. Md. 2005).
3. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
4. Banks v. Housing Authority of City and County of San Francisco, 120 Cal. App. 2d 1, 260 P.2d 668 (1953) and Detroit Housing Commission v. Lewis, 226 F. 2d 180 (1955).
5. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
6. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 296 F.Supp. 907.
7. See 42 U.S.C. § 3608(d) (“all executive departments and agencies shall administer their programs and activities relating to housing and urban development . . . in a manner affirmatively to further the purposes of this title and shall cooperate with the Secretary [of Housing] to further such purposes”).
8. Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968).
9. Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp, 429 U.S. 252 (1977).
10. Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976).
11. Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Township of Mount Laurel, 67 N.J. 151 (1975).
12. A complete discussion of the securitization process and how it played out in segregated communities is too much for this chapter, but see Kirwan Institute (2008) for a good primer.