Inclusionary zoning is a policy whereby a city or municipality mandates that a certain percentage of units in newly constructed multifamily developments has lower-than-market rents. This practice may also designate a proportion of newly built single family homes within subdivisions to be sold below fair market value.

It would seem that by implementing these zoning requirements, cities would be taking a step forward in making housing fair and affordable to all. However, when these zoning ordinances include stipulations as to who receives first priority in occupying low-rent housing, the policy can be quite the opposite of inclusionary. An article in the New York Times presents some examples from Connecticut and New York where the equality in affordable housing created under inclusionary zoning is called into question.

The cities whose “inclusionary” zoning requirements give residents, former residents, and city employees top priority when disbursing newly affordable units stand to deter fair housing, especially in situations when the city in question lacks socioeconomic diversity. This may be the case with most suburban municipalities, which historically, tend to be largely white, middle-to-high income families.

Due to this lack of diversity, residential priority in suburban “inclusionary” zoning will fail to provide a fair opportunity to affordable housing across race, ethnicity, and economic status. On the other hand, it will provide an economic upper hand to the already advantaged white middle class. It will illustrate the classic cliche: “the rich [although relative] get richer…” Suburban residents who qualify for affordable housing will end up in safer and possibly more economically lucrative areas than their inner city counterparts. Moreover, residential priority bars inner city families from gaining access to the better schools and public services that are associated with suburban living. Such segregation could lead to social inequality for future generations to come.

It is up to us, as housing advocates, to make sure that inclusionary zoning remains inclusionary, and that those seeking to better their situation through affordable housing have an equal opportunity to do so, regardless of where they live now. By restricting residential priority in zoning ordinances, we can make our communities more rich in diversity and abolish the notion that economic success is limited to one subset of the population.

Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap, a just released study by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, offers compelling evidence that the life attainment of African-American children is greatly enhanced if they grow up outside of poverty neighborhoods.

A majority of black children grow up in poverty neighborhoods and the study found between 25% and 33% of the black-white income mobility gap is explained by this fact.

The study’s principal conclusions are…

• Experiencing high neighborhood poverty throughout childhood strongly increases the risk of falling down the income ladder.
• Only a very small percentage of white children live in high-poverty neighborhoods throughout childhood while a majority of black children do—a pattern that hasn’t changed in thirty years.
• Neighborhood poverty explains one-quarter to one-third of the black-white gap in downward mobility.
• The report’s analysis also suggests that black children who experience a reduction in their neighborhood’s poverty rate have greater economic success in adulthood than black children who experience poverty rates that increase or are stable.
• Reducing the concentration of poverty in their neighborhoods could strongly impact children’s economic mobility.

The authors of the report suggest that massive public investment of services in lower income neighborhoods can produce an antidote.  But they emphasize the extent of the public commitment required and that favorable labor markets are necessary. “A broad interpretation of these results suggests that when residents of a place, such as a housing project or a low-income neighborhood, are provided services and incentives designed to facilitate employment they will benefit substantially. However, it is important to keep in mind that these programs were intensive interventions implemented in strong labor markets, and it is not known whether such interventions would be as effective when demand for labor is weak.”

In the real world of Texas, these type of public investments are simplify not going to occur except perhaps in one or two extraordinary instances. The lives of most African-American children living in poverty neighborhoods will not be touched by such interventions. To suggest that this is a realistic solution is fantasy or a crass deception.

We must not continue to place our exclusive emphasis on “guilding the ghetto” while focusing housing programs in poverty neighborhoods, expecting that non-existent public programs will somehow make these neighborhoods good places for the poor to live. What is needed instead is to use the housing resources that are now available to begin to create affordable housing outside of the ghetto.

The study’s findings highlight the tragedy of the Texas Legislature’s rejection earlier this year of a bill that would have adopted into state law the existing federal goal of requiring government programs to “affirmatively further fair housing.”

I came away from reading the Pew report more convinced than ever that aggressive steps need to be taken within the state low income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program to construct new affordable housing in “communities of opportunity” (low poverty neighborhoods). Neighborhood opposition from homeowner’s associations in high opportunity communities has lately constrained LIHTC funding largely to rehabilitating older properties that are mostly located in poverty neighborhoods.

The study suggests to me that the current Texas policy will confine up to one-third of future generations of African-American children living in these Texas LIHTC apartments to a lifetime of dramatically reduced economic attainment. This to too large of a price to pay to continue to pander to the racism and classism manifested in the NIMBY attitudes of middle class homeowner’s associations.

Federal, state and local officials should also take this study to heart and aggressively carry out the massive housing rebuilding programs now taking place in Texas to rebuild homes damaged by the hurricanes in a manner that does not force low income African American families back into segregated poverty neighborhoods. Under the existing program design this is precisely what is now happening. This troubling study points to the fundamental importance of the 1968 Civil Rights Act in seeking to open up housing choices beyond the ghetto to African-American families. The failure of the Texas Legislature to endorse this goal should not be an excuse to continue to ignore the moral and legal imperative of fair housing.

I have previously expressed concerns about how the new Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) can be successfully implemented. I attended a public hearing last Friday in which officials of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) explained their proposed rules for how the program would be carried out.

The NSP program is an attempt to allow local communities to purchase foreclosed properties and to either rent or resell those properties to low income families. Any time a new program like this comes along there is a scramble to figure out how to best carry it out and to establish rules and procedures governing the use and distribution of the funds.

The now regular battle between the Department and its nonprofit contractors surfaced during last week’s public hearing. TDHCA’s governing board has, as a matter of policy, insisted that funds made available by the Department to contractors take the form of loans instead of grants. This stems from a desire to maximize the amount of funds returned to the Department so that the funds can be “recycled” to additional projects. A secondary concern of the Department’s has to do with accountability to HUD. Money advanced as loans to families buying homes under the NSP program constitutes “program income” in HUD’s eyes and the state is on the hook for the proper use of these funds.

From the perspective of the nonprofit contractors they would like to be able to hold on to the money as it is repaid by the borrowers so that they can assist other families. While there is a significant amount of money available for the program, the amount going to any one particular contractor is not that large. Thus the contractors face the prospect of designing and implementing a program that serves relatively few families over a short duration. Many potential contractors question whether it is worth their time and effort to set up to undertake such a program.

Aside from this issue between the Department and its contractors there are a number of other important public policy questions. Principal among these are:

• Will the program be administered in a manner that expands the opportunities of low income and minority families to move outside traditional areas or will it reinforce existing segregated housing patterns?
• Will the program be truly affordable to very low income families (those earning less than 50% of the area median income) or will they be effectively excluded from the program due to underwriting and loan terms?
• How can the program be designed to help very low income families buy foreclosed home and not get in trouble and face foreclosure in the future due to their often tenuous low incomes?
• Will rental housing purchased under the program end up housing very low-income families or will it instead be relegated to higher income households who can pay market rents?
• While HUD requires contractors to each provide a sizable portion of their funds to assist very low income families, how can TDHCA ensure that the contractors actually follow through on this commitment?

Here are our answers to these questions that we have submitted to TDHCA…

1) In order to further the obligation of TDHCA and program recipients to affirmatively further fair housing in compliance with the HUD regulations I recommend that an absolute priority be given to applications for activities involving the purchase of rental housing in “high opportunity” and nonminority segregated communities for use in conjunction with a “moving the opportunity” or other affirmative fair housing marketing program.

2) In order to affirmatively further fair housing the Department should require applicants to adopt a fair housing marketing plan that effectively assists minorities to consider housing opportunities for the purchase of single-family homes in nonminority majority communities. The Department should review these plans to ensure their adequacy and effectiveness and should require reports of all applicants regarding the race and national origin of program beneficiaries and the ethnic composition of the census tracts the beneficiaries purchased housing in.

3) In lieu of a down payment families purchasing homes under the program that have incomes below 50% of the area median family income should be allowed to participate in a state certified self-help housing program for Habitat for Humanity program through which they could substitute “sweat equity” in lieu of a down payment.

