4
“NEGRO REMOVAL” REVISITED
Gladys Showers raised eight children at Bluegrass-Aspendale [public housing complex in Lexington, KY]. She said she missed her friends who have all dispersed since the demolition. “We was happy,” said Showers, 89. “I lived long and I lived good.”
—Josh Kegley, “New Neighborhood Rises from City’s First Public Housing Community”
On July 3, 1999, the city of Baltimore used five hundred pounds of dynamite to implode the George B. Murphy Homes. The Murphy Homes, 758 public housing units arrayed in fourteen-story high-rises, had been built in the 1940s. The city planned a parade of local residents and officials, and a “Murphy Homes Implosion Party” to mark the event.1 Though 92 percent of Baltimore’s public housing was occupied by African Americans at the time, Murphy Homes was even more segregated—99 percent of its residents were African American the year before it was blown up.
In Denver, Colorado, in 1999, the Curtis Park and Arapahoe Courts public housing projects were demolished. Prior to their demolition, 61 percent of the Curtis Park public housing project residents were black, as were 65 percent of the Arapahoe Courts residents. Though this is not particularly high by public housing standards, it was high for public housing in Denver where citywide only 25 percent of the city’s public housing units were occupied by African Americans.
Also in 1999, the Knoxville Community Development Corporation, the city’s public housing authority, demolished Lonsdale Homes, a 320-unit public housing project. Though the city’s public housing stock was only 47 percent occupied by African Americans, Lonsdale Homes was 90 percent black. The Elizabeth Park Homes in Akron, Ohio, demolished in 2000, were 90 percent black while the city’s overall public housing resident profile was 52 percent black. McConaughy Terrace in New Haven, Connecticut, was also disproportionately occupied by African Americans the year before it was torn down. So were the Bryant high-rises in Minneapolis, Parkside Homes and Dunbar Manor in Dayton, Addison Terrace and St. Clair Village in Pittsburgh, Pleasant View in Omaha, and Scott and Carver Homes in Miami. One can, in fact, point to dozens of projects across the country that share two characteristics with all of the projects listed above—they contained a disproportionately high percentage of black residents compared to other public housing in their cities, and they were demolished.
One of the defining characteristics of the old urban renewal program was its deleterious and disproportionate impact on African American residents of central city neighborhoods. Urban renewal displaced an estimated one million people from the time of its enactment in 1949 to 1965.2 The impact on African American communities was so disproportionate that the program earned the nickname “Negro Removal.” So, too, the development of the interstate highway system, as it carved its way through central cities, tended to disrupt largely black areas, displacing families and disrupting communities.3 And now, the dismantling of public housing is producing a similarly disproportionate impact on black families. Households displaced by public housing demolition are predominantly African American, far in excess of their proportion in the American population, and far in excess of their representation among city residents in those cities where demolition is taking place. Though public housing in general is disproportionately occupied by people of color and by blacks specifically, the effort to demolish public housing has targeted African Americans even accounting for their overrepresentation among public housing residents. Projects that have been torn down in city after city have had significantly higher percentages of African American residents than those left standing in the same cities.
The Fact of Race
Public housing in the United States is disproportionately occupied by people of color, predominantly African Americans, and it is disproportionately located in minority neighborhoods. In 2000, 48 percent of the residents of public housing nationwide were African American, despite the fact that blacks made up 12.9 percent of the national population. In cities with the most public housing (larger jurisdictions with local public housing authorities that own and operate more than five thousand units) blacks made up 66 percent of public housing residents. In some cities, notably Birmingham, Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., HUD data show that 99 percent of the residents of public housing in 2000 were African American. In fact, a number of southern cities have public housing systems that are virtually entirely black, including Jackson, Shreveport, Richmond, Tallahassee, and Montgomery. These are cities in which public housing has become essentially the exclusive domain of blacks. The only nonsouthern city comparable in this respect is Detroit, Michigan.
