2

AFFIRMATIVELY FURTHERING COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

The idea of community development embodies a set of strategies for the achievement of regional and racial equity in America’s urban areas unlike those pursued by fair housing advocates. This is so even as it is also true that the movement takes as its challenge confronting the same patterns of spatial inequality condemned by fair housing activists. Constructing the case for community development as a means of addressing these inequalities requires no critique of residential integration in and of itself. Indeed, the community development position does not incorporate a critique of residential integration per se. Integrated neighborhoods that emerge and persist as a result of families of all races and ethnicities realizing their housing choices demand no judgment one way or the other. Residential integration as a manipulated outcome and as a means of achieving urban and racial justice does, however demand a justification.

The difficulty of the fair housing integration argument is not so much its ends as its means.1 That is, the key problem is not so much integration as it is the integrating, especially when such efforts burden disadvantaged groups.2 The pursuit of residential integration, as a rule, either assumes or subordinates the residential preferences of people of color. Integration, it is understood, will not work without white acquiescence, and thus the terms of integration must be those that whites accept. Such a bind requires that the interests of communities of color be subsidiary to those of whites during the process of integrating. In addition, as a result of existing inequities of power, integration almost exclusively involves managing the settlement decisions of people of color and certainly not those of whites. The resistance of whites to residential integration is one of the glaring truths of American urban development, and it has repeatedly frustrated attempts at scaling up programs of integration. Programs of residential integration that have been able to last over time simply do not show much in the way of progress on the first objective, the spatial rearrangement of people, let alone progress on the end goal of racial justice.

The case for community development, of course, must address these same criticisms. Has it produced the benefits that it has promised? What, in fact, can be expected from community development, especially in the way of racial and urban equity? The assessment of community development to date has tended to concentrate on lower-scale phenomena such as whether affordable housing and other development activities produce benefits for people and for communities. The record here is better than the integrationists allow. Research has demonstrated very specific positive outcomes resulting from affordable housing and community development activity. Beyond these, though, the larger equity goals of the movement originate in conceptions of community that acknowledge the legitimacy and in fact importance of social group distinction. The strategies for achieving these larger equity goals within the community development framework should thus focus on the redistribution of political and economic power across the urban landscape rather than the redistribution of people of color.

The Limits of the Integration Argument

The central element of the community development response is that integrationist objectives should not be given a privileged position in housing policy, concerns about the problems of segregation and racial inequality notwithstanding.

Integration Is Only One Goal

Fair housing and equal opportunity as defined by the integrationists do not constitute the entirety of the HUD mission, nor do they address the totality of housing needs in the country. HUD’s obligations in no small measure include the provision of an adequate supply of affordable housing to meet the needs of all citizens. The most obvious measures of the agency’s performance in this area are figures on the number of homeless persons nationwide and the number of households lacking decent, safe, and affordable housing. These numbers suggest that we have some distance to go in meeting national objectives. Millions of families in the United States and more than half of all renters lack affordable housing. For very low-income families the shortage of affordable housing is most acute; in 2013, for every one hundred very low-income households only thirty-four units were available and affordable.3 An annual income of $42,240 is needed to afford the average two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent (FMR) in the United States in 2012.4 This translates to an hourly wage of $20.30, or $5 more per hour than the average renter household makes. For those making the minimum wage, of course, the discrepancy between earnings and what the National Low Income Housing Coalition calls the “housing wage” is even greater.5 There is not a single state in the country in which a person making the minimum wage can afford the average two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent. For most low-income families, the typical FMR is well beyond their ability to pay; the typical very low-income household is able to afford a rent that is roughly $500 less per month than the national average FMR.

The acute lack of affordable housing in the United States, worse in some metropolitan areas than others, is by itself a fair housing issue. This is because there is a racial disproportionality to housing need in the United States. People of color account for more than half of the households experiencing what HUD calls “worst case housing needs” in 2013, a pattern that has been the case since HUD began to track this information.6 The tremendous disproportionality of housing need is the result of long-standing patterns of discrimination in housing and employment. Addressing the significant racial gap in housing conditions that have resulted from discrimination ought to be a high priority of the fair housing movement.7

Much of the need for affordable housing is located in core neighborhoods that suffered significant disinvestment and decline during the postwar years of rapid suburbanization. These neighborhoods, disproportionately occupied by people of color, will require significant investment to improve housing and neighborhood conditions.8 A narrow construction of fair housing, one that focuses on integration, ignores the racial justice dimension of housing need and generates opposition to subsidized housing in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Wilen and Stasell argue that those focusing on integration “have cast aside the more important goal of improving housing conditions for members of previously oppressed groups, thus actually harming the intended beneficiaries of civil rights legislation.”9 By not conceiving of fair housing in this broader sense, fair housing advocates have defined their goal narrowly, and pursued that goal to very little benefit of very low-income households.10 The focus on integration sacrifices the objective of meeting housing needs to the spatial goals of dispersal and mix. Putting integration into a privileged position vis-à-vis the development of adequate affordable housing puts black communities in the position of having to wait for white communities to integrate before receiving the housing assistance they need. Given the fair housing concerns for resegregation, it is questionable whether black or near-black communities would ever be green-lighted for affordable housing investments by fair housing advocates.

Faulty Means

More than forty years ago legal scholar John Calmore pointed out that “truly bad things are happening in the name of integration.”11 At that time he was focusing his attention on the effect of “impaction rules” that have been applied to HUD programs since Shannon v. HUD in 1970.12 Impaction rules require that HUD housing subsidies be limited in poor neighborhoods that are racially segregated, on the grounds that those subsidies will reinforce patterns of racial and economic segregation. The implicit judgment embodied in impaction rules is that the housing needs of those who wish to integrate should be given priority over those who do not. However, for some like Calmore, self-imposed limits on housing subsidies in neighborhoods with poor housing conditions and a large number of disadvantaged families in need are “unconscionable and counterproductive” in that they limit the amount of safe, decent, and affordable housing for the poor in the central city.13 “The emphasis on dispersal tactics to achieve racial and economic integration,” argued Calmore, “is too often curtailing the provision of housing opportunities and community enrichment for those most in need.”14

In fact, the voluntary curtailment of housing investment in core neighborhoods is a type of voluntary, public-sector redlining. During the 1970s a national neighborhood movement emerged in the United States to advocate for the core neighborhoods of American cities. The chief concern of the movement was the systematic disinvestment in neighborhoods by the private sector. Lending institutions in particular were accused of draining communities of their wealth by taking deposits of residents while refusing to make loans in the neighborhood. Similarly, lending institutions were accused of directing their lending products toward predominantly white neighborhoods. Insurance companies were also criticized for imposing high rates in central neighborhoods. This general pattern of discriminatory and harmful business practices was opposed by neighborhood activists and local officials.

Public policies now exist to make banks and insurance companies more accountable to central city neighborhoods. In addition, public investment in core neighborhoods is seen as one way of countering the ill effects of these private-sector actions. By making low-cost loans available to property owners and residents in core neighborhoods, local, state, and federal governments have attempted to maintain a critical flow of capital into these areas.

Central city neighborhoods require an enhanced level of public-sector investment. As a rule, the building stock is older and therefore in greater need of maintenance and upgrading. In disadvantaged neighborhoods the level of physical deterioration and the effects of aging are even greater because owners and residents are less able to afford maintenance and upgrading. Community development corporations are the primary agents of maintenance and renewal in these neighborhoods. We know that community development investments in subsidized housing in core neighborhoods improve the housing stock, increase property values, reduce problems of crime, and contribute to economic development and the economic security of residents.

The restriction of CDC activities and the limiting of investments in subsidized housing in core neighborhoods, in the name of fair housing or in the name of deconcentrating poverty, would cut off or dramatically reduce the flow of public funds to central neighborhoods and ensure the further decline of these communities. When the private sector does this it is called redlining and it is opposed because of its obvious negative effects. The effects would be no better if the public sector pursued such a strategy. The restriction of community development activities, and subsidized housing efforts especially, in central neighborhoods is a form of redlining, this time imposed by public policy rather than by private-sector investors.