4) The cash down payment requirement for families with incomes below 50% of the area median family income should be reduced to $500.

5) Homeownership counseling should be required of all families purchasing homes under the program. The counseling should be provided by a HUD certified housing counselor. The Department should prescribe minimum requirements for prepurchase homebuyer counseling. The quality of the counseling is essential to the success of the program and the Department should invest the necessary funds to ensure the quality of the homebuyer counseling.

6) In instances where the local sponsor has a demonstrated capacity to successfully service mortgage loans of extremely low or very low income borrowers the Department should allow the local sponsor to provide loan servicing.

8 ) In all cases involving loans to families earning less than 50% of the area median family income, special provisions should be made within the structure of the loan to allow flexible terms to avoid future foreclosure. The borrower should be made aware of these special loan terms through the prepurchase homeownership counseling. The Department should establish procedures that recognize the precarious situation of a borrower at 50% of median family income. Any temporary loss of work, caused by the broader economic circumstances our nation faces or by family illness or family break up will likely place the borrower in loan default. The way to accommodate these situations and to prevent foreclosure is to build into the loan a process for loan abatement or payment reduction triggered by specific circumstances identified by the Department. Upon application by the borrower the Department would automatically agree to abate loan payments for a reasonable period of time or reduce payments by extending the loan term. This could operate in a manner similar to the US Department of Agriculture Section 502 loan. We strongly believe that a failure to build these type of accommodations into the loan product and make the borrower is aware of and encourage them to quickly communicate changing financial circumstances to the Department will result in an excessively high rate of foreclosures among this borrower population.

9) The single-family homeownership loan requirements is supplied in the draft plan are inadequate. The requirements need to be simple and easy to understand.

The loan must be:
- fixed rate loan for 30 years (no adjustables that can change)
- be affordable (X percent of gross income) including taxes and insurance
- lender must escrow for taxes and insurance
- borrower pays not more than 3 percent of the amount of the loan for any and all loan fees paid to any person (lender, title company, courrier, broker, etc.). This way the Department and homeowner can compare the loans apples to apples.

Loan forgiveness should not considered income for tax purposes. Borrowers should not get a 1099 for the amount forgiven each year.

Before the loan can be refinanced or before a second lien can be made including a home improvement loan, or home equity loan, the homeowner must be counseled on the risks, etc. by a HUD approved housing counselor.

10) All rental properties receiving assistance under this program should be required not to discriminate against renters who seek to use a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher. Minimum income requirements for renters should not exceed those allowed in the low income housing tax credit program as established by state rule.

11) TDHCA should ensure that funding recipients successfully carry out the income targeting requirements under the program by requiring each recipient to demonstrate At regular intervals that sufficient progress has been made on that portion of their plan directed at providing assistance to families earning below 50% of median family income as a pre-requirement for being able to expend any funds received from the Department for programs assisting higher income households.

The Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas has denied a motion by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) to throw out a lawsuit alleging the Department is guilty of racial discrimination in the operation of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program.  The case will now move forward to a trial on the merits of the allegations.

I reported on the lawsuit back in July.

The lawsuit alleges:
* TDHCA uses race and ethnicity as one factor in its decision whether to award Low Income Housing Tax credits and this factor is a cause of the segregation and other discrimination.
* The use of race as a factor subjects minority tenants to slum and blighted conditions.

The lawsuit, filed by the Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project can we found here.  The response filed by the State of Texas on behalf of TDHCA can be found here.

On December 11, Federal Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater rejected all of the claims made by TDHCA and ordered the lawsuit to go forward.  The judge’s order can be found here.

As I noted in a previous posting, this a major challenge to the way the State of Texas allocates Low Income Housing Tax Credits.  It is part of the evolving trend that has moved the focus of the national struggle for fair housing to North Texas due to the work of the Inclusive Communities Project and civil rights attorney Mike Daniel.

North Texas is becoming ground zero in the fight against residential racial segregation.  This thanks to the experienced and increasingly aggressive advocacy of civil rights attorney Michael Daniel and Inclusive Communities Project director Betsy Julian.

Consider what these two, who share offices in downtown Dallas, have done in recent weeks:

1. Filed a federal lawsuit against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs alleging fair housing violations in the operation of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program in Dallas;
2. Struck an agreement with the up-scale Dallas suburb of Frisco to accept future Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments;
3. Filed suit against affluent North Dallas suburbs of Flower Mound and McKinney for failing to participate in the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program.

The rapidity and scope of these desegregation actions have drawn national attention to a fight that has lost national momentum in recent years.

The national focus of fair housing used to be on Chicago.  Public housing desegregation and the Gautreaux program that sought to relocate Section 8 tenants from segregated inner city neighborhoods are the legacies of that effort.

Daniel and Julian are focusing on opening up the Dallas suburbs, and particularly the fast growing outer ring of suburbs to lower income African-American households through a combination of the Section 8 and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit programs.

Julian heads a nonprofit organization that works to place inner city Dallas Section 8 housing voucher holders in the suburbs and to support them as they integrate these formerly all white communities.  The program is a legacy of Daniel’s lawsuit against the City of Dallas and the Dallas Housing Authority for racially segregating publicly housing in Dallas.  Julian came to her current job from her role as Mike Daniel’s law partner with an intervening stint as Assistance Secretary for Fair Housing of HUD under President Clinton.

A while back I did an extensive interview with Julian about her approach to Fair Housing.

The Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve System and the Brookings Institution have issued a report, “The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S.” that profiles 16 high poverty communities in the US, including two in Texas.

The two Texas poverty communities profiled are East Austin and the Chamizal neighborhood in El Paso.

The purpose of the report is to understand “the dynamics of poor people living in poor communities and the policies that will be needed to bring both into the economic mainstream.”

The profiles of these neighborhoods presented in the report is shocking.  The combination of sky high poverty rates, low levels of education, high unemployment and unaffordable housing cripples both communities. Yet in another important way both of the communities are quite different.  The poverty in the Chamizal neighborhood is entrenched and unchanging, while the East Austin neighborhood is undergoing rapid change and loss of its low income population through gentrification.

Consider the demographics of the El Paso Chamizal neighborhood:

• the poverty rate is 58.7%
• 71% of adults lack a high school diploma
• the unemployment rate is 18%
• 55% of the rental units are HUD subsidized — 47% of renters have a high cost burden.

The report concludes:

“Lack of education, economic and social isolation, and obstacles to quality housing are major contributors to the perpetuation of poverty in Chamizal. Resources to address chronic issues are expensive, especially amid recent pressure in El Paso to reduce the tax rate in response to increases in property assessments.”

In the East Austin neighborhood:

• the poverty rate is 46%
• 54% of adults lack a high school diploma
• 50% of the rental units are HUD subsidized — 41% of renters have a high cost burden.

Regarding East Austin the report concludes:

“As the volume of investment in East Austin climbs, however, a growing number of low- and moderate-income households are dispersed outside the city limits, farther from the service providers and social networks they have relied on for their quality of life. For elderly and disabled individuals on fixed incomes and households that do not want to leave their family homes, gentrification has been an unwelcome change. At the same time, residents who are dispersing to the suburbs have access to other community assets, such as new schools and more vibrant employment opportunities. For East Austin, the question remains: Will government, the private sector, and community leaders be able to manage the community’s changes in a way that gets the “balancing act” right?”

I came away from reading this report frustrated that it did not present a clear blueprint for improving the quality of life in these neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the report does shine a light on these two Texas neighborhoods that desperately need solutions to their poverty problems.

The report can be downloaded at: http://www.frbsf.org/cpreport/docs/cp_fullreport.pdf .

According to a Brookings Institution study released this week, trends suggest that the decline in concentrated poverty that occurred during the 1990s may be reversing over the course of this decade.

The report is titled, Reversal of Fortune: A New Look at Concentrated Poverty in the 2000’s and the authors are Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube. The report can be downloaded and a video summary viewed at http://www.brookings.edu/multimedia/video/2008/0812_poverty_berube.aspx.

