1

THE INTEGRATION IMPERATIVE

The fair housing position on the siting of affordable housing is based on the empirical observation that most publicly assisted housing is located in central cities, in higher-poverty neighborhoods, and in neighborhoods dominated by people of color. This is not an item of contention. Analyses since the 1980s have demonstrated and reaffirmed this phenomenon.1 This concentration of assisted units is the result of two “impulses,” according to Tulane University law professor Stacey Seicshnaydre. The first of these is the desire to meet low-cost housing needs by building as many units as possible, wherever possible. The second is NIMBYism, the repeated and consistent resistance to affordable housing that is most prominent in more affluent and white communities. The result of these two dynamics is that most assisted housing follows a “path of least resistance” and ends up in disadvantaged neighborhoods.2

Once there, concentrations of assisted housing contribute to further concentrations of poverty and reinforce patterns of racial segregation.3 There is also, according to some, a durability to neighborhood poverty, meaning that once a neighborhood becomes identified as poor or racially segregated, change that would modify those basic characteristics is unlikely.4 Neighborhood hierarchies can be fairly stable over time. Neighborhoods that rank relatively high in incidence of poverty and racial segregation, for example, tend to remain that way over time, according to this argument. In fact, once poverty and racial segregation are established in a neighborhood, according to sociologists Robert Sampson and Jeffrey Morenoff, “further change is likely to be in the direction of its becoming increasingly poor and black.”5 Finally, there is evidence that the disadvantages of neighborhood are inherited, and that families that remain in lower-income or segregated neighborhoods pass on the disadvantages of place from one generation to the next.6

Given these dynamics, the decision on the part of a needy family to live in subsidized housing often carries with it acceptance of certain neighborhood conditions. Since the 1970s, principals within the fair housing movement have considered publicly assisted housing “to be unfair if those who occupy it or seek to occupy it are thereby forced to live within certain designated areas, prescribed by race and/or income.”7 As a result, publicly assisted housing is, according to the fair housing argument, a means of reinforcing racial inequalities. The residents of subsidized housing, disproportionately people of color, are consigned to neighborhoods in which crime is higher, public services inferior, and the environment more threatening.

To continue affordable housing programs in the manner that they have been operated in the past, according to Chicago civil rights attorney Alex Polikoff, is to “knuckle under, to accept the posture of the political establishment as a fact of life, [and] to permit all or nearly all subsidized housing and assisted housing to go into minority neighborhoods.”8 Fair housing advocates assert that “the great need for low-income housing cannot continue to be used as a justification for the inequity and segregation that results from these programs.”9 Unless integration is an explicit goal of housing assistance programs, and unless those programs are operated consciously and purposefully in a manner to achieve integration, they reinforce and intensify racial segregation and poverty concentration.10 Integration thus occupies a privileged place in the objectives of the contemporary fair housing movement.

Race or Class?

It should be clear already that there is significant fusion of race and class in the integrationist argument. This is so for three reasons: (1) there is great overlap between race and poverty in the United States; (2) some forms of racial discrimination operate through class-based mechanisms; and (3) policies that focus on poverty are less unpopular in the United States than are race-based initiatives. Two central concerns of the fair housing movement, the location of subsidized housing and exclusionary zoning, can serve as useful illustrations. Eligibility for subsidized housing is, of course, determined largely by income and certainly not by race. Fair housing arguments concerning subsidized housing, therefore, are based on the fact that people of color disproportionately reside in subsidized housing. Concerns about exclusionary zoning are also based on the race/income correlation, since the offending land-use regulations typically do not reference race per se but rather make it difficult to build lower-cost housing—the type of housing more frequently needed by people of color because of their lower incomes.11 To address the full range of discriminatory and segregationist factors influencing people of color in American housing markets, therefore, one is forced to talk also about class and income-based restrictions. Finally, it should also be noted that although significant progress has been made in liberalizing racial attitudes in the United States, a large gap persists between public opinion support for abstract notions of racial equity and support for specific public policies to achieve greater equity.12 The more integrationists can talk about poverty rather than race, the more likely they are to see their ideas enshrined in public policy. The prime example of this is the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, which was specifically designed with this political constraint in mind.13 Though modeled on the racial segregation remedy in the Gautreaux case, MTO became a program of poverty deconcentration with no official objectives related to race.

