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The right that was unconstitutionally denied to African Americans in the late 1940s cannot be restored by passing a Fair Housing law that tells their descendants they can now buy homes in the suburbs, if only they can afford it.
Of American children born to parents whose incomes were in the bottom income quintile, almost half (43 percent) remain trapped in the bottom quintile as adults. Only 30 percent of children born to parents in the lowest-earning quintile make it to the middle quintile or higher.
If a child grows up in a poor neighborhood, moving up and out to a middle-class area is typical for whites but an aberration for African Americans.
The legal jargon for this is that it has a “disparate impact” on different groups.
another policy that on its face is race-neutral but has a discriminatory effect is our national transportation system.
Whites may support political candidates who pander to their sense of racial entitlement while advocating policies that perpetuate the inferior economic opportunities that some whites may face.
After so much time, we can no longer provide adequate justice to the descendants of those whose constitutional rights were violated.
Thus, to provide an adequate environment for integration efforts, the United States also needs a full employment policy, minimum wages that return to their historic level and keep up with inflation, and a transportation infrastructure that makes it possible for low-income workers to get to jobs that are available.
But if we—the public and policy makers—acknowledge that the federal, state, and local governments segregated our metropolitan areas, we may open our minds to considering how those same federal, state, and local governments might adopt equally aggressive policies to desegregate.
Amen!
The 2012 edition has this to say about residential segregation in the North: “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods.” That’s it. One passive voice sentence. No suggestion of who might have done the forcing or how it was implemented.
The authors do not mention that an enduring legacy of the HOLC was to color-code every urban neighborhood by race so that African Americans would have great difficulty getting mortgages. That the FHA suburbanized the entire nation on a whites-only basis is overlooked.
provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act that requires jurisdictions that receive federal funds to “affirmatively further” the purposes of the law.
left unsaid was what HUD might do if suburbs don’t take steps necessary to advance integration.
Romney devised a program he called Open Communities that would deny federal funds (for water
and sewer upgrades, green space, sidewalk improvements, and other projects for which HUD financial support is needed) to suburbs that hadn’t revised their exclusionary zoning laws to permit construction of subsidized apartments for lower-income African American families.
the federal government should purchase the next 15 percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates (approximately $350,000). It should then resell the properties to qualified African Americans for $75,000, the price (in today’s dollars) that their grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so. The government should enact this program in every suburban development whose construction complied with the FHA’s discriminatory requirements.
courts should uphold it as appropriate.
I present this not as a practical proposal but only to illustrate the kind of remedy that we would consider and debate if we disabused ourselves of the de facto segregation myth.
About one-third of middle- and upper-income black families now live in neighborhoods bordering severely disadvantaged areas, while only 6 percent of income-similar white families do so.
ANOTHER REMEDY would be a ban on zoning ordinances that prohibit multifamily housing or that require all single-family homes in a neighborhood to be built on large lots with high minimum requirements for square footage.
Congress could amend the tax code to deny the mortgage interest deduction to property owners in suburbs that do not have or are not taking aggressive steps to attract their fair share of low- and moderate-income housing, both multiunit and single family, whether for rental or sale.
Complementing a ban on exclusionary zoning is a requirement for inclusionary zoning: a positive effort to integrate low- and moderate-income families into middle-class and affluent neighborhoods.
The ordinances are sometimes effective, but unless they are implemented on a metropolitan-wide basis, their value as an integration tool is limited. If an inclusionary zoning ordinance applies only to a single town, developers can avoid its requirements and serve the same housing market by building instead in a neighboring town without such rules.
discriminating by race when renters are turned away solely because they are subsidized makes a mockery of the Fair Housing Act. Such discrimination should be prohibited everywhere.
Illinois presently extends a property tax reduction to landlords in low-poverty neighborhoods who rent to voucher holders. Other
states should do likewise.
Residential segregation was created by state action, making it necessary to invoke the inseparable complement of the Roberts principle: where segregation is the product of state action, it has constitutional implications and requires a remedy.
But under our constitutional system, government has not merely the option but the responsibility to resist racially discriminatory views, even when—especially when—a majority holds them.
We, [your name], owners of the property at [your address], acknowledge that this deed includes an unenforceable, unlawful, and morally repugnant clause excluding African Americans from this neighborhood. We repudiate this clause, are ashamed for our country that many once considered it acceptable, and state that we welcome with enthusiasm and without reservation neighbors of all races and ethnicities.
When we become Americans, we accept not only citizenship’s privileges that we did not earn but also its responsibilities to correct wrongs that we did not commit.
themselves don’t want to integrate is a white conceit.
Before all leave, gentrification seems to create integrated communities. But this phenomenon is mostly temporary, lasting only until the replacement of lower-income with higher-income families is complete.
Gentrification would be a positive development if it were combined with inclusionary zoning policies to preserve affordable housing in every neighborhood.
Sarah Brundage, another public policy graduate student, worked on this book as it was nearing completion. She double-checked endnotes and source citations, a task for which she was overqualified. But she also prepared an exhaustive background report for me on how government policy knowingly isolated African Americans in Baltimore from integrated employment and housing opportunities.