The report is based on an analysis of the changing geographic distribution of low-income workers and their families, measured by receipt of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in tax years 1999 and 2005, nationwide and in 58 major metropolitan areas across the country.

This is a follow=up report to that authored by University of Texas at Dallas professor Paul Jargowsky which I wrote about earlier. Concentrated poverty areas are census tracts with 40 percent or more of the population with incomes below the poverty level. Jargowsky calculates a concentrated poverty rate, which expresses the percentage of poor people within the community (e.g., metropolitan area) that live in high-poverty neighborhoods.

Since census data is not available to assess changes in poverty concentrations from 1999 to 2005 the new study uses data of the number of households filing a tax return under the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This portrays an income group that includes families who are poor but also includes some that are over the official poverty level. The authors use the term “low-income working families.”

The report’s findings are:

A. The number of tax filers nationwide living in areas with high rates of working poverty increased by 40 percent, or 1.6 million filers, between tax years 1999 and 2005.

B. Among 58 large metropolitan areas, rates of concentrated working poverty (the share of EITC filers living in high-working-poverty communities) rose in 34 over the first half of the decade, while 24 showed declines.

C. Major metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast experienced substantial increases in concentrated working poverty over the first half of the decade, but Western metro areas saw steep declines.

D. Both central cities and suburbs saw an increase in high-working-poverty communities between tax years 1999 and 2005.

Compared to the beginning of this decade, more people across the country now live in areas with high rates of working poverty. As high-working-poverty areas have become more prevalent over the first half of the decade, low-income workers and families have become relatively more geographically concentrated in these communities.

Data for Texas’ two largest metro areas are included in the report. The increases in the concentration of poverty and the number of low-income working families living in concentrated low-income ZIP codes mirror the alarming national trends. Concentrated working poverty rates in the Dallas MSA increased from 10.8 percent in 1999 to 13.0 percent in 2005. Over the same period the concentrated working poverty rate in the Houston MSA increased from 15.0 percent to 19.3 percent. Almost 130,000 Dallas area working poor households lived in high work poverty ZIP codes compared to over 206,000 Houston households.

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX
EITC filers (2005) 456,358
Filers in high EITC receipt ZIP codes 129,301
Concentrated working poverty rate (1999) 10.8%
Concentrated working poverty rate (2005) 13.0%

Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land, TX
EITC filers (2005) 470,708
Filers in high EITC receipt ZIP codes 206,298
Concentrated working poverty rate (1999) 14.0%
Concentrated working poverty rate (2005) 19.3%

The report’s authors “counsel renewed attention and commitment to policies that foster greater economic integration throughout metropolitan areas, and help to make more places “neighborhoods of choice and connection” for families at all levels of the income spectrum.”

Dallas Morning News editorial writer Tod Roberson

An extensive opinion piece headlined, Poor assumptions: segregating poverty in Dallas is a money-losing proposition authored by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Tod Robberson offers a carefully reasoned economic argument for tackling the racial and economic segregation I was blogging about last week.

Robberson focuses on the 12 year combined efforts of fourteen North Dallas home owners associations to block in federal court a new public housing development in North Dallas.

Citing the controversial Atlantic article I bogged about last week, which links Section 8 housing choice voucher recipients with an increase in suburban crime, the Dallas Morning News article says…

Certainly, some of the increase in suburban crime can be linked to that migration. But there is no more than anecdotal evidence linking it to subsidized housing — especially considering that subsidy recipients account for only a small percentage of the total migration, says Dr. Timothy M. Bray, director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Dallas has always been a city that finds economic arguments more compelling than social ones.  Robberson makes the economic point well. Citing research from 2008 by Ricardo Bodini, a community economic development specialist, Robberson writes  The Dallas County has one of the lowest housing appreciation rates among the major cities studied.

Dallas County also ranked lowest in terms of “convergence,” which is the ability of urban — suburban areas to bridge their socioeconomic divisions by finding ways for people of varying incomes to live alongside one another.

The lack of convergence and existence of large pockets of poverty in Dallas might be causing our real estate values to be depressed compared to other metropolitan areas, Mr. Bodini wrote in the fall 2007 Williams Review.

So if homeowners in Far North Dallas are really concerned about their property values, they need to do more to embrace the cities rich-or-racial divide — not maintain it.

The Robberson opiion piece is worth a read.

In the previous post I explored the debate and political process that went into the passage of the Fair Housing Act.  Today, I’ll explore the political considerations that restrained the implementation on the Act and crippled our commitment as a nation to achieving the ultimate goal of residential integration.

As we have already seen passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 passed after more than 20 years of delay do to opposition from southern Democrats and conservative Republicans.  In addition to the constituency of racist southerners, opposition came from Northern ethnic home owners.  Suburban and ethnic opposition to open housing legislation was violently demonstrated in the response to Dr. King’s housing initiative in Chicago in 1966.

It was a tragic combination of Dr. King’s assassination, widespread urban rioting and President Johnson’s political skills that forced passage of the the Fair Housing Act in 1968.  Yet, as I noted previously the bill’s authors, Walter Mondale and Edward Brooke saw the bill, as did proponents of housing rights, as only a first step in the “open housing” movement.

The bill was termed the Fair Housing Act, yet the term Fair Housing was nowhere defined.  The Act had at least three goals:

* Elimination of explicit discrimination on the basis of race;
* Creation of integrated communities; and
* Breaking up ghettos occupied by poor and minority households.

The question was whether the Act would be implemented as a narrow set of legal rights aimed only at achieving the first goal or be used as a broader mandate to attack ghettos and widespread housing segregation along the same lines that school desegregation was being pursued.  Narrowly applied the Fair Housing Act might would rely on voluntarily compliance and private enforcement.  Advocates of open housing knew that this would never breach the well established walls of residential racial segregation in America.

Enactment came near the end of the Johnson Administration, meaning it would be left to the winner of the 1968 presidential election to define and implement Fair Housing.

The politics of the 1968 election on the Democratic side involved a three way race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.  Implementation of the law was front and center at the critical Democratic primary debate prior to the California election held less than two months after passage of the Fair Housing Act.

Asked how to cure poverty in the ghettos, Robert Kennedy talked about his public-private sector pilot program to create housing in distressed neighborhoods in New York City.

Eugene McCarthy responded, “…I would say we have to get into the suburbs, too, with this kind of housing because some of the jobs are in the city and some jobs are being built there-but most of the employment is now in the belt line outside of the cities and I don’t think we ought to perpetuate the ghetto if we can help it, even by putting better homes there for them or low-cost houses…”

McCarthy warned against “adopting a kind of apartheid in this country,” noting “some of the housing has got to go out of the ghetto, so there is a distribution of the races throughout the whole structure of our cities and into our rural areas.”

Kennedy responded, “I am all in favor of moving people out of the ghettos…You say you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange county. The people who graduate from high school which are only three out of ten of the people-or of children who go to these schools, only three out of ten who graduate from high school and the ones who graduate from high school hav[ing] the equivalent of an eighth-grade education. So to take them out of where 40 percent don’t have any jobs at all-that is what you are talking about. If you are talking about one hundred people, that is one thing. But if you are talking about hitting this problem in a major way-to take these people out, put them in the suburbs where they can’t afford the housing, where their children can’t keep up with the schools and where they don’t have the skills for the jobs, it is just going to be catastrophic.”

One author has written, “That Kennedy statement-and McCarthy’s neglect to respond to it with vigor-decided the California primary. It was as if George Wallace had entered the contest with respect to Orange county on Kennedy’s side.”

Kennedy won the California Democratic primary and effectively knocked McCarthy out of the race.  A few days later Robert Kennedy was assassinated.  Richard Nixon defeated the Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey in the general election.

Implementation of the Fair Housing Act thus became President Nixon’s responsibility.

As President Nixon's HUD Secretary George Romney advocated integrating suburbs with low income housing, incurring the wrath of the President.

