Badger writes: "On Wednesday, the Obama administration will announce
long-awaited rules designed to repair the law's unfulfilled promise and
promote the kind of racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded
deeply segregated cities like Chicago and Baltimore."
Cabrini-Green public housing project, which has been mostly demolished and
redeveloped, is seen against the Chicago skyline in May 1996. (photo: Beth
A. Keiser/AP)
Obama Administration to Unveil Major New Rules Targeting Segregation Across
US
By Emily Badger, The Washington Post
09 July 15
Administration calls move "historic," while conservatives decry it as
"social engineering"
When the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, it barred the outright racial
discrimination that was then routine. It also required the government to go
one step further - to actively dismantle segregation and foster integration
in its place - a mandate that for decades has been largely forgotten,
neglected and unenforced.
Now, on Wednesday, the Obama administration will announce long-awaited rules
designed to repair the law's unfulfilled promise and promote the kind of
racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded deeply segregated
cities like Chicago and Baltimore. The new rules, a top demand of
civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to
scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report,
every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set
goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce
segregation.
"This is the most serious effort that HUD has ever undertaken to do that,"
says Julian Castro, the secretary of the department of Housing and Urban
Development, who will announce the new rules in Chicago on Wednesday. "I
believe that it's historic."
Officials insist that they want to work with and not punish communities
where segregation exists. But the new reports will make it harder to conceal
when communities consistently flout the law. And in the most flagrant cases,
HUD holds out the possibility of withholding a portion of the billions of
dollars of federal funding it hands out each year.
Geographical data showing the demographics in Chicago. (photo: U.S. Census
Bureau and Robert J. Sampson,
Harvard University/The Washington Post)
The prospect of the new rules, which will also cover housing patterns that
exclude other groups like the disabled, has already spurred intense debate.
Civil rights groups pushed for even tougher rules but say HUD's plans
represent an important advancement on what's been one of the most fraught
frontiers of racial progress.
"Housing discrimination is the unfinished business of civil rights," says
Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education
Fund. "It goes right to the heart of our divide from one another. It goes
right to the heart of whether you believe that African American people's
lives matter, that you respect them, that you believe they can be your
neighbors, that you want them to play with your children."
But conservatives have sounded alarm. Republicans in the House of
Representatives, worried by what they see as government intrusion into local
planning, have already tried to defund implementation of the rule.
Conservative commentators say it represents an experiment in "social
engineering" in which the federal government will force white suburbs to
change their racial makeup.
"Let local communities do what's best in their communities, and I would
predict we'd end up with a freer and fairer society in 20 years than we have
today," says Rick Manning, the president of Americans for Limited
Government. "Far freer and fairer than anything that would be dictated from
Washington."
The centerpiece of the new rule is a vast trove of geographic data covering
every community in the country - its racial makeup, its poverty rate, its
concentration of housing vouchers and public housing, as well as the quality
of its schools and its public transit. Nearly all of this data, already
gathered by the government, comes from publicly available sources like the
Census. But HUD hopes the database will enable communities to more clearly
track where poverty and segregation overlap, where housing voucher
recipients live relative to good schools, which neighborhoods contain no
affordable housing at all.
The premise of the rule is that all of this mapped data will make hidden
barriers visible - and that once communities see them, they will be much
harder to ignore.
The administration's announcement comes less than two weeks after the
Supreme Court reaffirmed the power of the Fair Housing Act to ban housing
policies that harm minorities. After a years-long delay, it is also arriving
during a rare civil-rights moment, as the nation returns to familiar
questions from the 1960s about the underlying causes of racial unrest in
American cities.
"There is no question in my mind that part of the issue with Baltimore or
Ferguson is about the relationship between the community and the police, but
it's much deeper than that," Castro says. "It's also fundamentally about
people having opportunity in their lives. And where you live, in many ways,
dictates the level of opportunity that you have."
"That is social engineering"
American Civil Rights and religious leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929 -
1968) gestures emphatically
during a speech at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally in Soldier Field,
Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1966.
(photo: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
Martin Luther King Jr. chose Chicago when, in 1966, he launched a campaign
for "open housing" in northern cities where blacks had been restricted to
slums. On Chicago's South Side, their neighborhoods had been "redlined" by
banks that refused to lend to black homebuyers. Restrictive covenants
outside the ghetto barred blacks from moving in.