The fusion of race and class concerns has led to common cause between fair housing activists and advocates of regionalism or regional equity.14 Regionalists rarely refer explicitly to race, confining themselves, in the main, to issue of class-based place inequities. But the two movements (fair housing and regionalism) share a common vocabulary about access to opportunity and a common solution set centered on the dispersal of subsidized housing throughout metropolitan areas and the creation of mixed-income housing developments.15 Thus, the fair housing / community development divide is similar to what former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk terms “the Inside Game v. the Outside Game.”16 There is further commonality between the fair housing argument and the “mobility” agenda that has dominated housing policy in the United States since the 1990s. Common across all these policy threads is a skepticism of community development (i.e., “the inside game”) as an approach to addressing urban spatial inequities.

Segregation Injures

The case for integration begins with the identification of the personal and societal-level costs of segregation. Life in a racially defined ghetto carries with it a wide range of disadvantages that are insidious, extensive, and enduring. One set of hazards relates to personal safety and health; residents of segregated communities of color are statistically more likely to be victims of crime, be exposed to environmental dangers, and have less access to health care than others.17 The life expectancy of blacks is lower than that of whites, and neighborhood mortality rates are higher where blacks make up a larger percentage of the population.18 Racial segregation has also been tied to health disparities in children.19

Ghetto neighborhoods also suffer from fewer and inferior public services, including schools.20 The poor quality of schools results in an inferior education for children living in segregated neighborhoods and contributes to higher dropout rates. Thus, children growing up in racially segregated and low-income neighborhoods emerge with significantly lower levels of human capital than do their counterparts in more advantaged neighborhoods. This produces inequalities of opportunity that reinforce themselves over the course of a lifetime and are reflected in disparities in labor force participation, income, and wealth.

The economic life of high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods is underdeveloped. The relative lack of private-sector investment reduces local retail and commercial options available to residents and can produce “food deserts” in which fresh and healthful food choices are unavailable in large areas within central cities.21 The lack of nutritional grocery options in turn contributes to health problems for residents. Grocery stores that do locate within these neighborhoods often charge higher prices than stores located elsewhere. The lack of economic activity also manifests itself in a dearth of local employment opportunities for residents. To the extent that these ghettos tend to be located in central city neighborhoods that are far from areas of new job growth in the suburbs, a spatial mismatch between low-income job seekers and job opportunities further fuels the level of economic marginality characterizing these neighborhoods.22 “Address discrimination” can add another layer of disadvantage when people are denied employment opportunities because of where they live.

Residents of racially segregated neighborhoods, occupying below-standard housing, are more likely to be disadvantaged in the housing market, more likely to be victimized by predatory lending, and when they own property, more likely to see much lower rates of real estate value and lower rates of appreciation in that value than do residents of other neighborhoods. Oliver and Shapiro, for example, report that from 1967 to 1988, white homeowners saw an average increase in home value of $53,000, compared to only $31,100 over that same period for black homeowners.23 More recent analysis indicates that this gap has endured over time.24 The gap, what David Rusk calls the “segregation tax,” adversely affects the ability of black families to accumulate wealth and thus limits upward mobility and perpetuates socioeconomic disparities between whites and blacks.25

Finally, some have argued that the high crime and poverty of segregated neighborhoods inhibits the formation of the type of bridging social capital that can enhance upward mobility, primarily through access to job information from social networks.26 Here the argument stresses the homogeneity (and therefore the redundancy) of social networks in segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods. When one’s family and acquaintances are similarly situated in the labor market, the information one receives about job opportunities is limited.27