In most large American cities the concentration of African Americans in public housing is highly disproportionate to their representation within the city as a whole. For example, in Indianapolis, where only 25 percent of the population was African American in 2000, fully 87 percent of the public housing was occupied by African Americans. Similarly, Tallahassee, Florida, is one-third African American, but its public housing is 98 percent black. This phenomenon occurs in cities of all sizes and types, and is one of the legacies of racial segregation and discrimination in the American housing market. Patterns of racial residential segregation dominated American cities in the immediate postwar years. Though segregation has declined slightly over the past decades, it remains a central characteristic of most urban areas even today. In many cities, the limited housing choices of African Americans and the lack of suitable housing in the postwar era led many blacks to public housing as a safe, affordable, and high-quality housing option.4 As the United States emerged from the Depression during the 1940s and the economy (and local housing markets) expanded in the 1950s, white families of all income levels enjoyed greater housing choices, while blacks faced continued shortages of decent housing. Thus, demand for public housing waned among whites while increasing among blacks during this time period. The pattern became self-perpetuating as the racial turnover in public housing led more and more whites to avoid it. Public housing increasingly became known as housing for African Americans, leading many whites who might otherwise have been attracted by the lower rents to stay away because of racial attitudes.5
Across the largest 137 cities in the United States, in only five cities (two in Massachusetts—Springfield and Worcester, and three in Texas—Brownsville, El Paso, and Laredo) is the concentration of blacks in public housing less than in the city as a whole. In 62 percent of the cities, blacks as a percentage of public housing are at least two times their proportion of the citywide population. In fact, in the average large city in the United States, the share of public housing occupied by blacks is 2.6 times the share of the population of the city as a whole. In one-third of the cities, the ratio is greater than 3:1, and in 10 percent of the cities the ratio is greater than 4:1. In Lexington, Kentucky, and in San Francisco, the ratio is 5.7:1, the highest among the nation’s largest U.S. cities. The rest of the cities with high ratios of blacks in public housing compared to citywide are cities with relatively small black populations such as Wichita, Kansas, Lubbock, Texas, and Aurora, Illinois, with black populations at or below 10 percent and public housing populations that are around 50 percent black.
Given the clear and consistent overrepresentation of blacks in the public housing of America’s largest cities, any action, positive or negative, directed at public housing will have a disparate impact on African Americans. Had Congress, or HUD, or any of the presidential administrations from 1970 through 2010 attempted to systematically improve public housing, the beneficiaries would have disproportionately been African American. Conversely, however, because HUD and Congress have both passively allowed and actively pursued the demolition of public housing since the 1980s, the impact of the forced displacement has been disproportionately felt by black families.
Disparate Racial Impact
Though the NHLP report on demolition in the 1980s did not examine the racial breakdown of projects already demolished, it did look at the race of residents in projects that were being considered for demolition (twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand units at the time of their report). The NHLP observed that “race seems to be a factor in the units being considered for demolition. All of the projects slated for demolition are majority non-white.” Specifically, the higher-than-average occupancy by African American households might have been a factor in determining which projects were torn down.
There are several potential standards against which to judge whether public housing demolition has had a disproportionate impact on blacks, each one corresponding to a more restricted spatial scale. To judge the displacement of blacks from public housing against the representation of blacks in the national population would show tremendous disparity owing to the overrepresentation of blacks in public housing. A second possible standard is the proportion of blacks in public housing across the nation (49 percent). This too would produce a conclusion of highly disparate impact. But this too is a less than adequate standard because we know that public housing demolition is concentrated in larger cities, places where blacks typically make up a higher percentage of public housing residents. In the average large city in the United States in 1996, 59.7 percent of public housing residents were African American. By this standard, there is still a very large disparate impact, since the average demolished project was 79.7 percent African American. Thus, demolished projects contained 33 percent more (79.7/59.7 =1.33) African Americans as a proportion of all residents than would have been expected had demolitions occurred in projects that were representative of public housing in all cities in the sample.
