Introduction
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO REGIONAL EQUITY AND RACIAL JUSTICE
There are two realities of American metropolitan areas that concern me in this book: first, patterns of racial discrimination and segregation in housing, and second, the critical lack of affordable housing for persons and families with very low incomes. These two problems have been the subject of much policy debate, political organizing, and collective action over the years. There are interest groups and professionals whose chief activities focus on one or the other. To a large extent, all these groups and professionals share values related to racial and class equity and the importance of housing in providing access to opportunity. On many issues they are allies. This book, however, is about those respects in which the values of these two movements diverge and in fact conflict. This book is about how the pursuit of fair housing can be at odds with the pursuit of affordable housing, and vice versa, and the conditions under which fair housing advocates and affordable housing advocates find themselves on polar opposite sides of issues related to housing, community development, and metropolitan equity.
In this book I address a number of questions central to the tension between fair housing advocates and affordable housing / community development activists. There are critical disagreements that shape the debate. At the core of these disputes are a constellation of issues related to the desirability and terms (for people of color) of integration, the means of achieving integration, and strategies for achieving political and economic justice for communities of color in the United States. Throughout the book I describe and analyze the conditions under which this debate surfaces. Much of the work of these two movements is complementary and compatible, but certain strategies pursued by each bring them into conflict with each other. Identifying when the tensions occur, and why, helps to illuminate the principal elements of the conflict and should provide a means of moving toward resolution or at least toward accommodation between these two movements. I also trace the history of these tensions since the mid-twentieth century, describing how the debate has manifested itself over time and with what outcomes. Finally, I examine the contemporary conditions that have produced a renewal and expansion of the fair housing / community development conflict since the 1990s. It is, in fact, the renewed intensity of this long-standing debate that makes the book relevant and necessary today. In addressing these issues, I argue that we need to move to a vision of urban and racial justice in the United States that does not hinge on the spatial rearrangement of people of color in the manner argued by fair housing integrationists.
The Issue
We can begin with a hypothetical situation. The community development subcommittee of the city council is in session. The room is full of spectators and those who wish to speak on the main topic of the meeting, the proposal by a local community development corporation (CDC) to convert an empty warehouse into twenty-four units of low-cost rental housing. The CDC is coming to the city to ask for a change in the zoning to accommodate the housing, and for a below-market interest-rate loan to renovate the building and convert it to housing.
As is typical in cases where affordable housing is proposed, some in the audience oppose the project because they think it will create problems for the area. Nearby property owners are in attendance to tell the council members that they worry that their property values will decline as a result of the project and that their investments in their homes will be lost. Others are there to express concern about the potential for crime in the neighborhood to increase. They are not exactly worried about the new residents committing the crimes, they say, but they point to other parts of the city with lots of low-cost housing and higher crime rates. Others couch their opposition in terms of the lack of available parking or the unwanted increase in density that the project will produce for the neighborhood. Still others will profess concern for the lower-income families who will inhabit the units and argue that this neighborhood is not an appropriate one for raising children. These are classic NIMBY (not in my backyard) claims that plague affordable housing projects virtually everywhere. But compared to a hearing for a comparable project in the suburbs, or even in a more affluent or white part of the city, there are relatively few NIMBYists in the crowd. They are just a handful, and they are not particularly well organized, nor do they have any special “in” with any of the council members making the decision. Almost all in attendance know that if this project had been proposed for the middle-class neighborhood just a mile and a half north, or in any of the developing suburbs in the region, the room would be packed with vocal and well-resourced opponents to decry the project and foretell doom for the community should the project proceed. The lawyers among them might be investigating ways to sue to stop the project; others might have met ahead of time with the council members to make less-than-subtle threats about the councilors’ political futures should the vote go in the wrong direction. But here in the city, in this particular neighborhood, not much of this happens. Instead, just a couple of homeowners and two business-people are waiting to make the NIMBY argument.
The CDC has, however, mobilized supporters of its own, and these constitute the second group of people in attendance. First, there are low-income residents of the neighborhood who might stand to benefit from the new housing built. They are ready to tell the council members about how difficult it is to find good, clean, and safe affordable housing in the city. The only units they can find are in poor shape, with plumbing leaks, cockroaches, and spotty heating. And even then, they have to pay close to half their monthly incomes to afford the places they find. In addition to the low-income residents, affordable housing advocates join in this argument, reminding the council members that a recent study showed that the region needs fifty-seven thousand more units of affordable housing to meet the existing demand. Most of that demand, they note, comes from low-income and very low-income households in the city. They remind the council members of the content of the city’s comprehensive plan, which includes goals related to increasing the availability of affordable housing where appropriate. They may also point to the fact that the city is behind on its stated goal for developing such units, having funded only 127 units, compared to the annual goal of 350.
