Conclusion

EVERYONE DESERVES TO LIVE IN AN OPPORTUNITY NEIGHBORHOOD

Assisted housing for the poor was barely ten years old in the United States before community members and policy makers began to weigh the issues of housing need and desegregation against each other. More than sixty years later, the debate endures, and may be as contentious as it ever has been. Increasingly, the debate focuses on the role of community development and affordable housing in communities of color. There is, in fact, an active conversation occurring about what community development should mean in a policy era dominated by the opportunity paradigm, and amid narratives about the inadequacy of local initiatives in the face of regional and global dynamics that produce patterns of neighborhood decline.1

Allies?

I have argued from the outset that the debate examined in this book is an argument among allies. Using King and Smith’s analysis of racial politics in the United States, there are two overriding approaches to racial policy: a color-blind approach and a color-conscious strategy.2 The logic of color-blind policy is that an absence of racial considerations in policy making and implementation will mean an absence of racism, discrimination, and differential treatment. The race-conscious coalition contests this as naïve at best and disingenuous at worst. Race consciousness begins with the proposition that past discrimination has created a social, political, and economic order that contains a multitude of processes and dynamics that favor whites over people of color. Color-blind policy leaves intact those advantages and in fact leaves them completely unquestioned.

But this debate is not one between these two coalitions at all. Fair housing advocacy and community development have both evolved as race-conscious movements aimed at producing greater racial equity. They both acknowledge past discrimination and the enduring inequalities produced by the methods of American racism. There is agreement that the discrimination that produces residential segregation is a denial of rights and that enforced segregation has been accompanied by tremendous differences in quality of public services, economic opportunity, and political influence that have greatly reduced the life chances of people of color.

There is agreement between the two movements that some conditions in core neighborhoods of American urban areas, neighborhoods that have been the areas of settlement for communities of color, are problematic—that these areas are characterized by highly problematic levels of crime, poor housing, inadequate schools, and declining public and private infrastructure. Furthermore, there is agreement that these conditions are the result not of inherent qualities of the residents themselves, but of public and private investment decisions that routinely advantage white areas and disadvantage communities of color. The processes of racial advantage and disadvantage, moreover, are cumulative and self-perpetuating, and they are individual as well as systemic. Residents of America’s disadvantaged neighborhoods must confront conditions that many white Americans do not face: poor-performing and under-resourced schools that fail to provide adequate learning environments for children, exposure to toxic environmental hazards that produce adverse health outcomes, employment and “address” discrimination that denies them access to living-wage jobs, and housing discrimination that consigns them to poor-quality housing but also extracts rents out of proportion to the size and quality of accommodations. These are the daily insults to body and mind endured by victims of racial domination, fully acknowledged by fair housing advocates of integration as well as by advocates of affordable housing and community development.

There is agreement that in American metropolitan areas, some communities have effectively isolated themselves from others and created themselves as exclusive enclaves of white privilege and wealth. This dynamic is most often considered to be a problem of suburban exclusionism. Fifty years of legal history reflect the tendency of some communities to erect barriers to affordable housing in an attempt to limit the number of poor people and the number of people of color who can enter their communities as residents. Most metropolitan areas in the United States, despite the greater diversity among suburbs in terms of race and class, retain areas of white racial exclusivity. This pattern is more intense in older urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest, but it nevertheless exists across the country.3 These communities have been allowed by the vagaries of U.S. law and customs of home rule to define and maintain themselves as bastions of white affluence.

An implication of the above is that both traditions of community development and integration understand that there is a geography to racism and a geography to racial privilege. Certainly the landscape of advantage and well-being is uneven in American metropolitan areas, and regional equity is a goal of both movements. Recent work in equity mapping suggests, however, that opportunity comes in many forms and that these forms of opportunity have different and sometime contradictory geographies. Thus, neighborhoods vary by the type of opportunities they provide as much as by the quantity. The geography of opportunity is, in short, more complex than a simple black/white or city/suburb dichotomy.

Finally, as implied earlier, there is agreement between these movements that race-conscious policies are necessary to address the issue of racial inequality and its urban manifestation. Both integrationists and affordable housing activists agree that public policies must be instituted to address unequal systems and embedded institutional inequities. Thus, both sides agree that fair housing is necessary and needs to consciously attack systems that produce housing inequality along racial lines. Just as necessary is a community development movement that addresses the deficits of housing provision experienced in communities disproportionately inhabited by people of color.

Evolution of the Dispute

Why, then, given such extensive agreement, is there continued dispute between fair housing integrationists and affordable housing / community development advocates? The two movements act very little like allies. As Mara Sidney notes, even when not in outright conflict with each other, the two movements operate largely in independence from each other. Fair housing advocates, she argues, tend not to collaborate with affordable housing advocates, and “national fair housing policy has produced a population of local fair housing groups that have trouble developing allies and do little to mobilize the public behind their cause.” Similarly, affordable housing advocates rarely engage fair housers in their work or in their policy advocacy.4 Thus, lack of collaboration is a clear problem. However, the contemporary problems between the two movements go well beyond this.