The individual and cumulative effects of these disadvantages produce and reproduce stark inequalities between people of color and whites in America.28 Many of the dynamics mentioned here have lasting implications, as individuals have more difficulty in growing the human capital necessary for economic success, or accumulating the financial capital for greater economic security. Thus, current forms of disadvantage contribute to lasting differences between groups in a self-reinforcing manner.29 Sociologist Lawrence Bobo calls residential segregation the “structural linchpin of American racial inequality.”30 Patrick Sharkey argues that the differential experiences of blacks and whites in their neighborhoods have stifled progress toward racial equality despite the elimination of formal and rigid forms of racial discrimination that characterized American life prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.31

The legacy effect of segregation is one of several features that make it a critical target of fair housing advocacy. By conditioning life chances in the ways described above, racial segregation in the United States perpetuates and accentuates inequalities even in the absence of active discrimination. It is also seen by some in the movement as causing current conditions of disadvantage. Florence Roisman, for example, asserts that segregation is more than merely the setting for adverse neighborhood conditions, but in fact is the cause of problems such as crime, drug abuse, and violence.32 Finally, fair housing advocates point out that the adverse effects of segregation can be separated from the effects of discrimination even when discrimination is implicated in causing segregation in the first place. As Elizabeth Anderson notes, segregation allows the dominant group to “hoard opportunities without having to actively discriminate.” That “segregation propagates many material inequalities on its own,” beyond whatever damages discrimination may cause, establishes it as a separate target of fair housing advocacy.33

Segregation Is a Legacy of Public Policy

Not only is segregation a demonstrable problem in the ways briefly summarized above, but it is an avoidable result of illegal private acts of discrimination and ill-designed public policy. While some argue that segregation can and does result from purely market processes—that is, through the differential purchasing power of whites and blacks, which sorts them into neighborhoods that are also segregated by housing value—there is plenty of evidence that even blacks with higher income (and therefore greater purchasing power in the market) are highly segregated.34 Others argue that some degree of segregation is the result of personal preferences and taste, such as through the desire to live with others who share cultural identities.35 Nevertheless, there are two other causes of segregation that justify a vigorous public effort to eliminate it. First, discrimination in housing markets has a long and sordid history in the United States and has been used to create and maintain patterns of segregation.36 Second, previous public actions at virtually all levels of government have contributed significantly to patterns of racial segregation.37

For much of our history, residential discrimination has been overt, and for decades it enjoyed explicit state approval and was defended by state actions. Important among these was the indifference of the state to tactics of racially motivated violence and intimidation as a means of discriminating and segregating in the housing market. Historian Stephen Grant Meyer documented decades’ worth of episodes of mob violence and intimidation, firebombings, and race riots, and violence perpetrated by white residents intent on maintaining the lines of racial segregation in American cities.38 Early twentieth-century racial zoning laws explicitly limited housing opportunities for blacks in some neighborhoods that were designated to remain predominantly white.39 Suburban communities have rigged their zoning policies to reduce or eliminate the opportunities available for building low-cost housing, thereby limiting entry for lower-income people of color.40 The federal government, especially, has been complicit in the creation of segregation and the facilitation of white flight out of racially changing central city neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program, for example, recommended racially restrictive deeds in order to maintain segregation (and therefore, according to the agency, protect the property values of the houses it was insuring). Private deed restrictions were for many years a widespread and legally approved means of enforcing residential segregation by limiting ownership and residence of properties by race. This practice, like racial zoning, was eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The FHA restricted most of its initial activities to white suburban areas, providing a highly affordable housing option for whites fleeing the central cities. At the same time, the FHA severely limited its activities in mixed neighborhoods and in neighborhoods dominated by people of color. This starved these areas of needed capital and hastened their physical decline.41 Federal urban renewal and public housing programs were also operated in ways that explicitly reinforced segregation.42 This complicity in creating the current urban landscape serves then as a justification for calls for public policies aimed at producing more equitable and integrated outcomes. These discriminatory public policies have also had the effect of facilitating and supporting home ownership and wealth creation for whites while simultaneously constraining wealth creation among blacks.43

