Beyond Education Triage

Social policies seeking to ameliorate racial and economic segregation stem in part from the adverse disparities associated with the alternatives—limited income mobility, intractable concentrated poverty, negative health outcomes, constrained access to quality housing, and poor social services—which generate a cycle of economic inequalities and more segregation. Many social scientists have argued that high-quality educational opportunities for students experiencing segregation are linked to better life-course outcomes. Education could thus be viewed as a potential intervention to address segregation. This chapter argues that the predominant approach to educational reform is analogous to triage in medicine. The effects of triage policy have been anemic. Its failure is reinforcing segregation. Instead, we need to develop a different approach to education and youth development, an approach that takes an intergenerational perspective on education achievement, attainment, and youth development in our nation’s most segregated communities. Examples are provided.

Financing Affordability

Reinvestment in declining or poor areas is necessary to attract new middle-class residents, reduce concentrated poverty, and improve housing conditions for the poor. Private-sector housing and commercial real estate developers consistently argue that, without assistance from the public sector, projects are not economically feasible. However, fiscal and political constraints make local governments hesitant to provide direct subsidies to developers. Tax increment financing (TIF) is often offered as a politically attractive solution to this complicated development scenario. The expedited nature of TIF allows communities to fund projects and generate development investment through a highly decentralized process, potentially avoiding public involvement. This fiscalization of the development process raises key questions. Are the communities most in need of redevelopment benefiting from TIF, or do they compete for development? How does TIF’s “creative” financing strategy influence political fragmentation? This chapter illustrates these challenges and explores ways the tool can be used to promote inclusionary development practices and support creative affordable-housing strategies.

Market-Savvy Housing and Community Development Policy

This chapter addresses how housing policies to combat segregation often fail to consider housing market strength, which varies significantly within and between metropolitan areas. In weak housing markets, policymakers should not focus on increasing the housing supply but on building market demand. This is very difficult in the weakest markets, and it often makes more sense to encourage residents to move to better neighborhoods. Housing development funds should be concentrated on “middle neighborhoods”—areas where the market is still healthy but there is a threat of decline. Middle market strategies to improve market confidence can be highly effective. By contrast, it makes no sense to invest scarce development funds in strong market neighborhoods. Instead, cities should help low-income households to stay or move into these high-opportunity areas. The chapter concludes by arguing that policymakers who embrace the build-on-strength approach advocated here need to take into account how racist practices have unfairly trapped minorities in weak market areas.

Promoting Poverty Deconcentration and Racial Desegregation through Mixed-Income Development

This chapter examines the achievements and limitations of mixed-income development as a desegregation strategy. Mixed-income development has proven to be an effective way to harness private-sector interest in urban revitalization in order to generate the production of high-quality affordable housing. Beyond the goals of physical redevelopment and residential integration, there is evidence that mixed-income approaches promote stable, safe communities. After 20 years of the HOPE VI initiative, the federal government sought to enhance the mixed-income approach by launching Choice Neighborhoods in 2010. Significant questions remain about how to increase the benefits to low-income households through this approach and how to avoid reinforcing stigma and marginalization within the new developments. After briefly reviewing the history of mixed-income housing and the theoretical propositions underlying it, this chapter reviews the evidence of its benefits and shortcomings as a desegregation approach and proposes an array of strategies for strengthening the approach.

The Community Reinvestment Act as a Catalyst for Integration and an Antidote to Concentrated Poverty

Policymakers tend to focus on federal programs as remedies to poverty. While important, the largest of these programs do not combat poverty’s geographic aspects. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) imposes an affirmative obligation on banks to meet the credit needs of low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods. The act is designed to promote affordable housing and economic development by combating lending discrimination, thereby alleviating poverty and building wealth in LMI areas. Federal CRA exams rate banks on their loans and investments in LMI neighborhoods. By promoting responsible lending, the CRA has increased homeownership and small-business ownership in those neighborhoods. However, the act’s full potential to combat concentrations of poverty has not been realized. This chapter explores how improved examination procedures can make the CRA more effective in promoting integration in gentrifying and distressed neighborhoods and how the CRA can be combined with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s recent fair housing rule and other anti-poverty programs to combat concentrations of poverty.

De Facto Segregation

The United States’ ability to desegregate metropolitan areas is hobbled by historical ignorance. Believing that segregation is de facto, resulting mostly from private prejudice and income differences, policymakers have failed to consider aggressive initiatives that are constitutionally required to remedy state-sponsored de jure segregation. First with the Public Works Administration, later with war housing built for defense-plant workers during World War II, and still later with the explicit acceptance of racial segregation by the 1949 Housing Act, the federal government created separate neighborhoods for blacks and for whites, often in cities that had not previously known such extreme racial segregation. Subsequently, whites left public housing when the Federal Housing Administration financed suburban development with requirements that builders exclude African Americans. Many other federal, state, and local government policies purposefully contributed to segregation but have never been remedied because policymakers are unfamiliar with this history and the obligations it has generated.

Segregation

The introductory chapter to the book situates current housing segregation within a historical context. The chapter begins with a comparison of the current moment in housing to the circumstances preceding the signing of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The chapter then presents a snapshot of demographic continuity and change since the 1960s, including a description of patterns of segregation along lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. An argument is presented for why all residents of the United States should care about housing segregation: segregation fundamentally impedes shared economic prosperity, frays the fabric of US democracy, and calls into question the self-defining notion of equality of opportunity. The chapter closes with a preview of subsequent chapters in this volume, which provide frameworks for understanding the problem of segregation as well as proposed policy solutions.

Concluding Thoughts on an Agenda for Solving Segregation

Economic and racial segregation are major challenges to the United States. Without concerted government action to reduce segregation, however, little progress is likely. The chapters in this volume recommend three major strategies for government action. First is promoting integration in high-opportunity neighborhoods by supporting the movement of poor minorities into affluent, usually majority-white areas. Second is redeveloping areas of concentrated poverty as mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhoods. Third is encouraging the maintenance and expansion of existing, economically diverse middle neighborhoods. All of these steps are challenging and require significant changes in federal or local public policy. This concluding chapter conveys the importance of tackling these challenges and the need to build a political movement for reducing segregation.

Enabling More Families with Housing Vouchers to Access Higher-Opportunity Neighborhoods

This chapter discusses the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, which helps more than two million low-income households—nearly half with minor children in the home—to pay for modestly priced, decent-quality homes in the private market. The program has reduced housing cost burdens, decreased homelessness, and increased housing stability, but vouchers currently do less than they could to help families live in low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods. Public housing agencies have flexibility to implement strategies to improve location outcomes in their HCV programs. But unless changes in federal policy encourage them to take such steps and to modify counterproductive policies—and reliable funding is available to maintain the number of families receiving HCV assistance and to administer the program effectively—there is little reason to expect better results. Federal, state, and local agencies can make four sets of interrelated policy changes that will help families in the HCV program to live in better locations.

The Enduring Significance of Segregation

Residential segregation remains a perennial problem in major metropolitan areas across the United States. Many researchers have focused on the effects of segregation on housing patterns, educational disparities, and the geographic concentration of poverty. This chapter explores how these and other results of residential segregation affect population health. Using as its backdrop the St. Louis, Missouri, metropolitan area—one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation—this chapter reviews the scientific literature on segregation and health outcomes. It also discusses potential strategies for addressing segregation in this local context and nationally. Much of the local discussion draws on For the Sake of All, a landmark study on the health and well-being of African Americans in St. Louis. An analysis of the cultural, psychological, political, and practical barriers to integration is also presented.