Interests of Low-Income Minorities

It is not at all clear that low-income people of color hold integration in as high regard as do fair housing advocates.15 Such a proposition might seem preposterous in light of the civil rights activism of the 1960s in which hundreds of thousands of people of color marched and protested in order to integrate neighborhoods, public facilities, commercial establishments, and government offices. Yet the extent to which the civil rights movement was about equal rights versus a particular spatial arrangement of integration is debatable. Indeed, disillusionment with the integrationist strategies and objectives of mainstream civil rights leaders during the 1950s and ’60s is starkly reflected in the strong black nationalist movement of the same era. Black nationalism and black power proposed a different vision of racial justice, one that focused on renewing black neighborhoods from within and building a base of power and community that was not dependent on integration. The black power countermovement called for community pride and improvements internally, rather than spatial integration into the larger white community. The neighborhood-based community development movement that emerged during the 1960s, furthermore, promised new means of achieving community improvements while retaining control of important economic and cultural assets. At the end of the civil rights era, there was less rather than more certainty about whether racial justice is better obtained through integration or through community action.

There remains strong empirical evidence for support of residential integration among blacks. Various studies of residential preferences, for example, seem to indicate that for many African Americans, a neighborhood mix of about 50/50 black and white is the ideal.16 The meaning of this particular finding is contestable, however. When segregated living conditions carry with them extreme material disadvantage, support for integration on the one hand and support for better living conditions on the other are difficult to disentangle. The context and frame of reference for such a hypothetical choice is an American urban environment shaped by discrimination in which predominantly black neighborhoods suffer many disadvantages relative to white neighborhoods. Thus, it is hard to say that “ideal” preferences expressed in survey responses indicate a desire for integration per se, when it is quite possible that they reflect a desire for the better public services and physical environment that go with a substantial white population.17

Integration or Good Housing?

Integration, even if a goal, may not be the primary objective of many African Americans. Instead, it is possible that “the more fundamental concern among black Americans has been freedom from impediments to the fulfillment of their human potential.”18 It is similarly important to consider whether deconcentration is really desired by low-income African Americans, and whether such deconcentration is desired more than good housing in their existing neighborhoods.19 Furthermore, Leigh and McGee suggest that integration is pursued not for itself but for the benefits it provides, such as good housing, good public services, and quality education. In this, the integrationists may not disagree and would simply add that the pursuit of these neighborhood benefits requires integration. But this is a contested point, and there is evidence that while lower-income people of color are obviously aware of the disadvantages they face in their current neighborhoods, their preferred solution is the upgrading of their existing communities rather than relocation to predominantly white neighborhoods.20 The community development movement, furthermore, is the means by which lower-income communities attempt to improve conditions. Even prior to the emergence of the neighborhood-based community development movement, there was acceptance of public housing in communities of color.21 The unrest in many urban ghettos during the 1960s was not a response to too much assisted housing being built in those areas; it was driven by discontent over existing living conditions and specifically the poor conditions that characterized much of the private-sector housing in African American neighborhoods.22 The National Urban League position throughout the 1970s and 1980s was that “the overriding issue... is better, more affordable housing for minorities, not housing integration.”23 The League opposed policies of dispersal and deconcentration for that reason.

Questions about the degree of support for integration existed even as the integrationist movement was strong. As early as 1963, the newsletter of the fair housing movement’s national organization (the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, or NCDH) summarized a study “that found that when choosing a home, most African-Americans looked first for good quality housing and neighborhood amenities. ‘Integration as such,’ the study concluded, ‘was a secondary consideration.’ ”24

Integrationists acknowledge the reluctance to move on the part of people of color, and admit that support for integration may not be what it was a generation ago, but they give this phenomenon a different interpretation. They often attribute the lagging support for integration to “integration exhaustion” brought on by the bitter resistance frequently encountered by those willing to be pathbreakers.25 Certainly it is true that black families who have led the way by moving into predominantly white neighborhoods have generally suffered greatly as a result. The sordid American history of firebombings, rock throwing, and mob intimidation that unfolded throughout the twentieth century in city after city is terrible testament to what Orlando Patterson called the “ordeal of integration.”26 It is quite likely that much of the reluctance to integrate expressed by people of color is simply fear of the hostility they are likely to face should they move into predominantly white neighborhoods.27 Similarly, racial prejudice and discrimination in the workplace can make the black neighborhood a refuge of sorts, a place where blacks don’t “have to deal with white people anymore.”28

The integration fatigue observation is important because it describes inter-racial experiences that are in direct contrast to what the contact theory suggests (and depends on). Contact theory hypothesizes improved relationships over time as contact increases; integration fatigue, to the extent that it exists, reflects interracial relationships that remain highly problematic for people of color.29 In fact, on closer scrutiny, the contact theory rationale for integration is suspect even on its own terms. As philosopher Tommie Shelby notes, the assumption that contact will reduce white racism over time implies a period of interaction when whites will continue to act on their implicit and explicit biases. Black residents are to simply endure this period of time until the hoped-for racial accord occurs. Shelby rightly questions whether blacks must play this role in the moral reform of whites.30

It seems likely that at least part of the ambivalence toward integration within communities of color may be related to the nature of specific integration policies themselves. These initiatives, including judicial rulings and court-generated programs, often discount the expressed preferences of elements within disadvantaged groups in order to impose a particular solution. Integration mandates that impose particular remedies can restrict the liberty and choice of lower-income African Americans just as rigid segregationist practices did.31

The operating assumption of integration efforts seems to be that “absent discrimination all nonwhites would opt for integration.”32 So fundamental is this assumption, that the “target” population, people of color, is sometimes not even involved in the creation and shaping of integrationist initiatives. One of the most famous and far-reaching housing integration cases of the past fifty years is the Gautreaux case in Chicago. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs was Alexander Polikoff. In his memoir of the case, Waiting for Gautreaux, there is a remarkable section where Polikoff wonders if the five lawyers on the case (“five white guys,” he notes) “should have consulted with the black community” about the nature of rulings made by the judge in the case. “In the end... we did not consult either our clients or surrogates for them,” he writes. “ Gautreaux remains a case in which neither the black class members nor others in the black community have had a meaningful role in litigation decisions.”33 What makes this so remarkable is that Gautreaux makes very specific proscriptions about acceptable levels of black residency within communities in the Chicago area and strictly limits the production of subsidized housing within areas based on the size of the black population. The court-approved levels of racial mix are also used to direct the movement of black families around the metropolitan area using housing choice vouchers. Moreover, Gautreaux has served as the model for expanding ideas of mobility programs across the country.34 This massively important case was decided without so much as consultation with the black community about the remedies being established, and upon it we have based national housing policy related to the “improvement” of housing conditions for lower-income people of color.

Even within the fair housing movement itself there seems to have been a preoccupation with the attitudes of the dominant white majority. The fair housing movement’s central organization, NCDH, focused on white racial attitudes and rarely explicitly scrutinized opinions of blacks. The NCDH newsletter, Trends, reported on seven national opinion polls between 1956 and 1966; all but one were polls of white attitudes. It was perhaps assumed by the early fair housing movement activists that the neighborhood preferences of people of color for integration were so obvious as to not require study.

