Tag Archives: New York Times

NJ’s lessons for VT

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The Times’ Sunday editorial was a ringing endorsement of affirmatively furthering fair housing as put into practice in Mount Laurel, N.J. Mount Laurel, of course, was the epicenter of a fair housing lawsuit that resulted in state supreme court rulings in 1975 and 1983 known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine.

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Essentially, the doctrine held that every town must make room for people of all incomes and can’t legitimately exclude low or moderate income people through restricting planning and zoning policies. The Fair Share Housing Center, a primary litigant in the case that led to the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel that’s lauded by the editorial, calls it “one of the most significant civil rights cases in the United States since Brown v. Board of Education (1954).”

That statement might sound self-serving, but it has some credence, given that other states all over the country – including Vermont – have at least paid lip service to this principle. (For a quick summary of the Doctrine and how it resonates in Vermont, check out our previous blog post on this.

One thing that was missing from the editorial was any invocation of the incisive language in the New Jersey justices’ rulings. Like this, from Mount Laurel I:

“By way of summary, what we have said comes down to this. As a developing municipality, Mount Laurel must, by its land use regulations, make realistically possible the opportunity for an appropriate variety and choice of housing for all categories of people who may desire to live there, of course including those of low and moderate income. It must permit multi-family housing, without bedroom or similar restrictions, as well as small dwellings on very small lots, low cost housing of other types and, in general, high density zoning, without artificial and unjustifiable minimum requirements as to lot size, building size and the like, to meet the full panoply of these needs. Certainly when a municipality zones for industry and commerce for local tax benefit purposes, it without question must zone to permit adequate housing within the means of the employees involved in such uses…” (emphasis added)

Those guidelines are as apt today as when that opinion was written, in 1975 – 40 years ago!

Another thing missing from the editorial was anything more than a passing reference to complexities and controversies that attended efforts to implement the doctrine in municipalities across the state. It’s a long and tangled story, and while it’s true as the Times intones that “some local officials are working diligently to turn back the clock…” and that “Gov. Chris Christie and his allies in some of the state’s wealthy towns would like nothing more than to kill this remedy…” there is an added complication in many communities, and this one has resonance in Vermont, too.

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Some of the challenges New Jersey’ Sussex County faces in providing more affordable housing, according to this New Jersey Herald account, may sound familiar here:

“ ….a shortfall of utilities — sewer, water, electric — to accommodate more housing and population; and a lack of practical public transportation in the area that limits the ability for low- and moderate-income people to get to decent-paying jobs.

“But the most glaring problem is that with the population declining and the economy volatile, the county is not an ideal place for developers to invest.”

 

Segregation back on the table

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Here are a couple of readings that expand on some of our previous posts on the inexorable AFFH theme:

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“Segregation 101” takes off from an August Times story on Section 8 (that is, racial) discrimination in metropolitan St. Louis. One obstacle to locating more Section 8 voucher holders in middle-class suburbs, the story notes, is a relative lack of rental apartments in such suburbs — in part because of zoning practices that favor single-family homes.

“Segregation Conversation Goes National” offers another rebuttal to the controversial Edsall op-ed and advocates a dual approach to the housing affordability crisis: investing in poor neighborhoods and, on one hand, and settling more poor people in “opportunity-rich” middle-class neighborhoods, on the other. (That seems to be the strategy that Justice Kennedy implicitly endorsed in his disparate impact decision, as we noted previously.)

There’s also a reference to a regional program in Chicago that helps disperse urban Section 8-holders to outlying suburbs. (For an account in The Atlantic, click here.) Elements of that might translate well to Vermont, where the Section 8 program outside of Burlington and several other cities, is already administered by a “regional” agency (Vermont State Housing Authority) that covers the rest of the state.

Meanwhile, the Times lands another editorial today another segregation motif — racial discrimination by real estate agents around the country.

 

Once more, with feeling

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It’s not every day that we can praise the New York Times editorial board for following in Thriving Communities’ wake. Saturday’s editorial, which borrows its headline, “The Architecture of Segregation,” from a study we posted about last month. The editorial, while noting this two summer’s “positive” developments – the Supreme Court’s disparate impact decision and HUD’s AFFH rule – rightly takes federal officials to task for failing, over many years, to enforce the Fair Housing Act. And the editorial invokes Walter Mondale’s comments at the HUD conference last week about how the act’s intent is “not fulfilled” by exclusionary land-use planning.

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While government deserves a good share of the blame for the present state of residential racial segregation, there are those in the community of fair housing advocates who contend that the real estate industry has been at fault, too. How else to account for the fact that upper-middle-income black families don’t have comparable access to the neighborhoods where their upper-middle-income white family peers live.

Indeed, one factor that may have contributed to segregated patterns is the choice of many whites to opt out of integrated communities, as Stacy Seicshnaydre pointed out in a law journal article last year, “The Fair Housing Choice Myth.” And one way to address that, Seicshnaydre argued, is to defund exclusion — as application of the AFFH rule promises to do, at least in theory.

Meanwhile, HUD conferees were reminded last week, redlining is still with us, and new cases are in the pipeline.

 

‘Heated’ conflict over affordable housing?

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A provocative op-ed in the Times last week by Thomas Edsall has ruffled a few feathers. He took on the question of whether public housing subsidies should be directed to impoverished neighborhoods or to upscale areas.

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Pushing the former is something called the “poverty housing industry,” which he called “a de facto alliance of multimillion-dollar nonprofit housing companies, city politicians, state and local housing authorities” and others. Pushing the latter are those who advocate integration of poor minorities in more well-to-do neighborhoods. The result, Edsall wrote, is a heated conflict “within the affordable-housing community.”

He argued that some large nonprofit development companies benefit by confining their low-income housing developments to low-income areas. Bolstering the critique of that stance by the integrationists are three things: academic research that shows benefits to low-income children whose families are resettled in low-poverty areas; the Supreme Court decision upholding disparate impact; and HUD’s AFFH rule, which among other things calls for breaking up patterns of historic residential segregation.

A critical response to Edsall’s piece was soon in coming. A blog post on the website of the giant law firm Nixon Peabody took him to task for various alleged distortions and oversimplifications. Among other things, Edsall was said to have overlooked the obstacles to developing affordable housing in affluent areas – the high cost of land, the resistance by residents, and so on.

It’s also worth noting that Edsall, in citing the Supreme Court decision, did not mention the caveat in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion that left the door open to continuing to invest in poor neighborhoods:

“It would be paradoxical to construe the Fair Housing Act to impose onerous costs on actors who encourage revitalizing dilapidated housing in our Nation’s cities merely because some other priority might seem preferable,” Kennedy wrote, adding:

“The FHA does not decree a particular vision of urban development; and it does not put housing authorities and private developers in a double bind of liability, subject to suit whether choose to rejuvenate a city core or to promote new low-income housing in suburban communities.”

What does all this have to do with Vermont? Edsall’s primary targets are big, national nonprofits working in impoverished sections of major U.S. cities. His critique doesn’t seem to apply much in this rural state, although socioeconomic integration does present a challenge here.

Comments, anyone?

Ferguson and beyond

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The Times had a story over the weekend on housing segregation in St. Louis region, including Ferguson. Focus was on African American holders of Section 8 vouchers who found themselves limited in where they could move. St. Louis County, it seems, does not have protection for them.

We note here that programs that have sent minority voucher holders to low-poverty areas, in suburban Chicago and Baltimore, for example, have brought benefits in education and employment. We also note that in Vermont, receipt of public assistance is a protected class, so refusing to rent to a Section 8 voucher holder is illegal.