According to Dean J. Kotlowski, in a book titled Nixon’s Civil Rights, when one presidential task recommended “a strong national policy” of “carrots and sticks” to move low income housing from ghettos to suburbs, and another, on low-income housing pressed the government to use its community assistance programs to overcome racial and economic discrimination in housing, Nixon scrawled on the memo. “E[hrlichman]. I am absolutely opposed to this.  Knock it in the head now.”

Nixon’s secretary of housing and urban development, George Romney, a moderate Republican, pursued a moderate integrationist approach that ran afoul of Nixon.

Kotlowski describes Nixon’s attitude…

Following the GOPs lackluster showing in the mid-term elections of 1970, the President informed his staff that he wanted to shore up his suburban base and make changes in his cabinet.  Ehrlichman predicted that Romney would resign over the suburban integration issue because he and Van Dusen, “really believe in forced interg[ration] of housing.” Nixon repeated that he himself “deeply disbelieves in it” arguing that the government “can’t force blacks into housing — or we’ll have a war.  It just won’t work—we’ll get reseg[regration]” though white flight. Nixon urged his staff to nail every Democratic senator to the cause of “compulsory integrated housing.”  He planned to paint Romney as a proponent of forced integration and compel him to quit.

Romney resigned as HUD Secretary in 1972.

According Charles M. Lamb, writing in Housing Segregation in Suburban America Since 1960, Nixon “left a lasting imprint by seizing policy-making power from his HUD secretary, centralizing that power in the White House, and narrowly construing the meaning of the Fair Housing Act”.  Succeeding Presidents all came to see suburban housing integration was the third rail of American politics.

President Carter famously remarked, “I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity [of neighborhoods} being maintained. I would not force racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.”

President Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act

It is interesting and a little discouraging that on the 40th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, one of the principal goals of the Act, promoting the integration of neighborhoods remains unfulfilled and highly controversial.

Today I will explore the debate and political process that went into the passage of the Fair Housing Act.  Tomorrow, I’ll explore the political considerations that restrained the implementation on the Act and crippled our commitment as a nation to achieving the ultimate goal of residential integration.

Calls for fair housing began early in the twentieth century, but the effort to enact fair housing legislation began in earnest in the 1950’s. Early on, efforts concentrated on first integrating government housing.

Congressman Vito Marcantonio

During the debate on a housing bill in June 1949 the open housing issue came to a head in an amendment by New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.  The debate was on an amendment to prohibit the use of federal funds for any housing project that permitted segregation or other form of discrimination. Members supporting the housing bill told Marcantonio he needed to pull back on his call for housing integration so the housing bill could pass.  Marcantonio responded…

Mr. Chairman, I have a pretty good idea of the arguments that have been circulated against my amendment….. the artificial excuse that was offered is that this kind of amendment will sink the [housing] bill. Personally I do not believe that. …

Further, to those who want to use the opportunistic argument, let me tell them that you have no right to use housing against civil rights. housing and civil rights are an integral part of each other.  Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strengthening democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.  …

Stand up now and we can get housing in accordance with the best traditions of American democracy. This depends on your will to fight for it. The responsibility rests on the majority. The responsibility rests on every single Member. Do we want housing with Jim Crow? I say “No.” I say that the issue cannot be evaded. It exists in the very marrow of the bone of this bill. I say the American people want housing with the full guaranty of equality.

Marcantonio’s amendment was defeated.

It was not until thirteen years later in November 1962, when President Kennedy signed an executive order entitled “Equal Opportunity in Housing” that discrimination was prohibited in housing owned, operated or assisted by the federal government.

Opponents of housing integration and public housing used these fair housing requirements to attack both.  The ad below ran in the Dallas Morning News in 1962.

Dallas Morning News ad from 1962

While Kennedy’s Executive Order was the first official policy prohibiting residential segregation, it was basically ignored, in Texas and most southern states.  It was not until a series of desegregation lawsuits in the 1970’s that Texas housing authorities were brought into technical compliance with the anti-discrimination aspects of the law.  Integration of government housing has often proven illusive however.  The enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in public housing produced an exodus of whites so that to this day most public housing remains racially segregated.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the issue of civil rights in housing became the major unfinished piece of civil rights legislation.  Fair Housing and housing integration proved to be the most difficult civil rights legislation to pass.

The final process began in 1966 with legislation co‐sponsored by Senators Walter Mondale (D-MI) and Edward Brooke (R-MA).  Brooke was a liberal, African-American Republican.  Progress on the legislation was blocked for years by a combination of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans.

By 1968 the political environment was racially charged.  A series of race riots shook major US cities.  The Kerner Commission, empaneled by President Johnson to investigate the cause of the riots, recommended:

• eliminating barriers to choice (anti-discrimination);
• removing the frustration of powerlessness (empowerment); and
• increasing contact across racial lines to destroy stereotypes and hostility (integration).

.

The bill languished until Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4. President Johnson seized on the assassination, the urban rioting and the injustice of African-Americans disproportionally doing the fighting in the Viet Nam War to push through the legislation through Congress. After a weekend of urban rioting in major cities across the country, including Washington, D.C., the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10, as soldiers encircled the Capitol to protect it from rioters.  President Johnson signed the bill into law the next day.

In The Forty-Year “First Step”: The Fair Housing Act As An Incomplete Tool For Suburban Integration, Brian Patrick Larkin wrote…

Fair housing legislation was “the best way for this Congress to start on the true road to integration.”  Neither Senator Mondale or Senator Brooke saw the Fair Housing Act as the solution, or even the driving force to achieve integration. The Act was intended to be only a first step. Although its passage was an amazing accomplishment, Senator Mondale viewed the Act as being “only a foot in the door.” Similarly, Senator Brooke observed that even though the legislation was “a giant step in the right direction,” it was not a “cure [for] all the wrongs and ills in this country.” This view also aligned with the Kerner Commission’s recommendation that the removal of discrimination was to be the first objective, followed by strategies of empowerment and the facilitation of integration.

Critical decisions about implementation would occur in the months following passage of the Fair Housing Act.  These decisions would determine the extent to which the law would go beyond simply eliminating the legal barriers to housing choice to achieve the Kerner Commission’s most challenging goal of increasing contact across racial lines to destroy stereotypes and hostility through actually achieving housing integration.

As we will see tomorrow, political considerations would cause a retreat from the goal of integration.  As a consequence, forty years later the country is still beset with ghettos and struggling to overcome persistent racial housing segregation.

The elite media has decided to focus on whether Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher holders are bringing crime to suburban neighborhoods.

Instead of bringing to light the millions of poor families living in deplorable conditions because they cannot afford decent housing, instead of exposing slumlord exploitation of the poor, instead of chronicling the lives of poor children living in crime-infested impoverished neighborhoods, the elite media is focused on poor Section 8 voucher holders, mostly single moms with children, who are allegedly bringing crime to comfortable suburban neighborhoods.

“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” – Finley Peter Dunne, chief editorial writer for the Chicago Post.

These began with a well written but weakly documented story, “American Murder Mystery.” in The Atlantic by Hanna Rosen. It was picked up Saturday in a copy cat story in the New York Times titled “As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow.”  Now papers across the country will do their own stories examining the relationship of crime and poor families with Section 8 vouchers.

A group of national housing experts issued a lengthy rebuttal to the Hanna Rosen Atlantic story, “Memphis Murder Mystery? No, Just Mistaken Identity,” in Shelterforce. According to the Shelterforce article, Rosen’s piece “is part investigative reporting, part misleading caricature.”

Do yourself a favor and read the Atlantic story and the housing experts’ Shelterforce rebuttal because this is going to be talked about — a lot.

Pointing out that while crime in large cities has fallen, it is on the rise in mid-sized cities and suburbs, Hanna Rosen claims to have traced the source of this spike in crime to the demolition of big city public housing developments and the movement of the former public housing residents to outlying suburban areas using Section 8 housing vouchers.  She cites the work of two Memphis-based researchers on crime and housing in that city and surrounding areas.  The researchers, a husband and wife team, one a criminologist and the other a housing researcher, compared maps of crime and the homes Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher holders and, Rosen writes…

On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

This is the foundation of the author’s main conclusion — Section 8 voucher holders brought the crime to these outlying neighborhoods.

