HUDs New Secretary Does Not Understand Residential Segregation

In a 2015 commentary Ben Carson wrote that a HUD regulation requiring localities to show that their federally funded developments affirmatively further fair housing was based on failed socialist experiments. Carson, who will serve as HUDs Secretary, compared the housing regulation to programs that used busing to promote school integration. Busing, he claimed, was a failure noting that the percentage of blacks attending majority black schools from 1972 to 1980 moved from 63.6 percent to 63.3 percent.

Bussing is not an apt comparison. Housing discrimination is the principal impediment to school desegregation. Under a scale researchers use to measure residential segregation, all of the fifty largest metropolitan areas in America remain extremely segregated. Student populations in schools reflect the racial composition of the segregated neighborhoods in which they are located. HUDs new rule encourages municipalities to ameliorate the segregation that persists.

Neighborhood segregation is not an accident. For most of the 20th century, policymakers at the federal, state and local levels pursued community development strategies that had a detrimental effect on African American families. During the first quarter of the 20th-century, thousands of European immigrants arrived to the United States. Ethnic enclaves; Little Italys, Greek towns, Irish communities and the like were established in cities.

There were separate black neighborhoods but, unlike European immigrants, African Americans were confined to designated areas initially by municipal ordinances and later by private, racially restrictive covenants after the ordinances were declared unconstitutional in 1917. The private covenants prohibited property owners and subsequent purchasers from selling the properties to African American purchasers.

The ethnic villages that were a ubiquitous feature of urban landscape changed dramatically after World War II. The suburbs as we know them were developed in the 1940s and 50. These communities could not have been established without Veterans Administration and FHA-insured mortgages which introduced the 30-year mortgage. The federal government required lenders to insert racially restrictive covenants in all federally insured mortgages. This effectively barred blacks from suburban communities.

In the 1930s, the federal government established a color coded system of rating neighborhoods by desirability. A red line was drawn around Black neighborhoods and lenders did not make mortgage loans in these areas.

In the 1950s and 60s, the federal government subsidized the construction of the interstate highway system. The highways were frequently routed through black neighborhoods, many of which were physically destroyed in the process. Local officials also used highways to separate black and white neighborhoods, reinforcing residential segregation.

Acting under the authority granted by the Housing Act of 1949, the federal government subsidized slum clearance and urban renewal programs. In the years that followed, many black neighborhoods were declared blighted. Neighborhoods were seized by local governments exercising eminent domain powers and demolished. The housing was replaced by federally subsidized, multifamily housing projects.

The high density design used in many public housing developments was inspired by Le Corbusiers Radiant City model which featured high-rise towers perched on pylons, situated far apart in a park-like landscape. This approach failed because it isolated poor communities in monolithic high-rises that severed the social ties integral to a communitys development.

Public housing was deliberately located in all-black neighborhoods by local housing authorities. From 1965 to 1968, hundreds of Northern and Midwestern cities erupted in race riots during the summers. This resulted in increased disinvestment in central cities. White flight was also hastened by school desegregation efforts which commenced in the north. Exclusionary zoning kept affordable housing out of the suburbs.

Discriminatory housing practices persist today. A recent study using matched pair testers showed that discriminatory actions limit the housing choices available to minorities. The studys data showed that over all, black prospective renters were presented 11 percent fewer rentals than whites, Hispanics about 12 percent fewer rentals and Asians about 10 percent fewer rentals. As prospective buyers, blacks were presented 17 percent fewer homes and Asians 15 percent fewer homes. White testers were more frequently offered lower rents, told that deposits and other move-in costs were negotiable, or were quoted a lower price.

The unevenness, lack of exposure to other groups, clustering, centralization and concentration of large numbers of Black and Latino families in high-poverty, racially isolated neighborhoods has a devastating effect. As the leader of the agency responsible for enforcing the Fair Housing Act, Dr. Carson will need to appreciate the disasterous effects of this lingering vestige of the Jim Crow system.