Real estate agents buttressed these patterns. The city's housing authority
concentrated public housing projects within these same neighborhoods, too.
The Federal Housing Administration, which heavily subsidized the migration
of whites to the suburbs, had historically blocked blacks from living there,
too.
"The most profound form of social engineering was the creation and
maintenance of segregated suburbs," says Craig Gurian, a civil rights lawyer
and the executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center. "That is
social engineering."
Opposing views of HUD's new rule are fundamentally about different
interpretations of this history. Critics argue that the kind of overt
discrimination that existed in 1968 seldom exists today. Civil rights groups
counter that past discrimination lives on in housing patterns that America
has never addressed.
"Fifty years ago that was really a great argument," Manning says. "Thirty
years ago it might have been somewhat substantive. But 1968 was a long time
ago."
Civil-rights groups say that fair housing is about removing the constraints
on the housing market - such as zoning laws that bar apartment construction
in the suburbs and formulas that ensure affordable housing is built
primarily in poor neighborhoods - so that lower-income and minority families
will have more options. Conservatives see the rule, instead, as government
intrusion into a market that is already open.
In Chicago and many cities, the racial lines drawn by history are largely
the same ones that exist today. Black-white segregation in metropolitan
Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and New York has budged only modestly in 40
years. Within the city of Chicago, white flight has meant that many
once-white neighborhoods have become predominantly black. But over half a
century starting in 1960, Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson identified
just one neighborhood in the entire city that transitioned in the other
direction.
These patterns have persisted in spite of the Fair Housing Act in large part
because of the failure of the law's proactive mandate to "affirmatively
further" fair housing.
"You don't undo that," Ifill, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
says of all this history, "just by stopping people from engaging in
discrimination."
George Romney, Mitt Romney's father and the secretary of HUD from 1969 to
1973, tried to withhold HUD funding from local communities that fought
desegregation. His efforts, swiftly blocked by the Nixon administration, are
remembered today by civil-rights advocates as the fleeting moment when the
federal government was most committed to integration.
HUD has never aggressively enforced the language, although it has pursued
some complaints against communities for defying that part of the law.
Westchester County, New York, has been mired for years in a legal battle
with HUD, thanks to a lawsuit claiming that the county misled the government
by accepting HUD funding without affirmatively furthering fair housing.
The county agreed in a 2009 settlement to build 750 new affordable housing
units, primarily in communities with few minorities. The settlement also
required the county to adopt a law banning landlords from discriminating
against subsidized tenants. As some of those benchmarks went unmet, HUD
began to withhold money from Westchester. The county has since decided not
to pursue any more block-grant funds, an option critics of the new rule warn
many communities will chose.
"It's not worth it because of the threat of lawsuits, the strings attached,
and the control that Washington can then exert over you," says Westchester
County Executive Robert P. Astorino. "You get involved with the federal
government, and you can't get out of bed with them."
"There's nothing."
Here in Chicago on a recent morning, 17 women sat in a classroom learning
how to wield their housing vouchers to bring up their babies in better
neighborhoods.
The non-profit Housing Choice Partners handed out a pair of maps on thick
paper stock that the women might carry across town as they search for a new
home. One illustrated, in green, the "opportunity areas" in the city. The
other showed Chicago color-coded by crime.
"The darker the orange, the higher the crime. We're keeping it really
simple," said Shinnette Johnson, an education coordinator leading a recent
orientation.
Most of the women live in the dark areas on the south and west sides, where
high crime is also accompanied by poor schools, deep poverty and racial
segregation.
"If you look at State Street, there's nothing on the State Street corridor
for you to grow and prosper," Johnson said, describing a stretch of
Chicago's historic "black belt" on the South Side. "It's not even a store
from 22nd to 55th."
"Nope!" several women replied in chorus.
"There's one store! On 55th at State. And what is it?"
"A liquor store," one voice offered.
"A liquor store! That's not a place I want to send my kids. And all the way
down to 22nd, what's there?"
A mother in the second row shook her head. "There's no grocery stores.
There's no clothing stores. There's nothing."
Chicago, for decades, has remained one of the most segregated metropolitan
areas in the country - black separated from white, poor isolated from
wealthy, families who need housing aid living far from the schools they'd
chose for their children.