The Feasibility of Integration Initiatives

The few integration initiatives that operate tend not to produce discernible benefits. First, long-standing and enduring white and suburban resistance to integration and deconcentration of poverty is a problem these programs have never overcome. Desegregation efforts have faced fierce opposition from whites since their advent in the 1960s.35 When the battlegrounds of integration shifted from city neighborhoods to suburban areas, resistance to integration and the lack of political will to overcome or overrule that resistance persisted.36 And years after that, sociologists have documented the resistance of whites to programs of racial integration and housing desegregation.37 As suburbs diversify, whites continue to flee, moving ever farther away.38

Even though fewer white express racial prejudices in survey environments, there is often a gap between the portion of the white population that believes in overall equity across races and the population that expresses support for particular integration programs.39 As Sniderman and Carmines argue, “large numbers of white Americans remain opposed to a wide array of public policies, from social welfare through affirmative action, aimed at finally achieving racial equality.”40 Some attribute this gap to “race fatigue,” the notion that whites are impatient with the continuing demands for race-based policy, instead thinking that formal sanctions for discrimination that are embodied in various laws dating to the civil rights era have eliminated problems of racial inequality before the law. Such persons are much more likely at this point to support so-called color-blind laws that establish universal standards for conduct and treatment. In the housing policy arena, for example, only tentative steps have been taken on integration programs, and these have proven to be highly vulnerable politically.

The pattern of extreme political vulnerability has been depressingly similar from one era to the next. In Richard Nixon’s first term, his HUD secretary, George Romney, pushed hard for integrative housing policies, trying to extend the reach of HUD-assisted housing into the suburbs. White resistance stopped him cold, and Nixon quickly reassured his suburban constituents that integration would not be a policy goal of his administration. In 1993, the federal government again tried a tentative step toward integrating subsidized households into higher-opportunity areas with the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program. Again, suburban resistance shut down the effort, this time forcing nominally liberal congressional Democrats to quickly pull the plug on the program, sending the direct message that Congress will not support moving low-income blacks into suburban communities.41 The sudden decapitation of the MTO program, coming as it did from liberal supporters in Congress, was a forceful reminder of the very limited and shallow base of support that housing integration policy enjoys in the United States. Liberal commitment to integration is, in fact, paper thin.42

The one integration-inspired program enacted by Congress that has endured over time and has been of consequence is the federal HOPE VI program and the related demolition and conversion of public housing developments across the country. This initiative has resulted in the movement of hundreds of thousands of very low-income families, mostly African American, out of their previous communities. In Chicago, the nation’s largest effort at dismantling public housing has actually produced a noticeable decline in the African American population living in the central city.43 There are several features of this effort that explain its exceptional status. First, it is self-consciously a “color-blind” program in the sense that nowhere in the materials explaining or justifying the initiative is race considered. The guiding concern of public housing redevelopment is the concentration of poverty. Of course, the MTO program was similarly color-blind in that policy makers specifically avoided the issue of race when justifying and creating the program. The target neighborhoods and the designated destination neighborhoods in MTO were defined by poverty level, not race. But the movement of low-income people of color into low-poverty areas meant de facto movement into predominantly white neighborhoods, and this fact policy makers could not hide. This brings us to the second important characteristic of public housing demolition that distinguishes it from MTO: public housing demolition did not mandate integration—by race or poverty status. The families displaced through redevelopment were not obliged to make integrative moves. Although it was hoped that such deconcentration and dispersal would take place, it was not mandated. In those cities where demolition of public housing might have been tied to real dispersal and integration, white communities reacted quickly. In New Orleans, for example, as the city moved to demolish thousands of units of public housing, the nearby predominantly white parishes took quick action “to counteract these deconcentration measures.”44 As a result, the record there and nationally shows that the overwhelming majority of low-income black families displaced by public housing redevelopment moved to other segregated neighborhoods.45 The policy designers may have considered that unfortunate, but it was exactly that feature of the program that ensured its ongoing viability.

Finally, the third significant feature of the program is that it involved significant and dramatic physical redevelopment of sizable parcels of land typically located in the core areas of central cities. In many cases, the redevelopment triggered or unleashed rapid gentrification and neighborhood change that resulted in significant increases in land value and private-sector investment.46 Thus, the scale of public housing redevelopment and its longevity is attributable in main to the fact that its most lasting legacy is not integration at all, but rather the dissolution of previously black communities that had come to be seen as troublesome for many reasons and their replacement with new communities much more acceptable for speculative private investment.

On Program Effectiveness

Integrationists often criticize community development for being ineffective, if not counterproductive. Yet it is easily possible to make the same argument against programs designed to achieve and maintain integration. The typical argument against affordable housing / community development is that it fails to produce community-level impacts. When critics attack efforts to improve life in disadvantaged core neighborhoods, what they find lacking in these efforts is that they have too often not reversed the downward spiral of decline and that they have not altered the neighborhood’s position in the hierarchy of places within the region. The critics may point to continuing high levels of poverty, or high levels of segregation, or unemployment, private-sector disinvestment, or perhaps crime. It may well be a combination of many of these. Affordable housing and community development are, in other words, typically judged by their community-scale impacts. There are other scales at which they might be judged, however. They might be judged by the number of decent, safe, and affordable housing units made available to families who needed them. Community development might be judged by the reduced instability of those households, or the number of jobs created or saved in commercial development. Community development might be judged by the enhanced access to services that is made possible through the co-location of housing and social services in some affordable housing developments. Affordable housing and community development might also be judged by the greater feelings of safety resulting from a revitalized section of the neighborhood. The discourse of concentrated poverty and neighborhood effects, however, has devalued these lower-scale benefits to the point that they are frequently completely overlooked in assessments of affordable housing and community development.

The evaluation of integration initiatives, on the other hand, typically exhibits the opposite bias. Housing mobility programs such as Gautreaux and MTO are judged by whether the individuals who participate in them report individual-level benefits. Both of these programs have produced volumes of research aimed at uncovering such benefits. Fair share housing programs and impaction rules are judged by the number of units they produce in various communities or the degree to which they channel development to “opportunity areas.” They are not, however, judged by the impact that they have either on the segregated neighborhoods of disadvantage in core areas (i.e., have they contributed to the desegregation of such places, and to what extent?) or on the exclusionary “opportunity” neighborhoods in which they produce housing (i.e., have they contributed to the integration of such places, and to what extent?). This is, of course, a fabulous double standard. Affordable housing and community development are deemed failures if they do not succeed in reversing massive flows of private and public investment that have disadvantaged the very neighborhoods in which community developers operate.47 Against this standard of success, the Gautreaux and MTO dispersal programs are expected to show only that the families who (a) volunteered for them, and (b) received housing subsidies through them, personally benefited in any number of different ways. Our assessments of community development and dispersal would look very different were we to apply the same standards to each.

Do community development practitioners bring such assessment upon themselves by making claims about revitalization that are unrealistic? This undoubtedly happens in some cases. Yet, generally, community developers are quite circumspect about the benefits they promise. Community-level effects, to the extent that they are claimed for affordable housing projects, tend to be made for fairly small-scale areas—the revitalization of one block, or a street corner, or the reduction in crime at specific addresses. Importantly, however, community development practitioners also claim benefits at the individual level, even though such claims are often ignored and virtually never measured by critics.

The evidence on the actual operation of integration programs suggests that they are deficient at two scales—they are unlikely to achieve desegregation on any appreciable scale, and they tend not to deliver the range of benefits for individual families that the integrationist advocates suggest.