Restricting the referent standard to large cities would produce a more targeted comparison, but would still not indicate that individual PHAs are tearing down projects that have higher rates of black occupancy than the projects they leave standing. To demonstrate that, one must compare demolished projects to other projects in the same city in the same year; that is, one must use the overall racial distribution of a given city’s public housing stock as the reference for the demolitions that took place in that city.
One example should suffice to explain the method. The Bernal Heights Dwellings in San Francisco were demolished in 1997. In the year prior to its demolition the 208 units in the Bernal Heights Dwellings were 93 percent occupied (193 households), and 69 percent of households at Bernal Heights were African American.6 If 69 percent of the overall public housing stock in San Francisco that year was occupied by blacks, then the Bernal Heights demolition would be judged to not have had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. In fact, however, public housing citywide in San Francisco was only 49 percent Black in 1996. Thus, we conclude that the Bernal Heights Dwellings demolition did have a disproportionate impact on African Americans.
The degree of the disparate impact is calculated by a “disparity ratio” in which the numerator is the proportion of the demolished project occupied by blacks and the denominator is the citywide percentage of public housing occupied by blacks in the year prior to demolition.7 A ratio over 1.0 indicates a disparate impact. In the Bernal Dwellings example, the disparity ratio is 1.41 (69/49). The Bernal Dwellings demolition affected 41 percent more African American households as a percentage of all households displaced than would have been expected had the project reflected all public housing units in San Francisco.
For each demolition occurring between 1997 and 2007 a disparity ratio can be computed and then aggregated for all public housing projects. The information on resident demographics comes from HUD’s online database, “A Picture of Assisted Households.”8 There were, over this time frame, 394 public housing projects demolished in the 137 largest U.S. central cities. These projects accounted for 163,393 units of public housing (an average of 415 units per project). Of these units 110,227 (67 percent) were occupied during the year for which we have occupancy data. The HUD data contains resident demographic information for 313 cases, or 87,251 households. The average size of the projects in the sample is 397 units, though the median is 293. The mean is skewed upward by a relatively few large projects; one quarter of the projects had more than 515 units prior to demolition. The total number of people displaced in the 313 projects for which resident information is available is estimated at just under a quarter of a million (239,844).9 Assuming that the units for which no resident data are available are similar in household size to the units for which information exists, then all of the public housing demolished in these 137 cities over this time period directly displaced more than three hundred thousand people (303,002).
The majority of cases in the database are HOPE VI projects (228, or 73 percent of the projects for which we have resident information). Although HOPE VI projects are on average larger than the rest of the public housing developments that have been demolished (a mean of 421 units compared to 327),10 the data show that the HOPE VI projects and the other demolitions were statistically identical in terms of resident demographics. On seven indicators (percent of residents earning less than $5,000, percent with wage incomes, with welfare income, percent seniors, disabled, minority, and African American) there was no statistical difference between the HOPE VI and the other demolitions. As a result, it is reasonable to consider all of these projects as a single group regardless of whether they were HOPE VI-funded or not.
The overwhelming majority of households directly displaced by public housing demolitions across the country are African American. Of the 87,251 displaced households for whom we have demographic information, 71,373 households (or more than 192,000 residents given average household size in these projects) were African American, or 82 percent. The average demolition displaced 229 African American households (or 641 African American residents). In half of the demolished projects, furthermore, African Americans made up 95 percent or more of the households. Are these figures higher than one would expect to find in these cities during these years? Table 4.1 compares the demolished projects with the rest of the public housing stock in the same cities.
The data suggest a disparate racial impact of public housing demolition across more than three hundred demolitions in these large American cities. The average project that was demolished was 79.5 percent African American while other projects in the same cities were 73.2 percent African American on average. For Hispanic residents, however, there was no disparate impact; the average demolished project was 11.5 percent Hispanic, while the rest of the public housing stock in the cities averaged 11.2 percent Hispanic.