There are others from the neighborhood ready to tell the council members that they eagerly await the conversion of the warehouse. Since it has been abandoned, they will say, drug dealers have set up shop alongside it, and just last week two people were robbed right out in front. The empty warehouse has turned the adjacent street corner into a dangerous place, they will claim, and they want it cleaned up. The CDC, which has rehabilitated dozens of housing units in this neighborhood, has promised to repair the outside of the building, improve the lighting, and carefully manage the property. The residents who will speak in favor of the project trust the CDC; they have seen its work in the past, and they want the CDC to clean up this property just as it did when it bought and rehabilitated an old residential hotel three blocks away.
If these were the only two viewpoints represented at the committee meeting, it would be a fairly typical case. But there is a third group in the room that night. Unlike the NIMBYists, this group is supportive of low-cost housing and readily sees the need for it. Unlike the CDC and its supporters, however, this third group opposes the current project. This third group points to the current demographic makeup of the neighborhood and reminds the council members that the neighborhood is predominantly African American and has a poverty rate that is more than twice the city rate. They will also note that eight of the city’s last ten subsidized-housing developments have been placed within a two-mile radius of this proposed project. The project, they will say, will exacerbate patterns of racial segregation in the city because the likely residents of the housing will be people of color. Even were that not to be the case, the project will deepen the concentration of poverty that exists in the neighborhood because the twenty-four units being proposed will be subsidized and reserved for families with low incomes. There are other neighborhoods that are better suited for this type of housing, they will say, communities with better schools, with safer streets, and closer to job growth. This project should not be funded, nor should any others in this neighborhood until more affordable housing is built elsewhere, chiefly the suburbs. This third group identifies themselves as advocates of fair housing whose interests are in combating patterns of racial segregation and discrimination in housing, and who see the spatial concentration of subsidized housing as an important factor that produces and maintains patterns of inequality.
It is the conversation between the latter two groups, the advocates for affordable housing and community development on the one hand and advocates for fair housing on the other, that concerns me in this book. This is a conversation that pits two generally complementary and sympathetic movements against each other. The first group represents the ongoing effort to provide enough affordable, safe, and decent housing for low- and very low-income households ill-served by the private market. The second is focused on how opportunity and life chances are differentially distributed across metropolitan areas, and how patterns of racial segregation produce and perpetuate social, political, and economic inequalities. To the extent that fair housing advocates and affordable housing advocates generally occupy positions on the same end of the political spectrum, conflict between these two objectives are disagreements between allies, not adversaries.1
The practical conflict, furthermore, can be fairly summarized in a brief question: where should assisted housing for low- and very low-income households be placed? More specifically, what should our policy be about building, rehabilitating, or redeveloping assisted housing in core neighborhoods of our central cities (and increasingly in our inner-ring suburbs)? Should assisted housing be strictly limited in these areas on the principle of reducing concentrations of poverty or furthering integration objectives? Should we instead be focusing our policy efforts on building or in other ways creating more assisted housing opportunities in other neighborhoods, neighborhoods where the placement of assisted housing would integrate the community, racially and economically? Or do we continue to build or make available assisted housing in core neighborhoods because the need there remains overwhelming? Do we continue our efforts in core neighborhoods because doing so benefits those neighborhoods by bringing in new investment and benefits families by stabilizing their lives and improving economic self-sufficiency?