An article in American Prospect points out just how shaky Rosen’s evidence is that the crime can be attributed to Section 8 voucher holders…

There is nothing amazing or surprising going on here. Section 8 voucher holders typically migrate to lower-cost housing, which tends to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods where crime is a serious concern. As University of Texas public policy professor Paul Jargowsky, one of the nation’s leading experts on concentrated poverty and crime, says: “If you look at cities throughout the country from 1990 to 2000, you see a consistent pattern of increases in poverty in the inner-ring suburbs, while the central cities had declines. Since poverty and crime are correlated, you would expect that inner-ring suburban crime went up and central city crime went down — but that’s only a statistical artifact of changing neighborhood composition rather than a causal effect of poverty on crime. The correlation of crime and poverty, old news to be sure, is the only thing demonstrated by the map in the article. Nobody likes maps more than me, but sometimes they just confuse correlation and causality.”

Read through all twelve pages of the Rosin article and you will find no data about crime on the part of Section 8 voucher recipients, who are overwhelmingly single moms, their children, the elderly and people with disabilities.  Additionally, all Section 8 tenants are screened by the housing authority for past criminal records, so a sudden new proclivity to commit crime seems highly unlikely.

There is occasional juvenile crime in some Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher households.  Boyfriends and relatives staying in these households are sometimes responsible for crime. We do not yet know who shot three children at a Dallas subsidized development where most tenants receive Section 8. It may have been a person living with a Section 8 voucher holder but not on the lease.  It might have been someone passing by.  It does illustrate that Section 8 voucher holders, like other very low-income people, are often themselves victims of terrible crimes.  But what are the crime rates of Section 8 voucher holders?  That would be interesting and valuable policy information but the article does not tell us.

My point is that the article did not explore the critical policy questions.  Further, the crime examples cited in Rosen’s article were multiple homicides and rape — seldom the crimes of juveniles, moms and old people.

Rosin suggests the Section 8 program is a failure for allegedly not stopping crime and magically transforming the poor into model middle-income citizens.  But these are unrealistic expectations.

It is a shame that Hanna Rosen felt the need to so overreach with the conclusion of this article.  She has handed bigots mainstream media support to stereotype the poor and argue against integration.  Want proof?   Just look at the blogs.  They are filled with entries like this…

Rosin (sic) should be congratulated for taking 12 pages in the Atlantic Monthly to demonstrate that the fundamental problem with public housing projects was that they were full of public housing project residents. And, when the government finally blows up a housing project, the ex-residents just take their felonious folkways elsewhere.

Rosen raises a number of important issues, from a resident’s perspective, about the problems with the demoition of public housing and the overcrowding of Section 8 tenants in older, inner ring suburbs to the exclusion of the more desirable residentail areas.  Too bad all of these issues will be glossed over in the stampede to sieze upon her sensationalized, undocumented and unproven Section 8 crime claim.

Wednesday’s blog post about the persistence of ghettos in Texas cities led me to do a little more research about the spacial dynamics of poverty in Texas urban areas.  It is critical that these dynamics be considered in decisions about where to locate new subsidized housing developments.

Fortunately, Texas is home of one of the national experts on the geography of urban poverty.  Working at the University of Texas at Dallas, Professor Paul A. Jargowsky has set up a web site that allows users to generate maps showing the levels of poverty in census tracts within MSAs from 1970 through 2000.

National mega trends in poverty population shifts are mirrored in Texas’ major MSAs.  Nationally there were steady increases in the concentration of poverty households in the poorest census tracts from 1970 through 1990 followed by a dramatic dispersion of the poverty population from these inner city census tracts to the “inner ring” suburban areas.  These are the older suburbs closely hugging the large cities.

Poverty increases in inner city neighborhoods slowed dramatically in the 1990's while poverty increases in inner ring suburbs increased.

The maps above show this effect in the Dallas areas.  Long term, low-income, inner city Dallas census tracts grew in their percentages of poverty population from 1970 though 1990.  Then, in the decade of 1990-2000, the trend shifted dramatically, with inner city poverty tracts losing poverty population and the inner ring suburbs showing dramatic gains in poverty population. The old, inner-ring Dallas suburbs that experienced dramatic percentage increases in poverty populations include: Garland, Mesquite, Farmer’s Branch, Irving, Grand Prairie, Lancaster, Cedar Hill and Mansfield.  Even such historic white bastions of Richardson and Plano have seen significant poverty rate increases.

Professor Jargowsky offers a fascinating analysis of the dynamic of these changes in the Dallas area.  (Based on some time spent with the mapping web site it appears the same holds true in other larger Texas MSAs).

He points out the extreme political fragmentation in these MSAs (Dallas is surrounded by 154 suburbs).  These suburbs surround the core cities in a series of concentric rings of suburbs.  Each of these suburbs is politically autonomous and looks not to the best interest of the broader region but seeks to promote itself as the most desirable suburb.  This translates into the most expensive housing and exclusion of the poor.

The new suburbs are growing at the expense of older suburbs and central cities.  The poor are consigned to the core city, or when housing wears out in the core city, they more to the older, inner ring suburbs.

Here is how Professor characterized this process in an interview published by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank in 2006…

If more communities or cities were sharing the responsibility for providing housing for different income levels, then there wouldn’t be as much concern that any one neighborhood would bear a disproportionate amount of the lower-income housing burden. Coordination between jurisdictions could help eliminate the destructive forms of competition so that the rules of the game change.

In the current housing situation, the rules of the game dictate that today’s winners will be tomorrow’s losers. We live in a society where there is a very predictable progression of suburban development. New suburbs will become old suburbs, which start deteriorating. When some people see minorities and poor people moving into their neighborhoods, they start to consider moving out. They are making a sensible choice, given the existing structure of how neighborhoods develop, because they understand what happens to property values.

This pattern of rapid laissez-faire housing development can facilitate segregation and the concentration of poverty and limit poor people’s access to opportunity.

So how should this growth dynamic effect affordable housing programs?  (The following is my analysis and not necessarily Professor Jargowsky’s).

First, it would be mistake to permit subsidized housing to contribute to the over saturation of low income housing in the older ring suburbs that are undergoing this increase in poverty population already.  To do so would contribute to the social and economic tipping of these neighborhoods from desirable to undesirable neighborhoods through an over concentration of poverty.

Second, the real target locations for new subsidized housing should be the new “high opportunity” outer-ring suburbs.  Jargowsky notes that “spatial access to opportunity is the great emerging social challenge of the 21st Century.”

Third, the Texas Legislature needs to craft some sort of regional affordable housing fair share plan so that affordable housing is fairly distributed across all communities.  I discussed this in a blog entry last month.

Ghetto: a portion of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.

- Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Data drawn from Paul A. Jargowsky paper for The Brookings Institution

Ghetto. The word makes me wince. It should be anachronistic. Yet, as much as we don’t like to hear the word, it describes the reality of the living conditions for almost one million low income families in Texas today.

The “ghettoization” of low income, minority families plays a role in many tragedies such as the shooting of three children at a South Dallas subsidized housing development last week.

Paul Jargowsky, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas in his book, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997) defines poverty concentration as a census tract occupied by 40 percent or more poor residents.  Poverty is defined as a family of three earning $17,600 per year or less.  There is no dispute that where forty percent or more of a neighborhood’s residents live in poverty, there is indeed a severely economically distressed community.

Jargowsky found that 39 percent of the residents of such tracts were Black and 29 percent were Hispanic. In a follow-up study using data from the 2000 Census Jargowsky concluded that there had been major progress among both African-Americans in dispersing from ghettos during the 1990-2000 decade.