The data in table 4.1 also provide evidence of other statistically significant differences between the projects that have been demolished and other public housing. In the average demolished public housing project, 32.2 percent of the residents had incomes of less than $5,000, compared to only 25.2 of the residents in the comparison projects. Thus, demolition tended to target projects with significantly greater percentages of extremely low income residents. At the same time however, demolished projects had higher relative populations of wage earners and residents with welfare income. This is likely due to the fact that demolished projects also had significantly fewer seniors and disabled households than public housing that was not demolished. These findings show that demolished public housing projects looked significantly different than other projects on a range of resident-demographic measures.
Table 4.1 Demographic characteristics of demolished public housing, 1997–2007 (%)
The disparity ratio for individual projects ranges from 0 (in projects that displaced no African American households) to 5.08. The unweighted average disparity ratio for the 305 projects for which all data are available is 1.096, indicating that the average public housing project demolished had 9.6 percent more African American households as a percentage of all households than other public housing in the same cities. Twenty-two percent of the demolished projects had ratios of less than 1.0, meaning that there were fewer African American households in those projects compared to other public housing in the cities studied. Just over one-third of the projects (36.7 percent) had disparity ratios between 1.0 and 1.10, one-quarter (24.6 percent) had disparities from 1.10 to 1.25, and the rest (16.7 percent or one-in-six) had disparity ratios of 1.25 or more.
The overall disparity ratio is determined by dividing the total number of black households displaced in all 305 projects by the expected number displaced, where the expected number is simply the citywide percentage of public housing residents who are black applied to each project. In the Christopher Columbus Homes example, in Paterson, New Jersey, if there had been no disparate impact on blacks, one would expect that 70 percent of the 314 households in that project would have been black because 70 percent of the rest of the city’s public housing was black in 1999. This would have meant 220 African American households would have been displaced. In fact, 97 percent of the project was African American, or 305 households. Thus, this project displaced eighty-five more African American households (or 39 percent more) than would have been expected given a nondisparate outcome. Summing this calculation across all 305 projects, we obtain a weighted disparity ratio of 1.077; in the aggregate, projects that have been demolished in these 137 cities have displaced 7.7 percent more African Americans than would have been the case had there been no disparate impact. The weighted ratio is less than the unweighted average because of large projects in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore where virtually all public housing residents are black and therefore the individual-project disparity ratios are close to 1.0.
This last point highlights a limitation of the disparity analysis as used here; disparity ratios are bounded on the upper end by the initial overrepresentation of blacks in public housing in most of the large cities in this sample. For example, in cities such as Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Detroit, where 98 percent or more of all public housing residents are African American, there is essentially no possibility of a disparate racial outcome as it is defined here. Since both the numerator and the denominator in the disparity ratio have maximum values of 100, as the denominator (the citywide percentage of public housing residents who are black) approaches 100, the possibility of a ratio above 1.0 diminishes. The very high percentage of black residents in all public housing in these and other major cities, such as Atlanta (92 percent), Philadelphia (92 percent) St. Louis (95 percent), and Cincinnati (95 percent), have the effect of limiting the overall disparity ratio. Thirteen percent of the demolitions in the sample (or forty projects) took place in cities in which blacks make up 99 percent of all public housing households. In one-third of the demolitions (more than one hundred projects), blacks make up more than 90 percent of all public housing households citywide.
When all cases are included in the analysis, the unweighted disparity ratio is near 1.1 (1.096). When cases are eliminated at the upper end, that is, cases are removed where the percentage of citywide public housing is 98 percent or above, the average disparity ratio increases. When cities where 90 percent or more of the citywide public housing is inhabited by African Americans are removed from the analysis, the ratio is 1.15. The overall disparity ratio tops out at 1.18 when the analysis is restricted to cases in which the citywide public housing population that is African American is 75 percent or less.