The easy and ultimately unacceptable answer, of course, is that we need to pursue both agendas—more affordable housing and greater integration. Some will say that the conflict between these two positions is overstated and that advocates of both can readily agree that the question is simply a matter of balance; that providing sufficient affordable housing to people in need and reducing patterns of segregation can and should be pursued simultaneously as long as there is a rough balance between the two. There are several reasons why such a response is insufficient, however. First and foremost, the federal government, along with state and local governments in the United States, has never devoted enough resources to affordable housing policy to adequately address needs. In an environment of scarcity, housing advocates are increasingly faced with a choice of where to put resources. If needs cannot be met everywhere, the question arises of where to focus. In this respect, the harmony between desegregation and affordable housing is, in reality, only a long-term alignment, a conviction that ultimately the pursuit of affordable housing cannot be undertaken without regard to effects on patterns of segregation, and in turn, that integration cannot be pursued at the expense of meeting affordable housing needs. Limited to such a “long-term” perspective, there is agreement between the two sides. Unfortunately, the conflict between these two positions manifests itself every time a community development corporation proposes an affordable housing development for a core neighborhood and fair housing advocates speak out against the project out of concern for its impact on segregation. The conflict manifests itself when local bodies produce comprehensive plans or housing policies that offer numerical goals for affordable housing in the core neighborhoods, and fair housing advocates speak in opposition, calling for a reduction in those numbers. The conflict manifests itself most prominently when fair housing attorneys sue to stop a project because of its presumed segregationist impact or to reorient state policy in ways to limit housing in the core parts of metropolitan areas. A variant of this form of opposition to affordable housing in core neighborhoods is the argument that as long as we continue to provide affordable housing there, communities on the periphery will be able to resist it. That is, without a conscious effort to direct resources to the periphery, the de facto pattern of geographic concentration will continue.
While each side in this debate supports many of the core objectives of the other, the question comes down to whether, in the pursuit of those objectives, the principle of integration should be given greatest priority. Though there may be agreement about long-term balance and the need to provide affordable housing options everywhere, the day-to-day challenges of affordable housing development produce repeated conflict between these two ideals.
Such short-term conflict, however, is not the only source of tension between these two positions. There is debate, for example, over the presumed effectiveness of each strategy to accomplish its stated goals. This is an argument that, ironically (or depressingly), each side makes against the other. Some in the fair housing movement question the effectiveness of community development efforts, noting the continued decline of central city neighborhoods despite decades of work by CDCs and others. Community developers point out the very limited gains achieved by integrationist policies and the entrenched political opposition to such policies that render such efforts ineffective.
There are philosophical disagreements between the two sides as well. While some extol the benefits of integration and diversity at all scales, and employ rationales to those ends based on social justice and democratic theory, others see legitimacy in a more multicultural society that allows for group identity and differentiation and acknowledges the pursuit of cultural, political, economic, and institutional strength within groups as a means of achieving racial justice.
Finally, even where there is no disagreement about integration as an end, there can be disagreement over the means to that end. The actual act of “mixing”—that is, the coercive nature of integration efforts that involve, for example, the demolition of affordable and subsidized housing in core neighborhoods and the forced relocation of low-income people of color, or the restriction of housing choices for people of color in order to maintain integrated living patterns—generates debate and conflict.
The main purpose of this book is to engage both the philosophical arguments at stake and the more practical elements of this dilemma and what they mean for housing policy. In the following pages I argue that this conflict is not merely an academic or theoretical question that might, under the right circumstances, produce difficult policy choices. Instead, this fundamental question has confronted policy makers, advocates, and members of the judicial branch with regularity since the advent of low-income housing policy in the United States. Recent developments in the way that fair housing activists conceive of their work have served, furthermore, to make this question more relevant now than it has ever been in the past.