If we use Professor Jargowsky’s definition of census tracts having 40 percent or more of their population below poverty as a proxy for the ghetto, Texas still has 218 census tracts that qualify as ghettos.  There are 934,772 Texans living in these areas — about one out of every 21 Texas residents. The table below describes these “ghetto” census tracts by MSAs and for the balance of the state.

Jargowsky notes the body of empirical evidence suggests that living in poor neighborhoods has deleterious effects on the people who live there, particularly the children. This produces an increasing economic balkanization of our society in which lower-income persons are spatially isolated and unable to access the resources and opportunities they need to become fully integrated with the larger society.

Which brings me to the following comment that someone posted on this blog regarding my observation that the City of Houston has unfairly ghettoized Katrina evacuees and should take steps to break up this concentration…

This article is moronic. You start putting these thugs into solid neighborhoods, and guess what happens. They bring their thug friends with them, and bingo, there goes the neighborhood. This man is [sic] needs his head examined.

I share this comment because it illustrates that the problem of the ghetto is manifested not only on the ghetto’s residents but on outsiders as well.

George C. Galster of Wayne State University, one of the nation’s leading experts on residential segregation, argues that “the negative behavioral responses to ghettoization of some low-income individuals represent a predictable reaction to the constrained set of markets, institutions, social and administrative systems, and networks that potentially offer resources that affect socioeconomic advancement.” He calls this the metropolitan opportunity structure (MOS). In the end, features of the neighborhood environment are highly correlated with the residents’ decisions made about schooling, substance abuse, fertility, crime, and labor force participation.

This leads me back to the reaction of the commenter to my blog posting. As ghetto residents engage in negative behaviors triggered their perceptions of their opportunity structure, they reinforce the racial prejudices of some whites. Media portrayal of the most sensational of these actions fuels whites’ generalized prejudices of minority inferiority.

Galster argues that white attitudes about ghetto residents spill over to their attitudes of African=Americans in general. The impact of this is huge.

If my claim were correct that ghetto-based behaviors are used to legitimize racial stereotypes of Blacks in general, the ghetto represents a central producer of motivations for at least two types of discrimination. The first is a form of differential treatment known as statistical discrimination. Essentially, it is differential treatment based on the discriminator’s belief that race is highly correlated with one or more valued attributes. So, a landlord may refuse to rent to any Blacks because he thinks that there is a higher probability that a Black tenant may use the apartment to sell drugs. Or, a real estate agent may steer a White homeseeker away from a mixed neighborhood because of a belief that, on average, Whites are unwilling to take a chance of living amid many Blacks. The statistical discriminator does not disfavor minorities because of animus, but rather because experience, media reports, or other evidence “proves” that, on average, minorities are less likely to possess certain desirable traits. Of course, the ghetto goes a long way toward providing the requisite proof to make such statistical discrimination seem perfectly rational and even justifiable in a business or even moral sense.

The second type of discrimination involves policies and practices that cause or perpetuate various forms of adverse racial impacts. Here I am thinking primarily of the creation of suburban municipalities that subsequently adopt exclusionary land use policies and housing codes designed to limit the housing opportunities of all who are of lower socioeconomic standing than those already in the municipality. The concomitant creation of a distinct taxing district and public school district means that the intrametropolitan inequality in public sector opportunity structures will be intensified (The Institute on Race and Poverty, 1998). Restrictions on the in-migration of lower-income households to the suburbs become even more problematic given the continuing patterns of employment decentralization. These issues are well known. My point in reviewing them is to note that the behaviors produced by the ghetto spawn a prime impetus and ban jurisdictional fragmentation and exclusionary practices.

The persistence of the ghetto and its occasional pathologies not only presents a problem for the almost one million Texans who live there, but for us all.

Dallas civil rights attorneys Lara Beshara and Mike Daniel have sued over alleged segregation in the Dallas low income housing tax credit program.

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit program in Dallas has been effectively shut down for several years and is now the subject of an important civil rights lawsuit.

For those who have not followed the travails of the affordable housing program in Dallas let’s review where things stand today.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in the past several years in Texas knows about the federal indictments of Dallas politicians and real estate developers in alleged bribery and kickback schemes involving the low income housing tax credit program.  Unless you happen to be paying especially close attention you might not be aware of the other fallout from the federal investigation — the virtual curtailment of the construction of low-income rental housing in the city of Dallas.

As indicted city politicians ran for cover they shut down the housing program for reasons that seem especially short sighted.

Texas state law, in the name of local control and preventing over-concentration of low income properties, requires developers proposing to build apartments in cities with more than twice the state average of housing tax credit or bond apartments per capita to obtain a resolution from the city council approving the development (Tex. Gov’t Code §2306.6703(4)).  The City of Dallas qualifies under this provision, since it has more than twice the per capita average of affordable housing supported by tax credits and private activity bonds.

Effective three years ago the Dallas City Council informed the development community through a memo issued by then-Mayor Laura Miller, that the City Council would not be approving any LIHTC developments.  During this moratorium, only one development received the required certificate.  This was a long planned mixed market rate and homeless development located in the central business district of the City of Dallas.  So the city of Dallas has effectively shut down the production of low income rental housing in Dallas.

The logic of the housing moratorium is unclear.  It seems mostly a knee-jerk reaction.  Punishing low-income Dallas residents by denying them access to decent, affordable housing because of the alleged corruption of a few city officials seems short sighted public policy.

In March of this year a new twist was added.

Dallas civil rights attorneys Mike Daniel and Laura Beshara filed suit in Federal District Court on behalf of the Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project (ICP) against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) alleging…

• TDHCA uses race and ethnicity as one factor in its decision whether to award Low Income Housing Tax credits and this factor is a cause of the segregation and other discrimination.
• The use of race as a factor subjects minority tenants to slum and blighted conditions.

.

The lawsuit cites the damning indictment of the LIHTC program in the House Committee On Urban Affairs Texas House of Representatives, “Interim Report 2006 A Report to the House of Representatives 80th Texas Legislature”, December 6, 2006, Robert Talton, Chairman…

The Department’s funding allocations, as well as the allocations under the Bond Review Board’s (BRB) Bond Program should promote racial integration, however, the continued failure of these entities to evaluate the implications of prior and current funding decisions permits the Department and the BRB to disproportionately allocate federal low income housing tax credit funds and the tax-exempt bond funds to developments located in impacted areas (above average minority concentration and below average income levels).

Furthermore, QAP provisions requiring multiple notifications to state and local political officials and neighborhood organizations are feared to enable “Not-In-My-Backyard” (NIMBY) opposition to developments that are proposed in nonimpacted areas (above average minority concentration and below average income levels).

The vast majority of low income housing tax credits and tax-exempt bonds that fund developments in the Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and Houston metropolitan areas have been placed in impacted areas.

…

The Department’s funding decisions arise directly out of the QAP. In recent years, the QAP has continued to place low income individuals in impacted areas, further adding to the concentration problem in most cities today.

The lawsuit also cites HUD as proof of the segregation in the TDHCA tax credit program…

Texas has a segregated LIHTC housing program according to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report. Over 60% of LIHTC units in Texas are in U.S. Census tracts where more than 50% of the population is minority according to the report. Only Connecticut, California, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii are listed in the report with higher percentages of LIHTC units in census tracts with 50% or greater minority population than Texas. The state wide pattern is duplicated in the Dallas area. The report states that in the Dallas PMSA, 65% of the LIHTC units are in 50% or greater minority census tracts.

The Texas Attorney General, responding to the lawsuit on behalf of TDHCA claiming the selection of the location of LIHTC developments lies with the private developers and not the State of Texas. “The location choices are entirely selected by the developer prior to any application being made to TDHCA for tax credits, and may be based on how the developer believes the low income development will work best for their particular financial needs.”

Second, the AG blames the disproportionate location of LIHTC developments on IRS program rules that award private developers extra points for locating a tax credit development in a “Difficult Development Area” or Qualified Census Tract” which have a tendency to be low-income areas.