Little Impact on Settlement Patterns

The effort to reduce or cease subsidized housing development in central neighborhoods in order to create more such housing in suburban areas is unlikely to desegregate central neighborhoods for several reasons. The argument is that such units in suburban areas will help with fair housing goals of reducing racial segregation and other goals related to deconcentrating poverty.48 The fair housing argument is based on the belief or hope that the units built in suburban areas will result in the movement of households of color out of segregated central city neighborhoods into nonsegregated suburban communities. The deconcentration argument is based on the hope that a low-income family will move into a low-poverty, “opportunity” neighborhood. Such outcomes are unlikely for several reasons. First, many low-income families already reside in suburban areas. In fact, nationwide there are more poor people living in suburban parts of metropolitan areas than in central cities.49 Second, most of these families live in housing that is not affordable to them. For example, in the Twin Cities, the regional planning body, the Metropolitan Council, estimated at the end of the century that there were fifty thousand suburban households earning less than $20,000 per year and spending more than 30 percent of their income for housing.50 This pattern is repeated across the country. Third, providers of subsidized and affordable housing options in suburban areas already have long waiting lists of families needing subsidized housing units.51 Given the residency preferences used by many suburban affordable housing providers, new units of subsidized housing will almost certainly be filled by low-income families who are currently suburban residents, and not by central city families moving out to the suburbs. Finally, there simply may not be enough “opportunity neighborhoods” of the sort that integrationists see fit as receiving neighborhoods for minority households.52

That much of the new affordable housing built in outlying areas is not inhabited by families moving out of segregated, high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods is a pattern noted by John Goering as early as 1986.53 Sometimes, however, the lack of integrative (or deconcentrating) moves is the result of lack of interest among low-income families of color in relocating to distant suburban communities. Housing built in Washington County, Minnesota (suburban Minneapolis– Saint Paul), as a result of the consent decree in Hollman v. Cisneros was almost exclusively inhabited by people coming from the Washington County waiting list, despite an explicit effort to market those units to low-income families from Minneapolis, and despite reserving the units for those families.54 Those units, and others built in suburban communities that would have represented an integrative move for the Minneapolis families, were simply undesirable to those families for many reasons. In other cities, one-half of low-income families given vouchers to move out of poverty neighborhoods moved again very shortly, returning to neighborhoods that were more like the ones they had initially inhabited.55

The first HUD initiatives dispersing subsidized household (the Areawide Housing Opportunity Plans and other efforts) produced very little movement of assisted households out of the central city.56 Even the shift in subsidy type from project-based assistance to tenant-based vouchers that began in the early 1970s has failed to disperse assisted households to an appreciable degree. The nation’s largest fair-share housing program aimed at opening up suburban communities to more subsidized housing (the Mount Laurel program in New Jersey) has shown almost no movement of African American families out of central cities and into suburban communities.57 Finally, despite HOPE VI demolitions, the largest nationwide program aimed at deconcentrating poverty, concentrated poverty in American cities has increased and currently stands at its highest recorded rate.58 Of course, this lack of impact at the national level is perfectly consistent with the predominant pattern of relocation in HOPE VI projects—moves from one racially segregated and economically disadvantaged neighborhood to another.

There is a significant need for subsidized affordable housing in the suburbs. The magnitude of the need justifies greater efforts to produce affordable housing outside the core. The affordable housing movement acknowledges this need and supports efforts to address it. But at the same time it must be understood that such housing will likely not produce significant housing opportunities for central city households, and thus should not be pursued as a replacement for continued efforts to provide decent, safe, and affordable housing for those living in the core neighborhoods of metropolitan areas. Those who argue for a cessation of subsidized housing construction/rehabilitation in the central cities in favor of more decentralized development ignore this already existing demand in outlying suburban areas. The development of affordable housing units in the suburbs is most likely to benefit low-income households already living in those suburban communities.

Not only are the ultimate goals of integrationists unlikely to be met; they are ill-defined in the first place. How do we determine what integration means? Should all neighborhoods look alike? What threshold of people of color within a neighborhood is necessary to satisfy integration objectives?59

Limited Benefits

Finally, the evidence to date suggests that the individual-level benefits of integration are not as widely experienced as integrationists hope. On this point one can look at the many studies of relocated families in Gautreaux, MTO, and other mobility programs, as well as the studies of families displaced through the HOPE VI program. This literature has been extensively reviewed and summarized elsewhere. Generally speaking, however, while families report benefits related to feelings of safety, there are no demonstrable impacts on financial self-sufficiency, employment, or income,60 mixed and limited impacts on health and education outcomes, and evidence that dispersal actually damages important sources of social capital and informal support upon which disadvantaged groups heavily depend.61 The disappointing performance of dispersal and mixed-income efforts are seen in other contexts as well. The British dispersal policies of the 1970s and 1980s “forced Blacks out of clustered living situations into neighborhoods not of their choosing, but for the most part without improving the quality of their housing.”62

Recent research (what has come to be known as “the Chetty study” after the lead author, sociologist Raj Chetty) shows that economic benefits do occur from deconcentration, but that the benefits appear only among those who were children younger than thirteen years old at the time of relocation. The authors show that these children, when they enter the labor force as young adults, earn on average 31 percent more than their counterparts in the control group.63 The authors also find greater college enrollment among the thirteen-and-under treatment group compared to their age cohort in the control group.64 The release of the study in 2015 was received with enthusiasm by many, in part because it was the first study among many to demonstrate a positive economic impact of deconcentration. The evidence of benefits to smaller children of moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods reinforced for many the advisability of moving people out of their neighborhoods into areas with greater “opportunity.” Thomas Edsall in the New York Times placed the study’s findings squarely within the debate about whether “federal dollars [should] go toward affordable housing within high-poverty neighborhoods, or... to move residents of impoverished communities into more upscale” areas, and argued that the study “challenges” community development policy.65

As promising as the findings are, they are balanced by several other considerations related to the MTO program and its operation. First, along with the positive impacts for young children, Chetty et al. also find “that, if anything, moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood had slightly negative effects on older children’s outcomes.”66 The study also confirmed the previous evidence of no economic impact for adults. Second, MTO was a voluntary program of mobility. Enrollment in the program indicated a desire on the part of families to move away from their current circumstances. These findings, as important as they are in identifying some economic benefit for young children, are not generalizable to all households of color, or to all residents of segregated or disadvantaged neighborhoods. Third, as Chetty et al. note, most families in the MTO program could not make the program work for themselves; MTO had only a 48 percent “lease up rate,” meaning that fewer than half of the families participating were able to successfully use the housing choice voucher to move to another neighborhood. Finally, among those who did move, a sizable number moved back to higher-poverty neighborhoods. Within ten years, MTO treatment group movers living in neighborhoods with less than 20 percent poverty dropped from 90 percent to 60 percent.67 Only 25 percent of the treatment group movers lived in a neighborhood with poverty below 10 percent less than ten years after the program began. An Urban Institute study of three MTO cities indicated that in 2004, eleven years after the program began, only 27 percent of treatment group movers lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates below 20 percent, “and only 17 percent were living in neighborhoods with less than 10 percent poverty.”68 All these considerations strongly suggest that voluntary mobility programs are not for everyone and that considerable work remains to tailor such programs to the families for whom benefits will occur, and to address the obstacles to successful implementation for those families. Questions remain about what to do for families not wishing to volunteer for mobility programs and those who quickly move back to higher-poverty neighborhoods, questions that are not resolved by the findings of Chetty and colleagues.

The city of Chicago’s extensive efforts in producing and operating mixed-income communities reveals that these integration efforts have not, for the most part, produced living environments that are supportive of lower-income people of color.69 Policy analysts Robert Chaskin and Mark Joseph studied the degree to which the mixed-income developments that have been the core of deconcentration and desegregation efforts from the early 1990s onward have realized their stated goals. In general, they conclude that they haven’t. The authors note that the residential management regimes put in place to address the needs of market-rate residents who could easily move elsewhere have “generated new forms of exclusion and new dynamics of marginalization” for the public housing residents, “rather than promoting integration of the poor into well-functioning mixed-income neighborhoods.”70 The central aim of these mixed-income developments, to foster cross-class relationships and even to benefit the lower-income residents through the establishment of relationships with middle-class neighbors, is largely unrealized. The “divide, particularly between lower-income renters and owners, is in some cases a source of middling discomfort, informed by subtle cues and quiet assumptions about race and class. In other cases it generates considerable tension.”71

They also found “little evidence of inclusionary democracy” resulting from these efforts. Residents’ lack of civic engagement beyond the development itself was disappointing to the program architects. The “neighborhood associational mechanisms, whether intentionally or not, marginalize low-income renters, and associations designed to promote inclusion have been largely ineffective.”72

Individual-Level Benefits of Affordable Housing

What, on the other hand, can be said about the benefits of community development and affordable housing? We can say, in fact, that affordable housing development provides a range of direct benefits to families, from increasing the economic security of low-income families to improving the physical living environment and increasing residential stability.73 The link between affordable housing and positive health outcomes is also strong.74 Children of low-income parents living in subsidized homes have a higher chance of meeting “well child” criteria than children in similar families that do not live in subsidized housing.75 Children in low-income families lacking affordable housing are more likely to suffer from underdevelopment resulting from malnutrition and iron deficiencies compared to those living in subsidized, affordable housing.76 In fact, recent research shows that children who grow up in both voucher-assisted housing and in public housing experience higher earnings and lower incarceration rates than their peers who did not have access to assisted housing.77

The reasons for these outcomes are twofold. First, as noted above, affordable housing simply frees up more resources for families to meet other needs such as health care and nutrition. For example, adults who have subsidized rent are more likely to have health insurance than those who do not live in subsidized housing.78 Alternatively, having enough money for food allows for a better-balanced diet for children and adults, avoiding illnesses stemming from malnutrition.