The relevance of this issue is readily demonstrated by the fact that the leading national organization for affordable housing advocacy, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), and a group of nationally prominent fair housing advocates have both felt it necessary to issue recent statements pertaining to this question. In 2012 the NLIHC published Affordable Housing Dilemma: The Preservation vs. Mobility Debate, a thirty-six-page report on the debate over whether to preserve existing affordable housing or disperse subsidized households in an effort to desegregate and deconcentrate poverty.2 The authors note that the best “solution” to this debate would be to expand the level of housing subsidies in the country to adequately address needs, allowing the pursuit of both objectives. They also acknowledge, however, that there are those “who fervently support each side of the debate.”3
Similarly, in 2012, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation supported an effort to bring together fair housing advocates and housing and community development professionals to strike a balance “between addressing priority housing and redevelopment needs in low income communities while also providing access to housing opportunities in integrated communities.”4 A national meeting of dozens of actors in November 2012 managed to draft a set of principles related to the “intersection of community development and fair housing.” The principles called for (1) “giving families a choice,” by which they meant improving the quality of life in low-income neighborhoods while also making possible mobility to “high opportunity neighborhoods”; (2) “balancing housing investment priorities”; and (3) incentivizing affordable housing in high opportunity areas.5 While the effort alone reflects the level of importance that those on both sides of the debate give to the issue, the principles articulated provide little guidance for short-term decision making about affordable housing strategies in an environment of scarcity.6
Racial Policy Alliances and the Fair Housing Question
It is important to acknowledge that there is more shared between the two camps than separates them. Most notable is a baseline agreement on the core arguments of each side—namely, that there is a critical lack of affordable housing in the country, and that our metropolitan areas suffer from dangerous and debilitating levels of spatial and racial inequality. The lack of adequate affordable housing is a burden borne by the most economically disadvantaged, and the welfare of these groups is the core concern of the fair housing and the affordable housing / community development movements. Both sides agree there is a racial disproportionality to housing needs—that people of color, especially African Americans, suffer from various forms of housing deprivation at rates far greater than whites, including adverse neighborhood conditions that unfairly limit life chances.7
This point is critical because, of course, race is at the center of the policy conflict explored in this book. That there is a conflict between fair housing and community development on the role and importance of racial integration through housing policy does not mean that there is disagreement as to the importance of racial equity in the nation’s housing system. In Desmond King and Rogers Smith’s book, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America, the authors argue that racial politics in the United States are dominated by two “racial policy alliances”—one arguing for a “color-blind” approach and the other advocating a “race-conscious” strategy.8 A policy alliance, according to the authors, is a “coalition of participants in social movements, civic organizations, political parties, and government officials.”9 The color-blind policy alliance supports the goals of nondiscrimination but also seeks foremost to preserve individual property rights and to protect the character of traditional communities and the rights of communities to define themselves to a considerable extent. The essence of a color-blind approach to policy is to treat people “as individuals without reference to their racial identities” and to assume that effective nondiscrimination provides benefits to all.10 For these reasons the color-blind approach is often called a “universalist” approach because its preferred policies apply to all groups rather than to a single group.
The race-conscious alliance also supports nondiscrimination efforts but is attuned to the legacy of discrimination in the country and the systematic and structural disadvantages that racial inequalities and discrimination have created for racial minority groups. Thus, race-conscious policy attempts to redress those inequalities proactively. The race-conscious alliance opposes color-blindness as a policy approach, arguing that it is ineffective in addressing the costs of segregation and discrimination and ignores differences of power and access already in place as the result of segregation and discrimination.11 As King and Smith argue, the two racial policy alliances in the United States align themselves (and have since the 1970s) with the two major political parties. The color-blind approach has been adopted by Republicans, while the Democratic Party is more aligned with the race-conscious alliance.
King and Smith further note that sometimes divisions occur within these alliances. Specifically, they note that racial policy alliances “display significant internal diversity in regard to motivations, tactics, and ultimate goals.”12 The tension addressed in this book—that between affordable housing advocates and fair housing advocates—is best understood as just such a division, a split within the race-conscious policy alliance. The disagreement between these two camps is not about whether our policy should be race conscious (that is, focused explicitly to redress inequities across racial lines), but rather about strategy and on the relative importance of one goal in particular—that of integration.
The Geography of Fair Housing Advocacy
At this stage it is useful to make a distinction between the spatial elements of fair housing advocacy and its other aspects. Fair housing advocacy can be distinguished by whether spatial goals related to racial settlement patterns are involved. Many suggest that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 contains two core objectives: the elimination of discrimination (or what we can call the “equal access” objective), and the furthering of integration.13 The core principle of equal access in housing has no inherent spatial dimension. That is, discrimination against “protected classes” (groups identified in Title VIII as entitled to protection by the law) is to be contested wherever it occurs and whatever the particulars.14 At its foundation, the principle of equal access serves the objective of providing members of protected classes with greater choice in housing—it is a concern about equal process that could have any spatial outcome. Much contemporary fair housing advocacy addresses discrimination in a nonspatial manner by, for example, targeting predatory lending, foreclosure practices, and landlord abuses without regard for how these acts contributed to any particular spatial distribution of protected class members.