Likewise, the IRS, under 26 U.S.C. § 42(d)(4) and (5)(C), provides an adjusted basis to the amount of credits a developer can receive.  In the lexicon of the program, this is frequently referred to as a “boost” and provides a 130% factor in the eligible basis, and as such the credits allocated to the property, thereby providing significant incentive to locate in a Qualified Census Tract (QCT) or a Difficult to Develop Area (DDA) that attracts developers.  The list of QCTs and DDAs are published by the federal government prior to each competitive round and are available to and reviewed by developers.  Qualified Census Tracts are those tracts in which 50% or more of the households are income eligible for the tax credit program and the population of all census tracts that satisfy this criterion does not exceed 20% of the total population of the respective area.

Unless these provisions are removed from the federal statute, TDHCA has no legal ability to overcome the limitations of the program for the need to purchase inexpensive land for financial feasibility or the attraction of developers to the additional 30% boost to the property for developing in QCTs and DDAs that are overwhelmingly located in low income and minority areas.

The AG does not explain how these explanations can be reconciled with the HUD report finding that Texas LIHTC developments are more often in segregated neighborhoods than 44 other states.

Rental housing affordability is a major problem.  In the Dallas metro area 45 percent of renters cannot afford the HUD Fair Market Rent for a two bedroom apartment.

Needless to say, this is a sorry state of affairs as far as the low-income citizens of Dallas are concerned.  No housing is being produced because of political considerations on the part of the dallas Mayor’s Office and serious allegations are made regarding the segregation of low-income housing in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Houston crime map shows crime is high in downtown and Southwest areas.

Today’s dangerous housing problems in the Southwestern part of Houston have been greatly exacerbated by the actions of Houston city government in the settlement of large numbers of Katrina evacuees in the area. But the problem does not lie solely in past actions.  The City of Houston, in violation of provisions of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, continues to act to concentrate the predominately low-income, African-American evacuees in these deteriorated, high crime, segregated apartments.  So far neither the state or the federal government has acted to stop the city’s actions.

Let’s look back to 2005 to see how this developed.  Faced with a huge influx of Katrina evacuees the City of Houston assumed principal responsibility for finding apartments to accept the evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.  When the city sought vacant apartments a large number were found in southwest Houston in an area containing very high densities of Class C (older, poor condition) apartments originally constructed during the 1970’s and 1980’s in the wake of the Oil Boom.  These apartments already had substantial physical problems and were largely segregated with low-income families made up of ethnic and racial minorities.

According to the Houston Chronicle…

Driven by housing patterns, economics and sometimes the desperate desire to find a safe new home, roughly one-fourth of the 83,300 Hurricane Katrina evacuees occupying government-financed apartments have gravitated to high-crime neighborhoods on the city’s southwest side.

The city and Mayor White have received praise for their prompt handling of the huge task of rehousing the evacuees.  This praise is deserved.

But it should have been clear from the beginning that the concentration of a poor and minority population in this already deteriorating area of high density apartments would produce problems if the evacuees stayed put for any length of time.  There is virtual unanimous agreement in affordable housing policy today that for low-income multifamily housing to succeed two things are needed: the resident population should be economically and racially diverse within the development and the housing itself should not be located in high crime, high unemployment, low performing school areas.  The relocation of the Katrina evacuees to the Southwest area of the city violated these principles for low-income housing success.

Problems quickly developed.  Crime in the area soared.  The already substandard quality of the area’s apartments further deteriorated.

Faced with this problem the clear solution should have been to work with the federal government to secure funds to reduce the densities of evacuees in the area.  This large new population of extremely low income families financially propped up many marginal slumlords in the area by guaranteeing a renter market for any type of cheap apartments, no matter how unsafe and crime ridden.

The reports of problems in the segregated neighborhoods of Katrina evacuees produced public discontent in Houston.  Evacuees were blamed for all these problems and political leaders sought to respond.  City leaders, having created a segregated ghetto found it suddenly in their interests to maintain it as a way to contain public fears of Katrina evacuees.

The once hopeful promises of integrating the evacuees into the city economically and socially were replaced by an official city policy of containment and continued concentration.  To justify this city policy makers engaged in some appallingly fallacious historical revisionism to describe how the Katrina evacuees came to be concentrated in the Southwest.

This revisionism soars in the proposal the City of Houston and Harris County submitted to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to spend $60 in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds earmarked by the state and federal governments to help provide permanent housing for the Katrina evacuees. The city wrote in the plan…

Houston and Harris County take some pride in our efforts to encourage evacuees back into the mainstream of our nation’s life, rather than segregating these citizens in particular apartment complexes or makeshift trailer camps.  So, the most cost-effective use of CDBG funds is to address the incremental need for affordable rental units and housing safety services caused by a rise in population in the areas where a high concentration of the evacuees have chosen to live.

- page 2

The circular reasoning employed by the city is almost comical if not for the serious consequences..

Furthermore the idea that evacuees “have chosen to live” in Southwest Houston is pure fiction.  They were relocated from shelters to apartments identified by the city government as available and suitable for them.  Most had no knowledge of the city to call upon to base an independent apartment search.  The evacuees have been presented no alternatives for housing over the ensuing three years.

And now the city proposes use more federal funds to keep the Katrina evacuees bottled up in the Southwest.  Under the proposed plan no assistance will be provided for those who would like to get away from the deterioration and crime.  This city’s proposal to HUD and TDHCA make this clear…

All of the City of Houston spending will be allocated to affordable rental housing programs in areas where it can be demonstrated that the population has seen a dramatic population increase due to an influx of Katrina evacuees.

- page 3

The city and Harris County have proposed dividing the federal funds for Katrina evacuees into three equal $20 million pots: apartment rehabilitation, more police in the Southwest ghetto and reimbursement for jails, MHMR and substance abuse programs to serve the Katrina evacuees arrested through the enhance policing of Southwest.

The apartment repair program is described in the city’s plan as follows…

THE STRATEGY BEHIND HOUSTON’S REQUESTS

Housing
Houston’s use of $20 million in the CDBG funds for housing will be undertaken in the most cost-effective and market-driven manner.  These funds will be plugged into an existing Apartment-to-Standard Program in an area where a large number of evacuees have chosen to live.  The rehabilitation of existing multi-family housing stock at approximately $20,000 per unit can be implemented much more quickly and cost-effectively than the construction of new apartments.  By increasing the supply of affordable housing units in an area, we increase the availability of good quality housing at a reasonable price point available to evacuees.

The best way to target housing assistance for an evacuee population will be to concentrate this assistance in the geographical submarket within Houston where the highest concentration of evacuees have chosen to reside and get on with their lives.  (See Attachment A.)  Specifically, Houston will target the funds in and around the Fondren/Southwest area, the geographical area south of IH 59 outside Loop 610, in the southwest part of the City.  In that area, public school enrollment increased by 2,840 students between September 2005 and January 2006.
- page 5

The enhanced policing is also targeted toward the Southwest…

Housing Safety
The $20 million intended for housing safety efforts in and around multi-family complexes is based on similar principles.  Violent crime rose dramatically in multi-family complexes located within four Police Districts that contain the high percentages of evacuees. Murder rose 62%, rape rose 20 %, robbery rose 3%, and aggravated assault rose 20% in multi-family complexes in these districts. These figures do not include crime that spilled over into the neighborhoods near these hot zones. (Attachment B).

…

Crime analysis by the Houston Police Department has shown that residents of lower-income, multi-family apartment complexes are disproportionately the victims of violent crime.  This CDBG program will provide an officer liaison for fifty apartment complexes located primarily in Police Districts in the Fondren/ Southwest, west, and Greenspoint areas where a concentration of evacuees reside and a disproportionately high rate of violent crime has developed.  The program is intended to decrease the number of crime incidents in and around multi-family apartment complexes in these districts.  Overtime police programs previously funded by Justice and FEMA have allowed deployment of more officers into these hot spots, making numerous arrests, and heading off what would have been an even more shocking rise in the violent crime rate.  Houston continues to shelter more than 100,000 persons displaced by Hurricane Katrina.  Safe housing remains a need for these evacuees.