Affordable housing can reduce stress levels for adults and children by lessening the financial pressure of market-rate rents and providing a stable housing environment. Difficulties in keeping up with house payments have been shown to lead to lower levels of psychological health and greater rates of engagement with medical systems.79 Residential instability, eviction, and doubling up induced by lack of affordability have been linked to adverse psychological outcomes.80 In the case of the extreme instability of homelessness, a number of adverse psychological outcomes appear in both adults and children.81

Aside from benefits that arise from the extra income that subsidized rent facilitates, affordable housing contributes to bettering the health of residents directly through the physical environment that safe, stable housing provides. For example, safe housing can decrease exposure to environmental factors that affect health, such as allergens, neurotoxins (e.g., lead paint), rodents, or insect pests.82 Affordable housing also reduces the incidence of overcrowding, which can facilitate the spread of infectious disease and can contribute to stress in the home.83

A stable home environment is important for the educational performance of children. Lack of affordable housing produces instability in housing for low-income families with children. Hyper-mobility can have a negative effect on children, resulting in stress, behavioral problems, and poor performance in school.84 Frequent interruptions of educational instruction make progressive learning difficult.85 Schools located in areas with a hyper-mobile, often low-income population need to tailor their work to these kinds of students, and must focus more on reviewing previously covered topics, slowing down educational progress overall.86 Research has also shown that children’s cognitive achievement is higher for low-income families living in affordable housing and that lower-income families spend more on child enrichment when living in affordable housing.87

Creation of Jobs, Economic Stimulation, and Public Revenues

Development of low-income housing can have effects on the community in multiple ways, most directly by creating jobs for skilled construction laborers.88 The National Association of Home Builders estimates that the building of one hundred Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units for families can create 120 jobs.89 The multiplier effects of construction can also benefit local businesses when local suppliers are used. Local businesses can also benefit from the increased consumption of construction workers. Residents of affordable housing projects will experience an increase in their residual income after paying for housing, which can also contribute to the local economy.90 New housing construction and rehabilitation also generate revenues to local and state governments through fees and costs associated with zoning, permitting, and providing utilities for developments91 and through increases in sales, income, and property taxes from the housing project.92

In addition to providing revenue for the state or city and community surrounding the affordable housing development, low-income housing options can also prevent the local government from losing money by decreasing the likelihood of foreclosure for tenants that may have had difficulty remaining in a market-value home without assistance.93 Avoiding foreclosure also means avoiding declines in property taxes and utility revenue, and promotes stability of the housing market.94 The rehabilitation of vacant and abandoned properties brings them back on the tax roll and, as research has shown, increases property values nearby and can produce fiscal benefits that meet or exceed the cost of the rehabilitation subsidy.95

Creation of more affordable housing options will draw both employers and employees to the community. Employers view adequate affordable housing stocks as an advantage when determining where to locate business, as a shortage of affordable housing can prevent employees from staying with a company for an extended period of time.96 This suggests that building or maintaining low-income housing developments may draw potential employers to the community by providing adequate, stable, and safe housing for potential employees. A recent study showed that the lack of local options for affordable housing was linked to slower employment growth.97

Crime and Property Values

When community development corporations purchase problem properties for the purpose of rehabilitating and operating them as subsidized housing, there is a great potential for neighborhood improvement. The replacement of an overwhelmed or disinterested private landlord with a community-based nonprofit owner can improve management of the building, reducing the nuisance behaviors on and around the property. The upgraded physical condition of the building achieved through rehabilitation, combined with the reduction in nuisance behaviors, can produce benefits for the community.98

Determining the true impact of a subsidized housing development on property values is difficult because many projects are sited in neighborhoods that already have a less dynamic housing market. Thus, what appears to be a negative impact of the subsidized housing (property value declines or slower than average increases) is in fact not a result of the development being located nearby but rather the reason why the development was placed there in the first place. In the end, the impact of subsidized housing on neighborhoods depends on a number of factors, including the type of subsidy program involved, the size of the development, and ownership and neighborhood characteristics.

Generally, studies have shown that Low-Income Housing Tax Credit properties tend to have a positive effect on neighborhood property values.99 The role of nonprofit developers appears important in determining the ultimate impact of subsidized projects. In New York City, for example, although both non- and for-profit complexes have produced positive impacts on nearby property values, the nonprofit developments had a sustained positive impact over a longer period when compared to the for-profit projects.100

The experience is much more mixed with older forms of subsidized housing such as public housing and Section 8. Studies have shown positive, negative, and no effects of these forms of subsidized housing on neighborhood property values.101 Project size may be an important factor in the impact of public housing and Section 8. Small projects in New York City and Denver have had a positive effect on the neighborhood property values, whereas a large public housing project in New York City has had a negative effect.102 Tenant profiles can also produce differential effects; small public housing for the elderly produced a positive effect in New York City, whereas small projects for families had no impact on property values.103 Part of the positive impact of community development, of course, is the result of removing or improving existing land uses that are disamenities.

The housing rehabilitation efforts of local community development corporations that focus on single-family homes also have positive impacts on nearby property values. The rehabilitation of vacant properties increases property values nearby and can produce fiscal benefits that meet or exceed the cost of the rehabilitation subsidy.104

The Question of Choice

The issue of choice is at the core of the integration question as it has evolved in the fair housing movement. The working assumption of the movement is that given the choice, people of color will move into integrated settings. This has proven, in setting after setting, to be unfounded. The experience of the recent generation of mobility programs, for example, both the forced and the voluntary programs, show in some cases a reluctance to move to the prescribed areas and in other cases a noted tendency on the part of program participants to move back into more segregated and lower-income neighborhoods over time.105 The programs have also suffered, in some places, a lack of demand and even outright resistance to moving.106 Perhaps the most consistent and clearest lesson coming out of the studies of forced and voluntary mobility is that the desire for integration among lower-income people of color does not match what has been imagined by the integrationists.

Whose Preferences Matter?

The question of choice presents integrationists with a number of difficult issues.107 The first is a practical one. Thomas Schelling’s game theoretical work on residential integration shows that high levels of residential segregation can arise solely from whites and blacks acting on the basis of their integration preferences.108 Research has shown fairly consistently that blacks and whites have different ideas of what the ideal racial breakdown of neighborhoods should be. Preferences as stated in survey research show that most blacks would prefer a neighborhood that has roughly equal parts black and white.109 The majority of whites, however, see the ideal racial mix of a neighborhood they would consider living in to be closer to 75 to 80 percent white and thus no more than 20 to 25 percent black. As Schelling shows, the outcome in a setting in which blacks and whites act on these preferences is a high degree of segregation. First, there are too few whites with a preference for majority black neighborhoods to shift those neighborhoods out of segregated status. Second, blacks with a higher tolerance for white neighbors will be the first to move into predominantly white neighborhoods. As the percentage of whites declines, more blacks will move in, and this would continue presumably until the 50/50 balance is achieved. Except that once black occupancy reaches 20 percent, whites for whom this level of black occupancy is intolerable (i.e., the majority of whites) will begin to leave the neighborhood. Their exit will continue until only those whites with a higher preference for diversity remain. And, as with the first example given, that number is too few to prevent resegregation.