The second core principle expressed by fair housing advocates, however, is explicitly spatial—a commitment to racially integrated residential patterns. Thus it is possible to identify a set of strategies pursued by the fair housing movement aimed at achieving or maintaining a particular spatial arrangement of households—that is, creating integrated living patterns. Whereas the strategies related to equal access (the elimination of discrimination) are chiefly aimed at private-sector actors (for example, ending “steering” or “blockbusting” or differential treatment of real estate customers based on their race), the strategies related to spatial outcomes have been aimed more typically at public agencies, requiring either changes in public decisions (e.g., where to site new subsidized housing), new initiatives on the part of public bodies (e.g., integration maintenance programs, or housing dispersal programs), or the elimination of exclusionary land-use and development regulations that serve as barriers to low-cost housing production.
There are instances, of course, where the content of discrimination is spatial, as for example when minority home-seekers are steered away from predominantly white communities. In these instances, the pursuit of remedies for discrimination is indistinguishable from the pursuit of desegregation objectives. But the distinction between the purposefully spatial goals of desegregation and the nonspatial goals of antidiscrimination is valid and useful for several reasons. First, spatial discrimination is common only for some of the protected classes in Title VIII (groups defined by race, color, and national origin). There are other protected classes named in Title VIII (groups defined by disability status, religion, sex, and familial status) for whom antidiscrimination efforts are less commonly about enforced spatial segregation. For these groups the two goals (nondiscrimination and desegregation) are more conceptually distinct and distinct in practice. Not only are these goals frequently distinct; there are instances in which the pursuit of integration affects protected-class households in the absence of any discriminatory acts against those households. So-called integration maintenance programs, for example, have limited the entry of minority households into predominantly white neighborhoods where they had such access, in order to avoid a complete racial turnover in those neighborhoods.15 Here, the pursuit of spatial goals in fact introduced constraints upon members of certain protected classes in the absence of any prior, specific discriminatory act against them.
As we proceed with the argument it will become clear that the distinction between the spatial and nonspatial objectives of the fair housing movement has two additional implications important for housing policy. First, one can think of the integration objective of fair housing as being outcome focused, while equal access is focused on process concerns.16 An outcome focus—that is, a desire to create a particular spatial arrangement of households—necessitates a much more activist role for the government in housing markets, and justifies the substitution of choices sanctioned by the state for individual mobility choices.17 Second, and perhaps more important, these two approaches can be distinguished by how they treat the issues of choice and burden. The equal-access goals of fair housing can be understood as efforts to increase the housing choices available to members of the protected classes regardless of what those choices may be, by eliminating illegal, non-market-based restrictions on their participation in the housing market. The integrationist focus puts no such premium on choice, and in fact accepts intentional restrictions of choice for protected class members in the service of specific spatial outcomes.18 These restrictions of choice, through the restricted access to integrated neighborhoods mandated by integration maintenance programs, or the forced relocation of dispersal and deconcentration initiatives, place the burden of achieving integrationist policy objectives squarely on the back of minority groups. It is through the manipulation of their mobility patterns that the integrationists hope to achieve their preferred settlement patterns. Indeed, the limits of white tolerance in the area of residential integration (i.e., white settlement preferences) are typically used as the parameters within which minority settlement patterns are managed.19
The Stations of Fair Housing Spatial Advocacy
It is my argument that the distinction between the equal access and integration objectives has become more pronounced as the spatial strategies of the fair housing movement have evolved over time. In fact, it is possible to identify three stations of fair housing spatial strategy that represent an ever more aggressive approach to achieving integration goals: (1) opening up exclusionary communities; (2) preventing further segregation; and (3) dismantling existing communities of color. Each of these strategies is an extension of the movement’s reach—that is, the progression is an accumulation of strategies, not the replacement of earlier methods with new ones.20 The second and third stations, in particular, are the ones that produce tension between fair housing and community development. To repeat, there is no conflict between fair housing and community development advocates in the pursuit of nondiscrimination—that is, equal access. The debate between the two positions arises only in relation to the spatial strategies of fair housing.
Opening Up Exclusionary Communities
In its early stages, the fair housing movement was known alternatively as the “open housing movement,” to denote its concern for openness in the housing market and access to all communities regardless of race/ethnicity. During these early years of the 1940s to the 1960s, this manifest itself most frequently in calls to open up the suburbs to nonwhite families, reflecting the dominant spatial dynamic of white flight from the core, and exclusionary suburban development.