In a number of ways discrimination in housing is lucrative for the professionals who engage in it. A population that is systematically denied sufficient choice in the housing market can be made to pay more when that choice is slightly expanded. Thus, blacks typically pay a premium over what whites pay for comparable housing.44 There is money to be made, too, in the rapid neighborhood turnover that can be generated by the introduction of black families to a street that had been white only. So-called blockbusting was often orchestrated by real estate agents who use the tactic to generate home sales and the resulting commissions.45 Discrimination in housing has become less overt over time, as real estate practitioners shifted from outright and explicit discrimination to more subtle differential treatment of people based on skin color. Such studies as are done on the phenomenon of housing discrimination indicate that it remains pervasive.46

Segregation Persists

The evidence on racial segregation indicates that the United States has a severe problem. As measured by the most common indicator, the index of dissimilarity, rates of racial segregation are higher in the United States than in any other developed country. This index measures segregation on a scale of 0 to 100, and can be interpreted as being the percentage of minority residents who would have to move in order to create a condition of perfect integration (defined as a metropolitan area in which each neighborhood has the same racial breakdown). In some metropolitan areas of the country, chiefly older industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, the index is greater than 80. In 2010, thirty-nine of the largest metropolitan areas in the country (with populations over 500,000) have segregation levels that are regarded by experts as high (i.e., 60 or higher on the index).47 An indicator of hyper-segregation that takes into account multiple measures and dimensions of segregation suggests that twenty-nine metropolitan areas in the United States were hyper-segregated (highly segregated on four or more of the five indices used) in 2000.48

Segregation, as measured by these indices, peaked during the 1960s and 1970s. The decline since then has been uneven. In some metropolitan areas, including Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other, predominantly western and southwestern metro areas, the decline since 1980 has been significant (more than 10-point reductions). But in metropolitan areas of the Midwest and Northeast, regions that have higher percentages of African Americans, the reduction has been much less.49 Segregation remains a central fact of life in most American metropolitan areas. Segregation in schools is another phenomenon that is showing very little sign of abating. In fact, during the 1990s, the level of student segregation in public schools actually worsened, although this was followed by modest improvements in the following decade.50 The lack of significant progress on school desegregation, including the political failures of busing, and the judicial system’s reluctance to require metropolitan-wide remedies for school segregation, has put more pressure on residential integration as a solution.

Concentrations of poverty are also seen as a sizable problem and, unlike racial segregation, a problem that continues to grow over time. American Community Survey data covering 2010–2014 show that there is more concentrated poverty in American cities now than at any other time over the past sixty years.51 The more than forty-one hundred high-poverty census tracts in the United States and 13.7 million people living in concentrated poverty are more than double the figures from 2000.52

Through this much of the argument there is little that separates fair housing and community development activists. The severe and persistent urban inequalities that follow color lines and neighborhood boundaries are in little dispute. That American urban areas reflect a highly biased distribution of life chances and experiences is not an item of contention. Even the role of public policies in producing and abetting these inequalities is largely agreed on. The two movements split, however, on approaches moving forward, with the fair housing movement anchored firmly in strategies of integration.

Integration as the Necessary Solution

At the risk of oversimplifying, it is generally felt that there are two ways of addressing the spatial inequalities associated with residential segregation. The first is to focus on spatial mobility—that is, to desegregate. The strategy here is to facilitate and manage the movement of people in such a way as to achieve greater racial diversity across communities, to replace segregation with integration. The second strategy is to attempt to improve the conditions that exist within segregated communities, more specifically within minority-dominated neighborhoods. This has, in the past, been characterized as a choice between “dispersal” strategies on the one hand and “enrichment” strategies on the other. The contemporary fair housing movement emphatically pursues the dispersal/integration solution.

Integration as Source of Benefits

Integration is considered by fair housing advocates to be the best means of addressing the problems of segregation. The benefits of opening up racially exclusive communities have been a central element in fair housing for decades. To some degree the expected benefits of integration are simply the logical negation of segregation and its costs. Thus, if segregation limits access to areas of job growth, integration will increase that access.53 Insofar as suburban areas have been the areas of greatest job growth over the past forty years, then making housing options available in suburban areas for lower-income people of color will put them within reach of employment opportunities.