This 20 percent threshold is sometimes referred to as the neighborhood “tipping point”—the proportion of racial/ethnic minority population that will trigger white flight from a neighborhood. Research has shown that this point will vary from one urban area to the next and will also vary over time. It is, in effect, an index of white prejudice or intolerance.110 Thus, from a practical standpoint, blacks are often faced with only two residential options—either a segregated black neighborhood or a neighborhood in which they are part of a very small minority.111

The dilemma for integration efforts is that if everyone is given full choice about where to live from the standpoint of neighborhood racial composition, integration will not be achieved. Thus, what to do about it? The answer for integrationists has been to constrain the choices of people of color. However, as one observer notes, “What is missing in [such an] argument is an explanation of how... [to] convince Blacks to change their preferences on the kinds of neighborhoods in which they prefer to live.”112 Where some integration advocates are silent on the issue of black preferences, others address the conundrum directly and conclude forthrightly that policy must for practical reasons accede to the preferences of whites, “otherwise, efforts to achieve deconcentration either will be frustrated by community opposition or lead to the exodus of white households.”113

The lesson is clear: for the integrationists to achieve their goals, blacks must sacrifice their residential preferences. Put differently, the narrow pursuit of fair housing integration must relegate the choices of people of color to a position behind those of whites, and in some cases actively restrict the exercise of choice by people of color.114 This happens in at least two ways. First, the integration imperative specifically calls for restricting affordable housing development in black and/or high-poverty neighborhoods. Thus, those who wish to occupy new affordable units are limited in their choices to moving out of core neighborhoods (or not moving into them).

This restriction of choice is most obvious in cases of redevelopment and the forced displacement of lower-income people of color. The demolition or conversion of over 250,000 units of public housing in the United States since the early 1990s has disproportionately affected people of color and forced their relocation whether or not they desired to move. The engineers of this displacement seem quite comfortable in asserting their choice over even the expressed opposition of families who did not want to move. President Bill Clinton’s first secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros, presided over the policy changes that led to the mass demolition of public housing and displacement of hundreds of thousands of low-income, mostly black public housing residents. He dismissed the opposition to this displacement on the part of the tenants: “Although even residents living in horrible conditions had mixed feelings about leaving neighborhoods where they had developed bonds of friendship and mutual support, it was our judgment that conditions in the most distressed public housing developments were so bad that replacement was the only reasonable course” (emphasis added).115 The second means by which the fair housing imperative constrains choice is illustrated by attempts to manage neighborhood composition to the liking of white residents. The programs of integration management of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, allowed only a certain number or percentage of minority families into communities in order to maintain the desired level of diversity and to avoid triggering white flight. The disappointing irony of all this is that these programs place “constraints on black housing choice in addition to those imposed by overt discrimination.”116

The various mobility and dispersal programs set up to desegregate lower-income blacks rarely, if ever, incorporate the neighborhood racial characteristics preferred by blacks. Neighborhoods with a 50/50 black-white split (the expressed preference of most blacks surveyed) are not what participants are offered in the various programs that engineer their relocation. Under Gautreaux, African Americans are obliged to move to neighborhoods that are at least 70 percent white. In the consent decree that governed the integration of public housing residents in Minneapolis, the approved neighborhoods had to be at least 71 percent white. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh), the target neighborhoods had to be more than two-thirds white. In other mobility programs the neighborhoods approved for their residence are defined by poverty rate, but once that definition is applied, the de facto racial prescription is for neighborhoods that are typically at least two-thirds white. Take the MTO program as an example. Participants in that program were obliged to move to neighborhoods with poverty rates below 10 percent. The 1990 census shows that these census tracts were very unlikely to have the 50/50 racial composition that most black families prefer. In fact, across the five cities participating in the MTO program, only 6 percent of all census tracts in the metropolitan areas had poverty rates of less than 10 percent and white populations between 40 and 60 percent. Only 6.6 percent of all housing units in those five metropolitan areas were in those neighborhoods. In short, the various programs and legal remedies being offered do not incorporate the preferences of most blacks with regard to integration. The black/white balance that drives these initiatives reflects other considerations and other calculations.

The “Complex Subjective Web” of Housing Choice

Of course, housing mobility choices are almost never a reflection only of neighborhood racial composition. Instead, settlement patterns are the result of complex and multiple causes that integrationists often either fail to understand or simply ignore.117 People choose housing on the basis of a wide range of considerations, and for some very low-income people the very concept of housing choice is inappropriate for explaining mobility.118 People may hope to maximize their proximity to place of employment, or seek particular schools for their children. Some will choose to move toward or remain close to family and friends.119 Those who are transit dependent will prioritize transit access, and some will look for particular kinds of neighborhood amenities. One of the most important considerations in housing choice, obviously, is cost. In short, there is a “complex subjective web that helps guide people’s choices” in housing.120

Fair housers will point out, accurately, that housing choices are framed by the public policies that determine the spatial distribution of the factors important to people. For example, the transit-dependent are limited to those parts of a metropolitan area with acceptable transit service. In most metropolitan areas transit access is focused in the central city and immediate suburbs. Government support of highway development opened up vast suburban tracts for habitation, and this choice is one that middle-income families can make. Various public policies in the past have concentrated affordable housing in core parts of metropolitan areas, while local exclusionary zoning has actively kept it out of developing suburban areas. Thus, the choice of low-income people is constrained, of course, by cost and the spatial distribution of affordable housing and the spatial distribution of infrastructure and amenities that they most value. In addition, the continued influence of racial discrimination in housing importantly constrains choice. As previously noted, integrationists will often explain the reluctance of blacks to integrate with reference to their desire to avoid the direct racial animus of whites.

For the integrationists, the serious constraints on choice faced by lower-income people of color are of central importance. They question, for example, whether the choices that members of disadvantaged groups make to stay in a community or to return to a mostly segregated community are a true expression of preference. The decision of low-income people to locate or remain in less advantaged neighborhoods, they argue, is not a full and free choice. As Squires and Kubrin write, “All too frequently such decisionmaking is framed and limited by a range of structural constraints. Individuals exercise choice, but those choices often do not reflect what is normally understood by the term ‘voluntary.’ ”121

So, the argument goes, how much does choice really mean when it is not full and free choice? Does the absence of free and full choice in housing relieve us of concern about whether choice is served by integration efforts? Would low-income families choose to remain in their communities if they had full and free choice?

In the end this is a fruitless path. The answer to what housing people would choose in the absence of all constraints is as unknowable as the conditions of “full and free choice” in housing are unattainable. We can agree that full and free choice in housing is not available to lower-income people of color. However, we must also be prepared to agree that it is not available to affluent whites either. When one buys a house or rents an apartment, one is getting not just the unit but the neighborhood in which it is set. That neighborhood has an existing endowment of institutions and amenities, and an existing pattern of land use. In other words, an entire social and physical environment accompanies each home. Though these can change over time, typically they do not change quickly. So the neighborhood one “buys” along with the housing unit is the neighborhood one must negotiate on a daily basis for the foreseeable future. Full and free choice in housing is available to no one because, simply, no metropolitan area has neighborhoods available with every possible combination of school quality, transit service, retail amenity mix, housing affordability, and so on. Of course affluent whites are much better able to maximize their preferences because their choices are much less constrained than those of lower-income people of color. This observation provides us then with what should be the guiding principle of fair housing advocacy: the maximization of choice for disadvantaged groups. Fair housing advocacy should be about providing more choice, not constraining it. And, importantly, choice includes the decision to remain where one is, whether integrationists deem that location to be a good one or a bad one.