- pages 5-6

So to summarize the city’s vision for the long term housing of Katrina evacuees, there will be funds to make modest repairs to 1,000 of the tens of thousand run down apartments in the area, there will be police liaisons assigned to fifty apartment complexes and finally the City of Houston and Harris County propose to reimburse themselves for the incarceration of the Katrina evacuees swept up in the violent crime the city knows has resulted from the long term segregation of the evacuees.  Once again I quote the city’s plan…

Coordinated Housing Safety Program-Multi-Family Community Liaison Program

Funding in the amount of $6,707,000 will be used to provide expanded public services through the Coordinated Housing Safety Program with the City of Houston. Harris County’s participation in the Coordinated Housing Safety Program, more fully described under the City of Houston’s Multi-Family Community Liaison Program, will be limited to expanded services to evacuees arrested as a result of the increased security and public safety efforts in the identified target apartment complexes. The County will provide expanded services to such evacuees by contracting for additional bed space for treatment of substance abuse and mental health issues to reduce the recidivism rate of evacuees who are arrested and incarcerated. The County will add 144 beds specifically for substance abuse and mental health treatment of inmates who are evacuees. Additionally, the County will hire by contract six (6) reintegration counselors to re-establish eligibility in Social Security Income (SSI) programs, Medicaid, Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority (MHMRA) programs, housing and other similar programs to ensure continuity of services upon release from jail.  Based on 2006 statistics, the Harris County correctional facilities processed an estimated 3,600 evacuees through its system. It is anticipated that approximately 20,000 evacuees will be incarcerated in the County jail as a result of the proposed Multi-Family Community Liaison Program.

- page 11

Mayor White and the City of Houston did amazing things for Katrina evacuees in the days following the hurricane.  But today they are failing the evacuees.  In the course of this deliberate policy of segregation they have compounded the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and have consigned an entire section of the city to rapid deterioration, decay and crime.

The city and county’s proposed plan is more than outrageously bad public policy.  It is a clear violation of the Fair Housing Act. The state and federal government have an obligation to put a stop to it and order the city to come up with a plan to allow the evacuees to exercise the housing choice they are legally entitled to but have for so long been denied.

The Dallas Morning News ran a story by Kim Horner on June 23 about 500 Section 8 vouchers that have gone unused.  Since the Dallas Housing Authority (DHA) has more than 8,000 families on the waiting list and closed the waiting list for new applications four years ago I wondered what on earth was going on.

Like most housing stories the facts behind this story are complex.

Kim Horner reports that the 500 Section 8 vouchers are what is left over from a pool of 3,205 that were set aside as part of the landmark Dallas Housing Authority desegregation lawsuit.  I don’t have room to go into the details of the lawsuit here. The short version is that when the federal court ordered DHA to tear down a bunch of public housing in West Dallas the housing authority was ordered to replace the housing with new public housing in North Dallas neighborhoods that were higher income, virtually all white communities.  Then DHA Director Alfonso Jackson (later HUD Secretary under President Bush) hit a brick wall of neighborhood opposition to the building public housing in North Dallas from white homeowners associations.  Only one modest project got built after years of lawsuits between homeowners and DHA.  Section 8 vouchers were a way to let tenants find housing in private apartments in these North Dallas neighborhoods.

So the first thing to be clear about is that these vouchers are part of a court ordered remedy to the discrimination that was suffered by African-American households from the decades of substandard housing and segregation endured at the hands of the DHA.  They are not just a general pool of unused vouchers.

But the DMN story reported…

So why does it also have 500 special rent vouchers going unused?

DHA boss Ann Lott says some on the list have tried to use the vouchers – which are reserved for blacks willing to move to predominantly white areas – but couldn’t find landlords to accept them. Some families have bad credit or poor rental histories.

Others on the list have declined the vouchers, telling DHA they don’t want to move far from relatives and churches. And families without cars struggle with the lack of public transportation in some suburbs.

So we have two explanations for why the vouchers are sitting around unused:

1. the tenants can’t find landlords to accept them; and
2. some on the waiting list don’t want to move to North Dallas.

The first excuse is valid to a degree.  This is problem known in the affordable housing world as the “turn back ratio”.  Because in Texas landlords may legally discriminate against a tenant simply because they have a Section 8 voucher many do so.  Especially if they really want a legal way of keeping minority families and families with young children out of their apartments.  If you want to see how this plays out on a map check out the Austin Housing Segregation report posted on this blog on June 30.  Texas needs a law outlawing discrimination against Section 8 voucher holders.

I say this excuse is valid to a degree because DHA should have been hustling to help tenants find landlords willing to rent to them in desegregated neighborhoods and not leaving the voucher holders to strike out on their own.

The second excuse, that some folks on the waiting list don’t want to live in North Dallas, is completely disingenuous. Of course there are folks who don’t want to live in North Dallas.  But there are 8,000 families on the waiting list.  You cannot tell me it would be very hard to find 500 out of the 8.000 who would take advantage of this opportunity if the DHA put some effort into notifying folks and into developing and publicizing to the tenants a list of properties that would lease to them.  Nicer, newer apartments, safer communities, better schools, more public amenities along with a permanent rent fixed at no more than 33 percent of your income — of course there are 500 low-income, African-American Dallas families who would jump at the opportunity.

The real problem here is that DHA has been sitting on the vouchers for too long without advertising or recruiting eligible families to use them.  DHA has had these specific vouchers for almost two years and has just recently started going down the existing Section 8 waiting list to find African American families who want to move to desegregated neighborhoods. That’s the problem.

On June 26 Horner wrote a follow-up story reporting…

The Dallas Housing Authority board of commissioners plans to create a separate new waiting list for special rental assistance vouchers that can only be used by low-income black residents who move to predominately white neighborhoods. 

Now the DHA is waiting for HUD approval before proceeding.  Why this was not done two years ago is not explained.

It sounds a little like DHA would like to just wait out the clock, offer some excuses and pressure HUD to convert the vouchers for general use outside of the class of folks who should be getting help with desegregated housing opportunities under the Walker case.  That would be a grave injustice.

Watch the slide show of racial and economic housing segregation and the current housing policy decisions of the City of Austin.

My first job out of college was to direct a study of residential housing segregation in Austin for the City of Austin Human Relations Commission.  We documented a web of public policies that officially sought to concentrate racial and ethnic minorities and remove small minority communities from the path of higher income, white residential growth.

This official segregation policy was formalized in the Austin master plan of 1929 which made this policy explicit.

It would be reasonable to assume that these governmental practices have long since been abandoned in the wake of the passage of civil rights legislation and the Fair Housing Act in 1968.  Receipt of federal block grants are contingent upon cities, including Austin, certifying that the city will “affirmatively further fair housing”.  The city must submit a plan to the federal government accounting for the steps it will take to do so.

So we sat out to determine how the City of Austin’s policies today affirmatively further fair housing.  To do this Dr, Elizabeth Muller of the University of Texas at Austin and her graduate assistant Kate Bushman produced a series of maps to document…

• Where racial and ethnic groups live in Austin
• Where low-income people live in Austin
• Where different types of affordable housing is located 

.

The results are presented in the attached slide show.  Racial and economic integration is not happening across Austin.  The long time segregated housing patterns persist to this day.  Most alarming, the current housing policies of the City are not only not affirmatively furthering fair housing but are actively reinforcing historical patterns of racial and econiomic segregation.

Tomorrow, in the second part of this posting I will offer an analysis of the causes and effects of this alarming pattern and suggest what Austin must do to overcome it.

The Texas Legislature last session made inclusionary zoning unlawful except in very limited circumstances. Inclusionary zoning is an essential tool for cities that are trying to address the problems of segregation based on race and income. The Senate Intergovernmental Relations Committee held a recent hearing in Dallas in which all of the witnessess called for the state to repeal the Inclusionary Zoning ban. It is important that Texas Housers weigh in and let their voices be heard in this debate.

Texas is one of only 2 states that have outlawed inclusionary zoning.