Similarly, integration is seen as a means of improving the educational experience of children compared to what is available to them in segregated neighborhoods. The school benefits of racial integration have long been touted and are rooted in the extreme inequalities of education that characterized the “separate and unequal” era prior to Brown v. Board of Education. More equitable educational experiences for children across race and class categories, it is argued, would help to reduce intergenerational inequalities, as the sons and daughters of black and low-income families receive the same quality education as those of the middle class and white suburban families.

Integration, it is argued, will eliminate Rusk’s “segregation tax” and provide minority homeowners access to the more rapid property appreciation that whites have enjoyed for decades. Integration will allow families to escape the high crime and dangerous environmental hazards that burden the segregated ghetto. And so on. For the costs of segregation identified earlier, for the social dysfunctions and public-service neglect associated with the ghetto, integration provides a solution.

Integration would also redistribute the costs of poverty so that central cities are not overly burdened with the social and service costs associated with poverty.54 Currently, the segregation of disadvantaged and poor families in core areas of metropolitan areas ensures that a small number of local governments are burdened with the responsibility of providing antipoverty services. Given the extreme fragmentation of local governments in the United States, most do not have to deal with large numbers of poor households. This creates inequities of public finance and taxation that could also be evened out with a more integrated settlement pattern within regions.

It has even been argued that open housing laws, by facilitating the suburbanization of the black population, lead to increased employment and residential growth in central cities as those neighborhoods lose the stigma associated with racial segregation and concentrated poverty.55

In addition, integration is argued to provide other instrumental benefits such as supporting “regional and global competitiveness” and “smart growth and environmental values.”56 In the case of the former the argument rests on the idea that large socioeconomic and racial disparities within regions are harmful to overall growth and therefore to the competitiveness of a region.

The overall empirical basis for these claims is mixed. Whether movement of people of color to predominantly white communities produces greater access to jobs, for example, has received mixed support, whereas the benefits to children of color being educated in the same schools as white children have been more consistently demonstrated in the research literature. A number of studies of mobility and dispersal programs have dominated American housing policy since the early 1990s. In particular, advocates point to evidence from the Gautreaux mobility program in Chicago and to the Moving to Opportunity program that operated in five U.S. cities. Fair housers point to findings that people reported lower levels of fear of crime after moving out of high-poverty, segregated housing, and evidence from Gautreaux and MTO showing that adolescent girls reported health benefits from moving.

For some time, integration advocates focused on the Gautreaux study, finding those results to be more reassuring about the impacts of integrationist moves. The MTO program, on the other hand, a program that enjoyed a superior research design and thus could be said to provide more reliable data on the actual impact of desegregative moves by lower-income households of color, produced what most people regarded as disappointing results. In fact, the early results of the MTO studies were so disappointing to the advocates of dispersal that a great deal of further analysis was done to explain why the program had not produced the expected outcomes. Some argued for a more relaxed application of the experimental design that was more likely to show program benefits.57 The most recent analysis of the program tracing the labor market outcomes of young adults who were children at the time of their MTO relocation has demonstrated benefits for some.58

Of course, whether the benefits of integration, such as they are, occur because of inherent qualities of integration rather than the privileged economic and political power of whites is another question. If integration works only because it spatially rearranges households in such a way that people of color get to experience a portion of the privilege that white communities routinely experience, then integration does little to address the fundamental reasons behind racial injustice. If integration can somehow alter existing power dynamics in American society, then it can be considered a more robust solution to urban and racial inequalities.