The first station of fair housing spatial strategy, the opening up of exclusionary housing markets, meets the standard established above. Opening up exclusionary communities will provide another housing option for people of color and low-income people who had been kept out through a combination of regulatory restrictions. The second and third stations of fair housing spatial strategy, preventing further segregation and dismantling existing segregation, too often violate this principle. These efforts can involve (a) limiting the development of affordable housing where it is needed; (b) in the case of integration maintenance, denying entry of families of color to communities in which the current degree of diversity has been deemed optimal; or (c) forcing the relocation of families who have no desire to move. In these cases, the options of people of color are artificially and unnecessarily limited out of a desire to achieve an approved level of integration.

Affirmatively Furthering Community Development

More than thirty years ago, geographer Ceri Peach made a distinction between “good segregation” and “bad segregation.” More recently Peter Marcuse has differentiated between what he calls ghettos and ethnic enclaves.122 Peach and Marcuse make essentially the same basic point, that not all cases of racial/ethnic clustering are to be condemned or seen as evidence of oppression. What makes segregation objectionable is not the spatial concentration of a particular ethnic group, but rather the forms of oppression and structural inequalities that produce it or are attendant to it.123 Examples of healthy and functional ethnic enclaves are easy to identify. Similarly, disempowered ethnic ghettos are just as clearly delineated by the weight of social problems and physical decline they exhibit. Furthermore, and somewhat obviously, the acknowledgment of the benefits of clustering does not require a belief that all clustering is voluntary.124

It is not the concentration of minorities that distinguishes enclaves and ghettos, but rather the power inequalities, economic deprivation, stigma, and structural disadvantage. Iris Marion Young, after acknowledging the conditions of segregated ghettos, then asks, “What norms and ideals ought to guide policies and actions aiming to reverse these harms?”125 Her answer is not integration that imposes a spatial remedy with an “ideal” population mix in the “proper proportions.”126 Instead she calls for “an alternative ideal of social and political inclusion” that she calls “differentiated solidarity.” Differentiated solidarity, she argues, “affirms the freedom of association that may entail residential clustering and civic differentiation” while simultaneously establishing the basis for principles of justice across groups.127 Integration, she argues, tends wrongly to focus on patterns of group clustering while ignoring more central issues of privilege and disadvantage.128 Thus, Young defends “group differentiation [as] both an inevitable and desirable aspect of modern social processes.”129

Tommie Shelby distinguishes between segregation (the spatial pattern of racial clustering) and “the diverse social factors that contribute to bringing it about or maintaining it—discrimination, institutional racism, private residential choices, street crime, urban renewal policies, economic inequality, and so on.”130 Efforts to address the racial injustices inherent in segregation should therefore address the various factors that produce segregation. Integration, Shelby concludes, is not a requirement of a corrective response to racially unjust segregation.

In essence, the choice between fair housing integration and community development, to the extent that it must be made, is a choice between the values of diversity and equity. In Susan Fainstein’s The Just City, she argues that of the two values, diversity is the lesser. She concludes that “Iris Marion Young’s formulation of relatively homogeneous neighborhoods with porous boundaries” is therefore preferable to efforts to manage settlement patterns to achieve the “proper proportions.”131

Political scientist David Imbroscio employs a somewhat similar argument critiquing integrationist efforts.132 Like Young, Imbroscio condemns the injustices associated with race and class segregation, and he, too, sees the solution in something other than integration.133 Imbroscio assigns integrationist urges to a larger “politics of liberal expansionism.”134 Liberal expansionism, in Imbroscio’s eyes, “combines a liberal political philosophy (in the contemporary, American political sense of ‘liberal’) with the idea that the social and economic problems of America’s central cities can only be solved by... ‘crossing the city line’ ” and incorporating metropolitan area-wide solutions.135 Thus liberal expansionism is essentially the same as what others refer to as new regionalism.136

Subordinating Protected Class Interests

The pursuit of integration as idealized by fair housers and regionalists tends to leave the dominant group relatively undisturbed. Integration programs privilege the white position and reproduce white domination.137 Integration efforts that limit the number of blacks in a neighborhood in order to avoid “tipping” tacitly accept and accommodate white racism but also have the perverse effect of limiting choices for disadvantaged groups. In effect, this reproduces housing market processes of discrimination and segregation.

Sociologist Mary Patillo points out that integration entails both a “celebration of Whiteness” and presents white communities as the normative model for success. This is a point, she notes, that Derrick Bell makes in the context of education integration and the Brown decision.138 As she further argues, “Integration dwells on and is motivated by the relatively problematic nature of Black people and Black spaces, and posits proximity to Whiteness as the solution.”139

Furthermore, the desire for residential clustering rarely reflects a wholly separatist orientation, and most disadvantaged groups actively seek integration into labor markets and political institutions regardless of residential pattern.140 “Social group distinction,” writes Iris Marion Young, “is not wrong.” Further, what we should be seeking, according to Young, rather than a mechanistically applied spatial quota designating approved mixes of majority and minority groups, is “to balance values of inclusion and respect with more particularist and local self-affirmation and expression.”141

As a result, Young argues for “movements of resources rather than that of people.”142 She claims that policy that “aims to move resources to people addresses directly the inequalities of material privilege and disadvantage [that] processes of segregation produce” and thus is a more direct and effective means of achieving racial equity.143 In a like manner, Imbroscio argues for “the normative superiority of addressing urban problems where they currently exist rather than using... measures to foster a spatially oriented solution.”144

Young and Imbroscio echo, in a more generalized manner, the concerns of housing advocates who suggest that the focus of the fair housing movement on housing integration ignores the more pressing issue of housing inequality and the poor housing conditions faced by lower-income people of color. The privileging of integration rejects the validity of people’s desire to live and associate with others for whom they feel particular affinity. However, the privileging of integration also leaves intact fundamental inequalities. As Patillo writes, “integration is a strategy to achieve equality, not the substance of equality itself.”145 The solution to the problems of “lack of fairness, opportunity, justice, equality, and recognition of shared humanity” that lie at the bottom of American race relations, she argues, “cannot be realized through the co-location of Black and White bodies alone, but must include the real stuff of equality.”146

Social and Cultural Benefits of Neighborhoods

Virtually all social observers acknowledge that at least some of the social and racial “sorting” that characterizes American housing markets is due to “self-segregation” or the desire to live with others who share one’s sociocultural-racial identification. Place identification can be very strong for some families, and the desire to remain within a neighborhood and to see that neighborhood improved is as legitimate an aspiration as is the desire to move away to a different and “better” neighborhood. Furthermore, the impulse to self-segregate can reflect the “need of individuals to develop psychologically healthy and mature racial identities.”147 Racial clustering, “when its purpose is mutual aid and culture-building among those who have affinity with one another,” is defensible, according to Young, “as long as the process of clustering does not exclude.”148 Shelby argues that black self-segregation is fundamentally different from what is seen in exclusive white neighborhoods. Rather than an attempt to hoard resources and deprive nonblacks access to the advantages of black neighborhoods, he writes, “black solidarity is... instead a component of an ethic of resistance to injustice.”149

Lower-income people tend to rely on informal safety nets to obtain needed services such as child care and transportation.150 Such informal support networks are built up over time and depend on close, interpersonal relationships between neighbors, friends, and family members. Lower-income households rely on these informal networks for a range of goods and services that they are unable to purchase on the market. This informality is a central feature of their lives and can extend to basic needs such as housing and employment as well as to supportive services. Access to this type of social capital requires residential proximity and thus can influence the housing and neighborhood decisions of lower-income households. Kinship ties and social networks reduce the mobility of families, especially among low-income households.151

Integrationists frequently argue that the bridging social capital that would be available to blacks in integrated neighborhoods is more useful for economic advancement than the bonding social capital of informal support networks. But as Shelby points out, given white resistance to integration there is little guarantee that bridging would actually occur.