The seven-county metropolitan area recently produced a 133-page assessment
as part of another HUD grant program that helped serve as a model the new
rule. Many local municipalities initially weighed in that they had achieved
equal housing. The final report, though, bluntly concludes that
concentrations of race and poverty in the region have remained "largely
unchanged" for decades. And it includes two stark population maps: one
showing the racial makeup of the region in 1980, and again in 2010.
"If you show those two maps next to each other, you can't possibly look at
that and say that we're getting better, that we've solved this problem or
that this is no longer an issue in the metropolitan area," says Bob Dean,
the deputy executive director for local planning with the Chicago
Metropolitan Agency for Planning that worked on the report.
On the ground in Chicago, Housing Choice Partners also leads a tour every
week to some of those "opportunity areas" in the city. Families pile into a
16-seat rental van. And they leave the South Side - not far from that State
Street corridor - for neighborhoods where the child poverty rate is low and
the life expectancy high.
The van passes by public libraries and grocery stores, well-tended parks and
neighborhood schools. Occasionally, it pulls up to an apartment with an
empty unit where everyone can pile out and picture life in a different
kitchen, far across town.
Despite all this effort, it's likely only a third of the women in the
orientation class will move to a new home in one of the opportunity areas.
In a good year, that's the organization's success rate. "There are so many
barriers," says executive director Christine Klepper. "Sometimes I wonder
how we get any moves."
The units are too expensive. Or voucher holders have to compete with
market-rate tenants who don't entail the same paperwork load. Or landlords
reject them because of their vouchers, even though that's illegal in
Chicago. Or families can't find the right-sized home in the 90-day window
the housing authority gives them, or the right-sized home turns out to be in
a place where you'd need a car.
Or, more often, there just isn't much affordable housing in good
neighborhoods, because the nicest places to live are often the most
effective at keeping out new development, whether in the city or the
suburbs.
"If you think about it, we've only had a fair housing law for 50 years,"
Klepper says. "And we've had 300 years of slavery, Jim Crow, incarcerating
black men, discrimination. To me, it's not surprising that things have not
changed much over time. It's because we really haven't tried."
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Cabrini-Green public housing project, which has been mostly demolished and
redeveloped, is seen against the Chicago skyline in May 1996. (photo: Beth
A. Keiser/AP)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/08/obama-administrat
ion-to-unveil-major-new-rules-targeting-segregation-across-u-s/?hpid=z2http:
//www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/08/obama-administration-t
o-unveil-major-new-rules-targeting-segregation-across-u-s/?hpid=z2
Obama Administration to Unveil Major New Rules Targeting Segregation Across
US
By Emily Badger, The Washington Post
09 July 15
Administration calls move "historic," while conservatives decry it as
"social engineering"
hen the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, it barred the outright racial
discrimination that was then routine. It also required the government to go
one step further - to actively dismantle segregation and foster integration
in its place - a mandate that for decades has been largely forgotten,
neglected and unenforced.
Now, on Wednesday, the Obama administration will announce long-awaited rules
designed to repair the law's unfulfilled promise and promote the kind of
racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded deeply segregated
cities like Chicago and Baltimore. The new rules, a top demand of
civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to
scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report,
every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set
goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce
segregation.
"This is the most serious effort that HUD has ever undertaken to do that,"
says Julian Castro, the secretary of the department of Housing and Urban
Development, who will announce the new rules in Chicago on Wednesday. "I
believe that it's historic."
Officials insist that they want to work with and not punish communities
where segregation exists. But the new reports will make it harder to conceal
when communities consistently flout the law. And in the most flagrant cases,
HUD holds out the possibility of withholding a portion of the billions of
dollars of federal funding it hands out each year.
Geographical data showing the demographics in Chicago. (photo: U.S. Census
Bureau and Robert J. Sampson,
Harvard University/The Washington Post)
The prospect of the new rules, which will also cover housing patterns that
exclude other groups like the disabled, has already spurred intense debate.
Civil rights groups pushed for even tougher rules but say HUD's plans
represent an important advancement on what's been one of the most fraught
frontiers of racial progress.
"Housing discrimination is the unfinished business of civil rights," says
Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education
Fund. "It goes right to the heart of our divide from one another. It goes
right to the heart of whether you believe that African American people's
lives matter, that you respect them, that you believe they can be your
neighbors, that you want them to play with your children."