Policy initiatives in this station have been of four types: (1) expansion of various housing subsidy programs to increase low-cost housing production in the suburbs; (2) the elimination of land-use regulations that have the effect of excluding lower-income housing in suburban communities; (3) the elimination of private deed restrictions and covenants aimed at excluding people of color and other groups from certain communities; and (4) voluntary “mobility” programs that provide portable housing voucher subsidies to families to move from areas of segregation or poverty concentration to neighborhoods that are characterized by neither. Fair share regional housing approaches establish concrete goals for affordable housing development for all communities within a region in an effort to enhance the spread of affordable housing options, diversify communities that currently are not diverse, and ultimately to enhance the housing options of very low-income people and people of color.21 In some locations, higher levels of government have been given review powers over local land-use decision making when those decisions have prevented affordable housing developments from going forward.22 Some jurisdictions have used “inclusionary housing” programs that require or incentivize private developers to build a number (or percentage) of affordable units in exchange for approving a market-rate housing development proposal.23
On these issues and about these policies there is general agreement between fair housing and community development advocates. Indeed, members of both camps would point to the need for greater efforts to build affordable housing in those communities where it does not yet exist in large numbers. Yet even this agreement is strained by the issue of insufficient resources and the opportunity costs of pursuing affordable housing in one area versus the other.
Preventing Further Segregation
Fair housing advocacy, however, quickly expanded beyond “open housing” to incorporate efforts to mitigate the development or perpetuation of racially defined housing submarkets (i.e., “ghettos”).24 Programs of this sort, which mark the second station, have come in three varieties: (1) the elimination of discriminatory private-sector actions within the housing market, such as steering, which have the effect of creating and maintaining neighborhood color lines intact; (2) “impaction” rules that limit the production of subsidized housing in neighborhoods that are already considered impacted in terms of concentrations of people of color; and (3) “integration maintenance” programs that manage and limit the entry of minority families into communities in order to establish and maintain prescribed integration levels. The first of these strategies simply has the effect of increasing choices for low-income families of color and thus, like the integration programs of the first station, does not produce significant conflict with the affordable housing or community development movements. Reduction of private discrimination that has specific spatial content (e.g., steering) is similar to the elimination of exclusionary zoning; both are ways of opening up housing submarkets previously closed to disadvantaged groups, and they emerged as strategies in the early stages of the “open housing” movement.25
Impaction rules and integration maintenance programs, however, although they share the characteristic of attempting to forestall further segregation, are fundamentally different in that they place the burden for integrating on members of the protected class. These policy approaches work by limiting housing choices for members of the protected class so as to avoid concentrations or resegregation. Because of this, impaction and integration maintenance programs were the first that brought the fair housing movement into conflict with affordable housing / community development advocates. Impaction rules limit the amount of subsidized housing in areas of high need, leaving families who might have benefited from subsidized housing without it. It is arguable even that impaction rules limit the overall amount of assisted housing because of the great resistance to subsidized housing by residents who already live in the areas that integrationists find acceptable. Impaction programs were first considered in the 1960s. The decision in Shannon v. HUD (1970), for example, was an early demonstration of the intent of the fair housing movement to prevent further ghettoization by restricting the placement of subsidized housing in core neighborhoods, and of the court’s interpretation of the Fair Housing Act as authorizing such action.26 More recently the objective of preventing further segregation has surfaced in criticisms of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program as being too spatially concentrated. Community development advocates chafe under these restrictions, which they claim limit their ability to effectively address the housing needs that exist in core neighborhoods.
In a similar fashion, so-called integration maintenance programs worked by limiting the access of disadvantaged groups to communities or to housing developments in order to maintain a degree of racial diversity deemed appropriate by program designers. The access of disadvantaged groups was limited to prevent the racial turnover of these neighborhoods and resegregation of disadvantaged families.
Dismantling Existing Communities of Color
The third station of fair housing’s spatial strategy is the dissolution of existing communities in the name of desegregation. As such, it is the most interventionist of the three stations. This strategy is most prominent in a series of desegregation lawsuits pursued by fair housing attorneys in the 1980s and early 1990s, and also arises with respect to demolition and redevelopment of public housing through the federal HOPE VI program and other forms of subsidized housing through the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. While many of the residents of these public housing developments welcome the chance to move, the universal nature of the approach (usually involving demolition of housing and displacement of all residents) virtually ensures the displacement of many who do not. Some residents, typically very low-income African Americans, not only object to their forced displacement, but actively protest it.27 To the extent that these efforts involve the involuntary displacement of lower-income families and relocation to other neighborhoods, this strategy also generates opposition from affordable housing advocates.