The social capital argument also makes integration a particularly distasteful remedy for ghetto poverty because of its racial dimensions. Such an approach to corrective justice would reinforce the symbolic power that whites hold over blacks by encouraging whites to see their relationships with blacks not as intrinsically valuable forms of inter-racial community but as an avenue for blacks to share in (not abolish) white privilege. Because such relationships cannot be coerced but must be entered into voluntarily, whites are free to dole out this dubious privilege to whomever they see fit and, crucially, to withhold it at their discretion. This puts blacks in an untenable supplicant position.152

Further, some neighborhoods are more accepting of informal economic activity than others, making them locations where income generation is easier for those participating in informal economies.153 Indeed, neighborhoods, as noted above, are endowed with a set of physical, social, and economic characteristics. Neighborhoods contain differing arrays of jobs and job opportunities, shopping options, and market-based services such as Laundromats. They also vary by the type of public service infrastructures that exists, including public transportation facilities and social service agencies. As a result, studies have documented the fact that lower-income families frequently put emphasis on improving their existing communities rather than favoring a dispersal strategy in which they are forced or given an option to move to another community.

As with the social and cultural benefits of neighborhoods, the contention that some neighborhoods provide an array of services attractive to lower-income people is not an argument against integration, but rather an argument for choice and specifically for the choice of moving to or remaining in a neighborhood that integrationists find problematic on the basis of racial mix.

Political Power

It has long been observed that one of the outcomes of residential clustering is the development of electoral power among minority groups. The main argument is that residential clustering allows for the creation of so-called “majority minority” districts in which communities of color are more easily able to elect representatives from their own community and thereby build a tradition of political leadership. This basic dynamic was of course a fundamental element in the black power and community control arguments of the 1960s, but it is also a truism of local politics.154 In contrast, patterns of perfect integration would establish minority groups as a permanent electoral minority in all political jurisdictions and subdivisions.

Elizabeth Anderson, in The Imperative of Integration, relegates this notion to the status of “conventional wisdom” and ultimately dismisses its importance, suggesting somewhat paradoxically that only when minority groups are spread throughout all districts within a given polity will their interests be truly considered by the political elite. The bulk of political thought, however, suggests otherwise. Minority status within broader political arenas dominated by whites is more likely to create the conditions for ongoing political marginalization.155 Spatial clustering has led to a rise in the number of minority representatives and increased minority political participation.156 Aggressive desegregation efforts, were they to truly reduce concentrations of ethnic settlements, would necessarily reduce the political power of minority groups.157

Young, too, argues that “policy change to undermine structural inequality is more likely to occur if subordinated groups are politically mobilized.”158 This is more likely to happen where minority groups are able to build political leadership through successful electoral strategies. Integration consigns minority groups to perpetual minority status, making political development more difficult. Finally, spatial racial clustering has also led to the creation and emergence of political leadership and power within communities of color. This is an effect that even Anderson acknowledges, noting that minority districts have “arguably provided the foundation for a black political leadership which... has fostered a racially integrated, coalitional style of politics.”159

In the end, political empowerment of disadvantaged groups is a precondition for effective integration in any case. Groups must operate from positions of equality if integration is going to be anything other than tokenism.160 Contact theory suggests in any case that integration will improve race relations only under conditions of equality.

Those Who Do Not Move

Integration programs offer no solution to the conditions of segregated communities. Implied in the integration model is the idea that segregated communities will simply wither away as their inhabitants move to other places. As we have seen, however, the programs are unable to generate the degree of mobility that would be necessary for such a sea change in settlement patterns. What is left is the very selective out-migration of a few households with no discernible impact on the rest of the community.161 To the extent that those households that move out are carefully picked in order to maximize the potential for their success (an admitted element of the Gautreaux mobility program, for example), then the communities left behind are even more concentrated in poverty and disadvantage.

Were real deconcentration to occur and were integrationists able to produce real change in the targeted core neighborhoods, the likely outcome would be rapid neighborhood gentrification and the spillover displacement of disadvantaged groups. Again, the one deconcentration effort that has occurred at a significant scale, the dismantling of America’s public housing system, is frequently associated with gentrification-style turnover. The possibility that dispersal and redevelopment are simply preludes to gentrification has been an ongoing concern for several decades now. John Calmore, for example, wondered in 1980 whether dispersal efforts were not a prelude to gentrification. Indeed, many observers have noted how income-mixing efforts in previously low-income neighborhoods have been a form of Trojan horse penetration of housing markets ripe for revalorization.162 Integrationists have not been particularly guarded in their support for such wholesale change and the community disruption it brings. Indeed, this kind of change is the point, according to some.163 Though gentrification is seen as a problem by affordable housing advocates because of its deleterious impacts on housing affordability, it is seen as a positive outcome by fair housers because it changes the income (and often racial) dynamics within low-income, segregated communities.164

Regardless of their impact on segregated communities, one must acknowledge that integration programs that force mobility have done an exceedingly poor job of achieving integration in white middle-class neighborhoods. Indeed, the more common outcome for low-income people of color participating in mobility programs, voluntary and involuntary, has been reconcentration or no change.165 A majority of Gautreaux and MTO participants could not even successfully use their voucher subsidies and thus moved nowhere. Among those who did move, a portion have returned to neighborhoods more like the one they left than the first one they moved to. Families involuntarily displaced through HOPE VI overwhelmingly moved to other segregated, low-income communities. Should isolated families make it out of the core neighborhoods and into predominantly white neighborhoods, they frequently face social isolation. Gautreaux advocates celebrate the fact that program participants faced overt harassment only in the early years of the program, and note the disappearance of active hostility after a period of time. However, the greater concern for low-income families who moved into “opportunity” neighborhoods is the loss and ongoing absence of an informal network of support that allows them to make ends meet.166

This is not to say that affordable housing built in suburban areas is a failure. Affordable housing in the suburbs has been shown to successfully provide stable, clean, and affordable housing to disadvantaged households. It has been shown, furthermore, to operate in ways that do not damage local property values, or disrupt “quality of life,” two concerns that opponents of affordable housing frequently verbalize. For those families who do find their way out from central cities, affordable housing in the suburbs can work very well.167 Such housing fills an important need, and it works. For this reason it should be pursued aggressively. It does not, however, desegregate central neighborhoods. And for that reason it should not be a substitute for continued affordable housing efforts in the core.

“The Stuff of Equality”

The counterargument to integration as a policy objective is not an apology for segregation. Critiques of dispersal, mixed-income housing schemes, and deconcentration do not constitute a tacit acceptance of segregation or spatial inequalities. The choice between committing to the integrationist ideal on the one hand or surrendering in the fight against segregation on the other is a false one.

The community development movement, at its basis, expresses an ideal different from that of integration. It suggests that a fundamental objective in the pursuit of racial justice is the desire to achieve “the real stuff of equality,” as Patillo calls it. This means greater political and economic power for people of color, the kind of power that produces and maintains good schools and safe communities wherever they are located, and provides economic security to residents. It also means the pursuit of decent living conditions independent of the number of white people living nearby.

The systematic forms of oppression visited upon black communities are rendered invisible when the focus is on how many people of color are clustered together. An emphasis on neighborhood demographics produces integrationist solutions that, as will be detailed in the next chapter, focus on managing and restricting the entry and exit of people into and out of neighborhoods to maintain acceptable color/ethnicity mixes. What is acceptable, furthermore, has always been determined by what the white majority will tolerate. Success in such endeavors would have the effect of ensuring black minorities in all communities and enshrine the tipping point as a guiding principle of urban policy. Thus do integration initiatives ratify white racism.

As a result, Iris Marion Young argues that housing should not be distributed “according to some integrated patterned outcome decided by allocators.”168 The community development position, it should be pointed out, does not mean a retreat from public-sector responsibilities in monitoring and regulating housing-market processes and outcomes. Responsibilities related to enforcing antidiscrimination in the private sector and reducing exclusionary and discriminatory behavior within the public sector remain central to ensuring equitable patterns of regional development.

The fair housing / community development tension has been playing out since the 1940s. It has been present in varying degrees ever since the federal government became involved in building affordable housing for lower-income households. The next chapter looks at the early years of this debate and how it was perceived by African American leaders in the 1940s and ’50s, and how the debate evolved through the civil rights era.