National figures mask a wide range of outcomes from one project to the next. The highest disparity ratios occurred in cities in which African Americans made up half or fewer of all public housing households. Demolitions in those cities, nevertheless, affected some projects with very large proportions of African American residents. The largest disparity ratio belonged to the Springview Apartments complex that used to stand in San Antonio, Texas. Though the city’s public housing was only 12 percent African American, the Springview Apartments complex was 61 percent black, producing a disparity ratio of 5.08. Four of the top ten projects, as ranked by the size of the disparity ratio, were located in Denver, Colorado, and two were in Knoxville, Tennessee. In Denver, blacks made up roughly one quarter of the residents of public housing citywide, but accounted for between 61 and 71 percent of all residents in four projects demolished between 1995 and 2007. In Knoxville, blacks made up just less than half of citywide public housing residents, but were 90 percent of the occupants of two projects dismantled in that city.
Other cities have fewer African American households in their HOPE VI projects than would be expected given the overall racial makeup of public housing in the city. There are two extreme examples of this in El Paso, Texas, and Los Angeles (disparity ratios of 0.17 and 0.22, respectively) where public housing demolition has generally affected projects with higher Hispanic populations. And though San Antonio, Texas, has the project with the single greatest disparity ratio in the nation (Springview Apartments), overall the city has not targeted projects with a disproportionate number of African American residents for demolition (a disparity ratio of 0.76 over eight demolitions).
It is possible that the disproportionate impact on African Americans is not due to a targeting of blacks per se, but to the fact that public housing demolition and redevelopment has focused on the most dysfunctional public housing units and that these units happened to be occupied by African Americans. This, of course, does not eliminate disparate impact, it simply pushes it back one step. That is to say, one would need to ask why blacks occupy the worst public housing. Are they steered into the worst of the public housing stock? Or do local housing authorities systematically neglect the management and upkeep of public housing occupied by blacks? If one assumes that the earliest HOPE VI projects and the earliest non-HOPE VI demolitions were the most distressed and dysfunctional public housing in the nation, then it is possible to examine whether the disparate impact on African Americans is due to an emphasis on the most distressed public housing.11 If the disparate impact of demolition on African Americans is due mainly to the fact that African Americans occupy the worst public housing in the country then we would expect the percentage of black residents in demolition projects to be highest in the early years and to decline over time. This has not been the case, however. The percentage of residents in HOPE VI projects, and in all public housing developments demolished between 1995 and 2007, who are African American remained steady over that time period. This suggests that the racial breakdown of residents is probably not a function of the level of distress in projects that are demolished.
In order to definitively demonstrate a disparate impact one must be able to control for the other factors that could lead to demolition. A fixed-effects logistic regression analysis of public housing demolition and disposition between 1996 and 2007 was undertaken to see whether the racial composition of residents was a significant predictor of demolition net of other factors. The other factors that were controlled for in the model include the size of the development (in number of units), the vacancy rate, the percentage of residents over the age of sixty-two, and the median rent.12
The findings (data shown in the appendix) indicate that in large U.S. cities that account for the majority of public housing demolition, the public housing projects that were demolished tended to be larger on the whole than those that have been maintained, they had higher vacancy rates, lower rents, fewer seniors, and more African Americans as a percentage of all residents. Some of these findings are not surprising. PHAs have often manipulated vacancy rates when engaging in de facto demolition in order to induce the conditions that lead to greater acceptance of actual demolition. A higher vacancy rate was one of the factors identified by the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing (NCSDPH) as a direct indicator of distress and thus was directly used to identify developments suitable for demolition.13 Projects with lower rents were also more likely to be demolished than other projects. This is consistent with the interpretation offered in chapter 2 that cities are clearing the way for more lucrative land uses through the demolition of public housing.
The data indicate that the percentage of residents over the age of sixty-two is an important predictor of whether a project was subsequently chosen for demolition. Projects with more senior residents were less likely to be demolished. This suggests a marked propensity on the part of PHAs to demolish “family” projects and to preserve projects set aside for seniors. Sometimes the tendency is so pronounced that even HUD requests an explanation for why a PHA has “focused on eliminating ‘so much of its family housing but none of its elderly/disabled housing.’”14 Although the Atlanta case study showed that in some places even senior housing is being removed, the data indicate that for every additional percentage point increase in senior residency in a building, there is a reduction of over 3 percent in the likelihood of demolition.
