Tag Archives: integration

Socioeconomic segregation: On the rise?

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Across the country, residential segregation by race has declined slightly over the last 40 years, since the Fair Housing Act was passed, but it’s still pronounced in major metropolitan areas. Residential segregation by income, however, has been on the rise since 1970.

So say three sociologists in a journal article published this month, “Neighborhood Income composition by Household Race and Income, 1990-2009.” This one of several scholarly articles in recent years documenting the increase in socioeconomic segregation nationally.

Studies like this typically focus on urban areas, so one might wonder how much their findings apply to a demographic outlier like Vermont. Still, it’s worth considering whether some conclusions resonate here. Here’s one:

“(M)iddle-class households are typically located in neighborhoods that are more similar to those of low-income households than to those of high-income households. That is, high-income households re more segregated from middle-class and poor households than low-income households re from the middle class and the rich.”

This is consistent with an earlier study of residential segregation by income that found that “During the last four decades, the isolation of the rich has been consistently greater than the isolation of the poor.”

Why might that matter? “The increasing geographic isolation of affluent families means that a significant proportion of society’s resources are concentrated in a smaller and smaller proportion of neighborhoods.”

How Vermont’s neighborhood and regional compositions by income are changing is a dissertation topic waiting to be explored. The 2012 “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” offers a mere snapshot from the 2010 Census. Of the state’s 184 census tracts, there were 23 where at least 51 percent of the residents met the criterion for low-to-moderate income status (less than 80 percent median income). Here they are again:

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Is the number of LMI districts on the rise in Vermont or not? Perhaps the upcoming state assessment, to be undertaken under HUD’s new affirmatively furthering fair housing rule, will offer some clues.

 

 

Fair housing backlash?

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An interesting op-ed in the Times today suggests that two recent boons for fair housing – the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the disparate impact doctrine and HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing rule – might generate a backlash from an unlikely quarter: white liberals. White liberals tend to be supportive of fair housing initiatives, the argument goes, but not necessarily when then that means stepping up racial integration of their own neighborhoods.

The example cited in the op-ed is New York’s Westchester County, where a Republican executive has been fighting a desegregation order for years, apparently with support from white Democrats in a preponderantly Democratic district. A summary of the Westchester fair housing case, as described by the organization that brought the suit that led to the order, can be found here.

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The recent push for racial integration in Westchester is sometimes portrayed as an example vigorous fair housing enforcement – or “affirmatively furthering” of fair housing – that has been mostly lacking around the country over the past four decades.

In Vermont, where racial minorities are less than 5 percent of the population, affirmatively furthering fair housing might have a somewhat different thrust – toward socioeconomic integration. The goal would be to ensure that lower-income people generally have housing choices in low-poverty, high opportunity areas. Granted, low income is not a protected class, per se, under the federal Fair Housing Act. But disability is protected class, and people with disability are more likely to be of lower income; and under the state fair housing law, receipt of public assistance is a protected class, too.

Well then, how are liberal Vermonters likely to respond to socioeconomic integration? Drawing on the Westchester analogy, might some people who profess support for diversity and tolerance object to proposals for affordable housing in or near their own neighborhoods? We’ll see.

 

New push for integration

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When the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its AFFH rule yesterday, it was the second cause for celebration among fair housing advocates in the last two weeks.

The first was the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the disparate impact doctrine — a key civil rights enforcement mechanism, under which housing policies can be found discriminatory on the basis of their effects, not merely their intent.

The second was the long-awaited AFFH rule. AFFH stands for “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” language contained in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 but not fully elucidated until yesterday.

Essentially, as HUD summarizes it, the rule is a means of overcoming segregation and fostering inclusive communities. This is entirely in keeping with the intent of the Fair Housing Act’s original sponsors – chief among them Sens. Walter Mondale and Ed Brook, who can be seen flanking LBJ as the president signs the legislation into law on April 11, 1968.

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The main point of the Act according to Mondale, “was to replace the segregated living patterns with ‘truly integrated and balanced living patterns.’” To Brooke, the act was meant to break the “dreary cycle of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs and the rapid deterioration of the central city.” (They said as much in their amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the disparate impact case.)

Their vision hasn’t exactly played out over the last half-century, as most major metropolitan areas remain highly segregated. Consider Boston, for example, which has a white/black dissimilarity index of 68. On a scale of 0 to 100, 0 represents total integration and 100, total segregation. Any place that registers over 60 is considered highly segregated. (The State of Vermont, by contrast, came in at 38.8, according to a 2012 report.)

In this map of the Boston area, based on 2010 Census data by Eric Fischer, red dots represent white people; blue dots, black people; orange, Hispanics; and green, Asians.

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Similar maps, some even starker in the depiction of racial separation, can be seen for most major U.S. cities. The AFFH rule, which makes operational the Fair Housing Act’s intent, is seen as a tool that will help overcome these longstanding segregated patterns.

Even though Vermont is 95 percent white, AFFH will have broad application here. After all, a major thrust is to break up pockets of poverty and promote inclusive settlement patterns that give people in protected classes – among them, racial minorities and disabled people – the choice to live in low-poverty areas with access to transit and good services. Vermont has plenty of room for more housing development in keeping with AFFH standards.