The historical perspective offered in this book suggests that the dispute has evolved considerably over time. Some level of tension between the two movements is inherent in the fact that they represent alternative policy objectives in an environment of resource scarcity. Trade-offs exist between devoting resources to meet integration goals and resources that could be allocated to meeting community development and affordable housing goals in core neighborhoods. This tension could be resolved with adequate resources, though few envision that in the near future. Trade-offs will continue to exist. Such low-level debate about competing objectives is what characterized the integration / community development dispute in the early years (pre-1960s).

Subsequent events, however, have introduced deeper divisions between the two movements that constitute a heightening of the disagreement. The articulation of alternative visions of racial equity within the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, revealed fundamental philosophical differences between the integration and community development approaches. These two approaches articulate different visions of racial and urban equity. Integrationists invoke the need to reduce walls between groups to undo racial injustices, while community development advocates point to the need to develop internal capacity for self-determination as a precondition for racial equality and spatial equity. This philosophical divide moved the dispute beyond the idea of zero-sum competition for scarce resources.

The evolution of fair housing advocacy has also deepened the dispute. I have argued that it is possible to identify three stations of fair housing spatial strategy. The first station of fair housing, opening up exclusionary communities, is not incompatible with community development and affordable housing practices, except as competition for scarce resources. But the fair housing movement moved beyond the open communities strategy to advocate limiting the work of community developers by imposing constraints on the placement of subsidized housing, or by placing conditions upon community development work (the second station of fair housing spatial strategy). These strategies shifted the attention of fair housing away from the exclusionary community and toward practices within communities of color. Doing so led to a series of positions related to how much affordable housing and community development activity was warranted in communities of color. This, as I have argued, took the dispute to a new level. Implicit in this strategy is a criticism of community development and an argument that affordable housing and community development actually contribute to patterns of racial inequality and regional inequities. Siting guidelines and restrictions on affordable housing in areas that fair housing advocates feel have too many people of color, or have too much affordable housing, not only undermine the work and legitimacy of community development, but also have the effect of privileging integrationist objectives over those of affordable housing and community development. It is here that the integrationists say, in effect, that the work of affordable housing and community development should either serve integrationist goals or wait until integrationist goals are met.

Also problematic at this stage is the tendency for the burden of integrationist goals to be shifted from exclusionary white communities (the policy target in the first station) onto the shoulders of people of color. This was most apparent in integration maintenance programs that actively managed and constrained the choices of people of color in order to maintain a racial mix that was palatable to whites. But even as that approach was nullified by the courts as being discriminatory, fair housers were working to limit affordable housing in communities of color through siting guidelines.

The impulse to limit and guide the housing decisions of people of color rather than addressing the behaviors of exclusionary white communities is repeated and expanded in the third station of fair housing spatial advocacy. The third station, it will be recalled, is the dissolution of existing communities of color. These initiatives work by dismantling existing communities through redevelopment or demolition. These initiatives displace low-income people of color but leave exclusive white communities intact.5

Efforts to enforce a specific spatial arrangement of people within metropolitan areas, coupled with the reluctance to bother whites in the process, have unfortunately and frequently led to a range of initiatives that place the burden of pursuing integration on people of color. It is their forced displacement that fuels deconcentration and dispersal efforts. It is the restriction of public-sector investment in their communities that characterizes current fair housing advocacy. It was the negation of their housing choices that defined integration maintenance programs. And when quotas were overturned by the courts, integration management programs were designed to work through discouraging their mobility choices, while incentives were offered to whites. These strategies are pursued in deference to the low tolerance of whites for neighbors who are not white. But, as John Calmore writes, “in supporting fair housing, we must oppose racism.”6 Courts that order the restriction of choices for blacks in order to achieve the “greater good” of integration have not yet conceived of imposing such restrictions on whites. As a result, the pursuit of integration has too often taken on a negative aspect, stigmatizing people of color, and idealizing neighborhoods that retain high percentages of white people.7 Not only do integration initiatives unfairly burden people of color, but, as Tommie Shelby argues, “policies that seek to end unjust racial inequality by pushing, or even nudging, blacks into residential integration or that make needed resources available only on condition that blacks are willing to integrate show a lack of respect for those they aim to assist.”8

The second and third stations of fair housing spatial advocacy have deepened the dispute between community development and integration, in large part because they attempt to limit community development efforts and because they implicate community development and affordable housing in producing and reproducing patterns of racial and regional injustice. At its worst, the fair housing argument interprets community developers as a “poverty housing industry”—a phrase calculated to conjure images of a large-scale, impersonal constellation of actors who profit from the provision of housing to poor people.9 In addition to being a cynical misrepresentation of the efforts of mostly neighborhood-based nonprofit organizations to increase standards of living and quality of life in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the use of the phrase is obviously divisive.

Prospects for Resolution

The prospects for fully resolving the tensions between community development and integration are dim, given continued resource deficits, budget limitations, and current policy trends toward privatization. The lack of sufficient resources will always put distinct objectives in a position of competition. These tensions have existed since the beginning of large-scale subsidized housing efforts in part because those efforts have always been underfunded relative to need. Tension between community development and fair housing that results from competition for resources, thus, is highly likely to persist.