Finally, the data show that, controlling for all other resident characteristics measured in this database, projects with greater proportions of African American residents were more likely to be demolished over the time period of this study. The magnitude of the effect for the African American variable suggests that for every additional percentage increase in black residency, the likelihood of demolition increases by 1.1 percent. A public housing project that is 80 percent African American thus is 44 percent more likely to have been demolished than an otherwise identical project that was 40 percent occupied by African Americans.
The analysis presents strong evidence that there has been a disparate impact of demolition on blacks and that this disparity goes beyond the mere overrepresentation of African Americans in public housing. The findings show a statistically significant tendency across more than twenty-five hundred public housing projects in 137 cities for projects with greater percentages of African American residents to be demolished compared to those with relatively fewer African American occupants. This pattern is a national one, and exists despite all of the differences that exist across the large cities in the sample.
Negro Removal Updated
To secure congressional passage of the public housing program in 1949, advocates joined forces with groups interested in creating a federal initiative aimed at revitalizing the downtown cores of the nation’s cities.15 As a result, the public housing program became tied to what became known as the urban renewal program. Urban renewal proceeded to fund massive redevelopment projects that from 1950 well into the 1960s involved total clearance of slums and blighted areas of central cities. The program was supposed to produce low-cost, public housing on a portion of the sites cleared in order to provide new housing for the slum dwellers. The program never fulfilled that promise and in the end demolished much more low-cost housing than it ever built. In many cities, most of the residents of that housing were African American families. Thus, the program took on the nickname of Negro Removal. Fifty years later, the HOPE VI program swept in for another round of clearance in many of the same neighborhoods that had experienced urban renewal a half century earlier. The numbers quite clearly indicate that the current round of demolition and the HOPE VI program in particular has been an updated version of Negro Removal.
The current efforts to dismantle public housing are only the most recent contribution to a troublesome legacy of disparate racial impacts in public housing. In its early years public housing was operated so as to reflect and reinforce patterns of racial segregation. The program reinforced racial segregation within cities and repeated those patterns within its own developments. Later, as the population of public housing became increasingly black in most cities, the program suffered from mismanagement and neglect. As the years went on and the problems of public housing in some major cities continued to mount, it was low-income blacks who bore the burden. This most recent phase of public housing history, the displacement and demolition phase, has also, as a matter of course, most heavily affected African Americans, both because they are generally overrepresented in public housing and also because they seem to have been targeted by the effort.
The forced removal of a household from its home is one of the most intrusive exercises of state power. The disruption to families is significant and the sense of loss, loss of home, of community, of a sense of identity and belonging can be profound in cases where people have developed strong place attachment. Forced displacement can also have negative effects on self-sufficiency and well-being regardless of place attachment, simply from the disruption of social support networks and survival strategies designed and employed by people living on the economic margin. For these reasons, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) and the international Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) have both weighed in on the displacement of public housing residents. The HRC conducted a fact-finding mission to several locations in the United States and COHRE has called for a moratorium on public housing demolitions.16
It is not at all clear, however, that the intentional targeting of African Americans in the transformation of public housing, should such intention exist, would necessarily be malicious. The demolition of public housing is embraced by many local officials as a necessary step in improving the communities of public housing and improving the lives of families in public housing. The proponents of HOPE VI and public housing transformation might not be surprised or troubled by the findings reported in this chapter. To them, demolition and displacement is a benefit, an opportunity for families trapped in public housing to escape the stifling and dangerous environments of public housing and to move to neighborhoods of opportunity. Thus, to some extent, the degree to which the targeting of “black projects” for demolition is a problem is dependent upon the experience of the displaced. How many are able to move back into the finished redeveloped neighborhoods? What are the neighborhoods like that displaced persons inhabit? Are the benefits that they experience significant enough to balance or outweigh the disruptions of forced removal? Are there reasons to distinguish this mass displacement of African Americans from the one that occurred as a result of urban renewal during the 1950s and 1960s? It is to these questions that we now turn.