Approach
Throughout portions of this book I will present criticisms of integration efforts, dispersal programs, mixed-income housing schemes, poverty deconcentration efforts, and at times the very principle of integration. It is striking to me how frequently I, and others with similar views, find it necessary to stress that our position is not tacit acceptance of spatial inequalities, nor an ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the negative conditions attending enforced racial segregation. Virtually every piece of writing that I have reviewed for this work that criticizes integrationist efforts includes what I have come to see as this obligatory caveat. That we do this, myself included, reflects two important realities about the current discussion related to spatial inequalities in urban areas. First, the proposition that integration or social mixing is the natural solution to the ills of racial segregation and poverty concentration is so deeply ingrained in the political discourse of our time as to be frequently taken as a given. Those of us critical of integration initiatives must therefore note that our criticism does not entail an acceptance of spatial inequalities.
The second reason why critics must make explicit their condemnation of the harms of segregation is that in many venues integrationists reinforce the simplified notion that to be critical of integration is to accept the inequities of segregation. This choice that integrationists present, that one either commits to the integrationist ideal or surrenders in the fight on segregation, is, of course, a false one. Community development and affordable housing development are tainted by this false choice and in fact are at times implicated by fair housing activists as complicit in the continued inequalities that mark our urban areas.
This book presents a challenge to the fair housing critique of community development. To make this case it is necessary first to understand the integrationist argument and its criticisms of community development and affordable housing practices. The strength of the fair housing perspective comes from its emphasis on the evils of enforced segregation and the ways that urban exclusionism creates and perpetuates racial inequalities in the United States. The regional inequities that result from enforced segregation and the public and private dis-investment that ensues in communities of color are targets of both fair housing and community development. Thus, the counterargument to the integrationists evolves initially as a response to the weaknesses of the policy approaches embedded within the fair housing integrationist case, and to the fallacies of the fair housing critique of community development. The full counterargument requires an affirmation of the positive value of community development efforts, including the benefits to individuals and to communities of safe and decent affordable housing, and the importance of economic and political self-reliance, self-determination, and power for all groups. The community development argument asserts a set of values different from those embedded in the integrationist strategy. Community development demands political and economic development in ways that integrationist strategies do not. Integrationist strategies accommodate majority dominance in ways that community development does not.
A recapitulation of how the integration versus community development conflict has played out over the several decades since the 1940s provides a number of opportunities to see these values in debate. Specifically, the roots of community development in the black empowerment and community-control movements of the 1950s and 1960s help to highlight the critical distinctions between an integrationist view of urban and racial equity and the community development view. The subsequent era, lasting from the early 1970s through the 1990s, also provides important lessons on the limits of the integrationist approach. Finally, realities of metropolitan development patterns in the twenty-first century and current policy debates over urban sustainability provide new light for the consideration of these competing models of regional equity and racial justice. What emerges from this analysis is not only the insufficiency of the integrationist approach, but a clear call for a community development approach that is race-conscious and focused on issues of urban and regional political economy, an approach in which housing, critical in its own right, is also enlisted as part of a larger movement for racial and place equity.
There is an important imbalance in contemporary scholarship related to U.S. housing policy. Fair housing scholars have produced a large body of work asserting the need for and benefits of pursuing integration. They have also presented a coherent legal justification for fair housing integration efforts in a range of scholarly venues. Furthermore, they have presented a strong vision of racial justice that focuses on geography. The achievement of residential integration is central to this vision of racial justice and urban equity. The literature on community development / affordable housing, on the other hand, is more diffuse and has not evolved in a fashion parallel to the fair housing work. More precisely, this literature tends to focus on program outcomes and analyses of implementation, and not on more fundamental justifications for community development in the first place.28 Most important in this respect, there is nothing in the literature that specifically provides a comprehensive response to the critiques of community development by fair housing advocates or an alternative to the integrationist argument.
This work is an attempt to at least partially correct that imbalance. The argument in this book highlights the legitimacy of place-based, neighborhood-scale initiatives in housing and community development in response to the challenges to such policy presented by fair housing critics. The argument is based on a vision of urban and racial equity that does not hinge on the imperative of integration or the mobility strategies of integrationists and regionalists, and is intended to present a view of racial justice, rooted in historical experience, that acknowledges the value of relatively homogeneous neighborhoods of people of color and the importance of self-determination for all communities.