But conservatives have sounded alarm. Republicans in the House of
Representatives, worried by what they see as government intrusion into local
planning, have already tried to defund implementation of the rule.
Conservative commentators say it represents an experiment in "social
engineering" in which the federal government will force white suburbs to
change their racial makeup.
"Let local communities do what's best in their communities, and I would
predict we'd end up with a freer and fairer society in 20 years than we have
today," says Rick Manning, the president of Americans for Limited
Government. "Far freer and fairer than anything that would be dictated from
Washington."
The centerpiece of the new rule is a vast trove of geographic data covering
every community in the country - its racial makeup, its poverty rate, its
concentration of housing vouchers and public housing, as well as the quality
of its schools and its public transit. Nearly all of this data, already
gathered by the government, comes from publicly available sources like the
Census. But HUD hopes the database will enable communities to more clearly
track where poverty and segregation overlap, where housing voucher
recipients live relative to good schools, which neighborhoods contain no
affordable housing at all.
The premise of the rule is that all of this mapped data will make hidden
barriers visible - and that once communities see them, they will be much
harder to ignore.
The administration's announcement comes less than two weeks after the
Supreme Court reaffirmed the power of the Fair Housing Act to ban housing
policies that harm minorities. After a years-long delay, it is also arriving
during a rare civil-rights moment, as the nation returns to familiar
questions from the 1960s about the underlying causes of racial unrest in
American cities.
"There is no question in my mind that part of the issue with Baltimore or
Ferguson is about the relationship between the community and the police, but
it's much deeper than that," Castro says. "It's also fundamentally about
people having opportunity in their lives. And where you live, in many ways,
dictates the level of opportunity that you have."
"That is social engineering"
American Civil Rights and religious leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929 -
1968) gestures emphatically
during a speech at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally in Soldier Field,
Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1966.
(photo: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
Martin Luther King Jr. chose Chicago when, in 1966, he launched a campaign
for "open housing" in northern cities where blacks had been restricted to
slums. On Chicago's South Side, their neighborhoods had been "redlined" by
banks that refused to lend to black homebuyers. Restrictive covenants
outside the ghetto barred blacks from moving in.
Real estate agents buttressed these patterns. The city's housing authority
concentrated public housing projects within these same neighborhoods, too.
The Federal Housing Administration, which heavily subsidized the migration
of whites to the suburbs, had historically blocked blacks from living there,
too.
"The most profound form of social engineering was the creation and
maintenance of segregated suburbs," says Craig Gurian, a civil rights lawyer
and the executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center. "That is
social engineering."
Opposing views of HUD's new rule are fundamentally about different
interpretations of this history. Critics argue that the kind of overt
discrimination that existed in 1968 seldom exists today. Civil rights groups
counter that past discrimination lives on in housing patterns that America
has never addressed.
"Fifty years ago that was really a great argument," Manning says. "Thirty
years ago it might have been somewhat substantive. But 1968 was a long time
ago."
Civil-rights groups say that fair housing is about removing the constraints
on the housing market - such as zoning laws that bar apartment construction
in the suburbs and formulas that ensure affordable housing is built
primarily in poor neighborhoods - so that lower-income and minority families
will have more options. Conservatives see the rule, instead, as government
intrusion into a market that is already open.
In Chicago and many cities, the racial lines drawn by history are largely
the same ones that exist today. Black-white segregation in metropolitan
Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and New York has budged only modestly in 40
years. Within the city of Chicago, white flight has meant that many
once-white neighborhoods have become predominantly black. But over half a
century starting in 1960, Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson identified
just one neighborhood in the entire city that transitioned in the other
direction.
These patterns have persisted in spite of the Fair Housing Act in large part
because of the failure of the law's proactive mandate to "affirmatively
further" fair housing.
"You don't undo that," Ifill, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
says of all this history, "just by stopping people from engaging in
discrimination."
George Romney, Mitt Romney's father and the secretary of HUD from 1969 to
1973, tried to withhold HUD funding from local communities that fought
desegregation. His efforts, swiftly blocked by the Nixon administration, are
remembered today by civil-rights advocates as the fleeting moment when the
federal government was most committed to integration.
HUD has never aggressively enforced the language, although it has pursued
some complaints against communities for defying that part of the law.