Integration as a Democratic Project

The argument for integration as a way to address fundamental inequities in power is based on claims about the ways in which it harmonizes with democracy and inclusive social relations among diverse groups. The best-known version of this argument is Gordon Allport’s “contact theory,” which postulates that under certain conditions, which include equal status and common goals, greater contact among members of different groups will reduce prejudice and improve intergroup relations.59 The fair housing argument is that residential integration is an appropriate application of the thesis.60

The 1968 Report of the Kerner Commission on Civil Disturbances evinced a similar faith in integration. While acknowledging that both enrichment strategies and integration efforts could deal with the unequal conditions that minority households were forced to face in segregated neighborhoods, the commission concluded that integration was “the only course which explicitly seeks to achieve a single nation ” (emphasis added).61 In this sentiment and in its other statements, the commission was arguing that separate is inherently unequal and thus integration is a prerequisite for the egalitarian social and political relationships that are the foundation of American political beliefs. One finds reference to this phrase, “separate is inherently unequal,” in a great deal of fair housing argumentation, and it carries a power and authority that derive from the political and historical discourse surrounding the discredited “separate but equal” doctrine embodied in Plessy v. Ferguson.62

Perhaps the most extensive recent articulation of a political theory of integration is Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration, published in 2010. In this work, Anderson argues that the “democratic ideal holds that justice requires equality in social relations,” that is, that political equality is not possible without social equality, and that neither is possible in conditions of segregation.63

Integration is also, according to Anderson, an inherent part of democratic processes. Negotiation and deliberation among groups that are part of democratic processes are facilitated by integration; indeed, she argues, they require integration.64 Systematic inequalities along socioeconomic lines (though not limited to racial and ethnic divisions), on the other hand, are better served by conditions of segregation. Segregation, according to Anderson, allows dominant elites to be insular in their decision making and thus unaccountable and irresponsible. Residential segregation that “pack[s] blacks into majority-minority districts makes the remaining districts overwhelmingly white, insular, and free to promote racially polarizing policies.”65 This view of minority power in a representative system runs counter to, and explicitly challenges, the oft-expressed views of many minority political leaders in and out of government that minority districts are essential to building political power.66 Anderson’s view is the opposite, that integration, even if it means minority status in all electoral districts for communities of color, is the only condition under which political elites will have an accurate understanding of minority problems and issues and is the only condition under which political elites will be equally responsive to minority issues.67

Integration as a Realistic Outcome

For integration to produce benefits it must be accomplished at a sufficient scale. Fair housing advocates assert there is evidence that it is possible to engineer integration through public policy and judicial rulings. Important court rulings in Gautreaux v. CHA, Gautreaux v. HUD, the Mount Laurel cases, and a range of public housing desegregation lawsuits (all of which are described in more detail in chapter 4) have demonstrated the ability and willingness of the courts to impose integrationist initiatives upon jurisdictions that have been shown to be obstructive, exclusionary, or discriminatory in their application of assisted housing programs. These initiatives, according to fair housing advocates, have resulted in the resettlement of significant numbers of families of color into integrated settings.

The success of legislated programs is somewhat more limited. Here, fair housing advocates point more to the fact that we know how to shape policy in a way that will disperse subsidized housing residents. The federal Moving to Opportunity program provides housing choice vouchers to families who volunteer to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Fair share housing programs that exist in New Jersey or have existed briefly in other areas are referenced as ways of rearranging the spatial distribution of subsidized housing.68

Community Development as a Failure

In addition to the merits of integration, the integrationist argument incorporates a critique of the alternative approach—referred to as “enrichment” or “community development.” Enrichment strategies have been criticized for decades, derisively termed “gilding the ghetto” by those who argue that such methods will never alter the basic dynamics of disadvantage associated with concentrations of racial minorities. The implication of this term is that it is not possible to change the underlying nature of the ghetto as an area of systematic disadvantage; rather it is only possible to make cosmetic and superficial improvements.