What might be accomplished in the future, however, is to eliminate the deeper conflicts between the movements, conflicts that extend beyond ever-present competition for resources. The way forward depends on a common commitment across the two movements on the issues of choice and burden. The two movements need not be “converted” to the objectives of the other. Instead, the pursuit of objectives that increase the housing choice of members of the protected classes, as they themselves express them, without placing the burden for those outcomes on the shoulders of those same classes, allows community development and fair housing to coexist and to produce complementary benefits.

Resolution of the deeper conflicts between community development and integration, however, are quite unlikely as long as community development efforts are characterized as contributing to patterns of regional and racial inequality, and as long as integration goals are pursued in ways that impose restrictions and constraints on community development—that is, as long as efforts are made to privilege one set of goals over the other.

Our approach to issues of housing, neighborhoods, and racial equity should be fourfold. First, there is a need to ensure that all communities are inclusive and do not erect barriers to entry that systematically exclude lower-income people and people of color. This was the original fight of the open housing movement. Nor should communities systematically limit low-cost housing through the manipulation of local regulations with the aim or effect of depriving lower-income families of housing opportunities. We need to continue the seventy-year struggle to ensure equal access to housing for all. Renewed efforts need to be directed at and focused on opening up exclusionary communities. The Fair Housing Act should be used to sue the communities that deny opportunities, not the agencies or nonprofits that create them. The fight should target exclusionism and discrimination, not affordable housing and community development.

Second, people of color and low-income people who wish to move to racially and income-integrated neighborhoods should be supported in doing so. Voluntary mobility programs are a means of achieving this, and these programs should be continued. These efforts serve the objective of expanding choice in housing, a goal shared by fair housers and community developers.

Third, for people of color and low-income households who wish to stay in place and also to live in more secure, economically vibrant, well-serviced neighborhoods, there should be support for the community development efforts that can make this happen. In addition, there should be protection against the forces of gentrification present in so many cities that would produce neighborhood changes but simultaneously displace low-income people of color from such neighborhoods.10

Fourth, research shows that segregation rates are greater in metropolitan areas with greater inequality.11 Thus, efforts to reduce secular inequality have a chance to reduce social divisions that produce and maintain high levels of residential segregation. These approaches elevate choice and shared burden as the guide-posts for efforts to address racial and regional equity.

Enthusiasm in the media and in policy circles for the first two of these strategies (opening up exclusionary communities and voluntary mobility) has the potential to crowd out consideration of the third (community development). This must be avoided. Moving forward on these objectives requires that we not privilege any one over the others. Some have recommended privileging mobility and integration efforts by making reference to research showing how neighborhoods impact life chances. Yet the awareness that “place matters” for outcomes of racial justice does not, by itself, justify a dispersal approach any more than it justifies community development.12 Moreover, there is no legal justification, despite the arguments of fair housing advocates, to privilege the pursuit of integration over other reasonable public policy objectives related to housing for poor families and the revitalization of disadvantaged communities. The opening up of exclusionary communities can and should occur in such a way as to not limit the pursuit of community development objectives.

Racial and Regional Equity

Integration efforts can be criticized for reifying white dominance through reference to “acceptable” levels and rates of mixing, and can be criticized for substituting the spatial arrangement of people for the pursuit of more fundamental goals of racial justice and equality. These criticisms suggest that integration efforts displace more fundamental questions of equity and power with lower-level concerns about residential mixing.

If these criticisms can be applied to fair housing, however, so too can affordable housing and community development be faulted if they are not connected to the larger pursuit of racial justice and regional equity. For community development efforts to improve upon integrationist initiatives they must confront issues of power and the power differentials experienced by communities of color. That is, community development needs always to be connected to issues of regional equity and racial justice.

The community development movement began with just such a self-consciously political objective of self-determination and resource-building within the black community. Some have since criticized the community development movement for losing that perspective and slipping into an apolitical service-delivery mode that does little or nothing to challenge political dynamics that produce and reproduce spatial and racial disadvantage.13 To truly realize the original intent of the movement, however, community developers need to reconnect with the political. Social justice efforts like the Black Lives Matter movement should be as important to community development as are the shifting implementation guidelines related to the LIHTC program or the AFFH obligations of local governments. Post-Ferguson America requires a community development movement that is engaged on issues of regional and racial equity.

The conversation around the proper role for community development often focuses on strategic issues such as the “comprehensiveness” of projects and plans, and on the appropriate scale at which community development should operate. While these issues are important, ultimately the great promise of community development, and its great advantage over integration as a path toward racial justice, are in its potential political content. In this book I have argued that community development efforts in communities of color can be justified on their own terms related to the benefits that they produce. But in the pursuit of regional equity and racial justice, causes that both sides of the integration / community development dispute claim as important, it is the community development movement that has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and social justice efforts.

Everyone deserves to live in an opportunity neighborhood, not just those fortunate enough to get a mobility certificate, or those fortunate enough to “be accepted” into a white, middle-class community, or even those willing to move into a white middle-class community. Racial justice and regional equity demand a focus on what Mary Patillo calls the “stuff of equality” and not merely the spatial arrangement of people.