Westchester County, New York, has been mired for years in a legal battle
with HUD, thanks to a lawsuit claiming that the county misled the government
by accepting HUD funding without affirmatively furthering fair housing.
The county agreed in a 2009 settlement to build 750 new affordable housing
units, primarily in communities with few minorities. The settlement also
required the county to adopt a law banning landlords from discriminating
against subsidized tenants. As some of those benchmarks went unmet, HUD
began to withhold money from Westchester. The county has since decided not
to pursue any more block-grant funds, an option critics of the new rule warn
many communities will chose.
"It's not worth it because of the threat of lawsuits, the strings attached,
and the control that Washington can then exert over you," says Westchester
County Executive Robert P. Astorino. "You get involved with the federal
government, and you can't get out of bed with them."
"There's nothing."
Here in Chicago on a recent morning, 17 women sat in a classroom learning
how to wield their housing vouchers to bring up their babies in better
neighborhoods.
The non-profit Housing Choice Partners handed out a pair of maps on thick
paper stock that the women might carry across town as they search for a new
home. One illustrated, in green, the "opportunity areas" in the city. The
other showed Chicago color-coded by crime.
"The darker the orange, the higher the crime. We're keeping it really
simple," said Shinnette Johnson, an education coordinator leading a recent
orientation.
Most of the women live in the dark areas on the south and west sides, where
high crime is also accompanied by poor schools, deep poverty and racial
segregation.
"If you look at State Street, there's nothing on the State Street corridor
for you to grow and prosper," Johnson said, describing a stretch of
Chicago's historic "black belt" on the South Side. "It's not even a store
from 22nd to 55th."
"Nope!" several women replied in chorus.
"There's one store! On 55th at State. And what is it?"
"A liquor store," one voice offered.
"A liquor store! That's not a place I want to send my kids. And all the way
down to 22nd, what's there?"
A mother in the second row shook her head. "There's no grocery stores.
There's no clothing stores. There's nothing."
Chicago, for decades, has remained one of the most segregated metropolitan
areas in the country - black separated from white, poor isolated from
wealthy, families who need housing aid living far from the schools they'd
chose for their children.
The seven-county metropolitan area recently produced a 133-page assessment
as part of another HUD grant program that helped serve as a model the new
rule. Many local municipalities initially weighed in that they had achieved
equal housing. The final report, though, bluntly concludes that
concentrations of race and poverty in the region have remained "largely
unchanged" for decades. And it includes two stark population maps: one
showing the racial makeup of the region in 1980, and again in 2010.
"If you show those two maps next to each other, you can't possibly look at
that and say that we're getting better, that we've solved this problem or
that this is no longer an issue in the metropolitan area," says Bob Dean,
the deputy executive director for local planning with the Chicago
Metropolitan Agency for Planning that worked on the report.
On the ground in Chicago, Housing Choice Partners also leads a tour every
week to some of those "opportunity areas" in the city. Families pile into a
16-seat rental van. And they leave the South Side - not far from that State
Street corridor - for neighborhoods where the child poverty rate is low and
the life expectancy high.
The van passes by public libraries and grocery stores, well-tended parks and
neighborhood schools. Occasionally, it pulls up to an apartment with an
empty unit where everyone can pile out and picture life in a different
kitchen, far across town.
Despite all this effort, it's likely only a third of the women in the
orientation class will move to a new home in one of the opportunity areas.
In a good year, that's the organization's success rate. "There are so many
barriers," says executive director Christine Klepper. "Sometimes I wonder
how we get any moves."
The units are too expensive. Or voucher holders have to compete with
market-rate tenants who don't entail the same paperwork load. Or landlords
reject them because of their vouchers, even though that's illegal in
Chicago. Or families can't find the right-sized home in the 90-day window
the housing authority gives them, or the right-sized home turns out to be in
a place where you'd need a car.
Or, more often, there just isn't much affordable housing in good
neighborhoods, because the nicest places to live are often the most
effective at keeping out new development, whether in the city or the
suburbs.
"If you think about it, we've only had a fair housing law for 50 years,"
Klepper says. "And we've had 300 years of slavery, Jim Crow, incarcerating
black men, discrimination. To me, it's not surprising that things have not
changed much over time. It's because we really haven't tried."
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