Gary Orfield, for example, contends that enrichment does not work because efforts have been too limited in the past. The root problem, according to Orfield, is that there is not enough political support for large-scale improvements in predominantly black communities, that such efforts are based on “white goodwill” or the extent of support within the white communities for race-based efforts at community improvement. Instead, he argues, whites have spent most of the last sixty years trying to put as much distance between themselves and such communities as they possibly can. Orfield argues that efforts at improving ghetto conditions will always be too limited to make a true difference in living conditions.69

Elizabeth Anderson maintains that enrichment is workable only if the deprivation experienced by the community is solely material. She argues that segregation creates disadvantages in social and cultural capital as well, and enrichment strategies that do not alter the basic conditions of spatial segregation will not be able to address those disadvantages.70 Others also argue more simply that community development impacts are limited.71

In this critique of community development, the fair housing advocates are joined by “new regionalists” who likewise see the “inside game” strategies of community development as insufficient and poorly equipped to meet the challenges of turning around segregated and poor communities in urban cores. Pastor et al., for example, see the actions of CDCs as “the equivalent of swimming against a raging stream” of policies and regional dynamics that combine to channel investment outward, away from core neighborhoods.72 Rusk calls community development efforts the equivalent of “helping people go up a down escalator.”73 An important part of their assessment is that such community development activities do not connect with regional groups in order to ensure that whatever development does take place in core areas is connected to regional growth opportunities. Thus, Pastor et al. criticize community development that does not have a regional vision or link to regional partners. Similarly, Rusk says an “inside game” is doomed to failure without an aggressive “outside game” (initiatives aimed at creating greater regional equity) to match it.74 The concern is that community developers are too parochial and too focused on the neighborhood scale to generate the type of change that will alter the larger patterns of spatial inequality that essentially produce and reinforce neighborhood disadvantage. A recent study of community-based organizations, for example, shows that high levels of racial and ethnic segregation produce conditions in which community organizations “become very territorial, highly protective of their own ‘turf.’”75

The critique of community development connects with Sampson’s argument about the hierarchical calcification of communities within a region. Sampson’s research on Chicago showed that the hierarchy of places within that region has been fairly rigid and that movement of communities up and down the hierarchy is rare and limited.76 Communities follow certain paths that lock them into positions relative to others in the same region. Thus, community revitalization efforts are largely incapable of changing those trajectories or path dependencies. In this way, communities within urban regions can become long-term “poverty traps” that operate to reproduce poverty and disadvantage. In such circumstances, community development will fail, and integrationist strategies are necessary.

Yet the fair housing critique of community development goes deeper than a mere allegation of ineffectiveness. According to some, community development is actually detrimental to fair housing objectives because it continues to place services and resources used by lower-income people of color in core neighborhoods and thus perpetuates and exacerbates patterns of segregation.77 This argument, in fact, positions community development and affordable housing as part of the problem that integration efforts need to address. Community development is a problem to the extent that it works to anchor low-income people of color in declining communities. It is a problem to the extent that it perpetuates segregation and racial isolation.

An Unassailable Position?

The fair housing case, briefly sketched out here, is compelling in two aspects. The first is in the description of the harms of segregated living in American cities. These conditions have produced and reproduced patterns of severe inequality and injustice along racial lines. It is also demonstrably true that American public policy was complicit in the development of segregated residential patterns, either proactively through renewal programs that consciously disrupted communities of color, or passively through the malign neglect of the state in the face of aggressive white racism in building the walls of American urban segregation. This particular pillar of the integrationist argument, however, is one that is largely shared by those active in community development. The harms of segregation and concentrations of poverty are readily seen in the differential neighborhood conditions that prevail in mostly white communities as compared to communities of color. The improvement of those conditions is the very subject of community development activity.

A second compelling aspect of the integration arguments is the assertion that the harms of segregation demand a policy response that fundamentally alters the dynamics of segregation and in turn eliminates the structural disadvantages of life in an enforced ghetto. Whether integration is the only settlement pattern consistent with democratic governance and a well-operating political system is a question that community development activists cannot ignore. Community developers must be able to articulate either how integration falls short in altering political dynamics and structural disadvantages, or they must articulate an alternative approach to addressing racial justice and regional equity that simultaneously avoids the weaknesses of integrationism. In the next chapter, as part of a comprehensive case for community development, I argue that it is possible to do both.