Obstacles to desegregating public housing: Lessons learned from implementing eight consent decrees

Abstract

Between 1992 and 1996 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settled a number of legal cases involving housing authorities and agreed to take remedial action as part of court-enforced consent decrees entered into with plaintiffs. These housing authorities faced significant obstacles that impaired their ability to comply swiftly and fully with all of the elements in the desegregation consent decrees. The obstacles fell into two broad categories: contextual obstacles (racial composition of waiting lists and resident populations, lack of affordable rental housing, and inadequate public transportation), and capacity and coordination obstacles (conflict among implementing agencies and ineffective monitoring by HUD). Findings presented here highlight the sizable potential delay between the time a legal remedy is imposed and when plaintiffs in public housing segregation disputes realize any benefits. They also reinforce the argument that implementation problems will be legion when policies impose a significant scope of required changes on a large number of actors who must collaborate, yet are not uniformly capable or sympathetic to the goals being promoted. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Struggling to stay out of high-poverty neighborhoods: housing choice and locations in moving to opportunity's first decade

“…It also defines supply-side strategies such as inclusionary zoning and area ''fair share'' requirementsat least when they include very low income households-and efforts to preserve affordable supply in ''better'' neighborhoods, such as in the federal Mark to Market reforms for projectbased Section 8 housing. McInnis, and Popkin 1997;Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000), as well as the major desegregation consent decrees of the 1990s (Briggs 2003;Popkin et al 2003).…”

“…In 2008, The Atlantic magazine and New York Times, among other major media, sounded the alarm, suggesting that changing market dynamics and decisions to demolish public housing might be opening once-stable neighborhoods -in cities and suburbs alike -to a wave of crime arriving with poor people of color using housing vouchers. 3 Stepping back from these immediate controversies, since 1992, the hope of improving locational outcomes through low-income housing policy -which has also been linked to the controversial transformation of public housing since the early 1990s (Popkin et al 2004;Vale 2003) -has been pursued through the voucher program in four ways: a broad budgetary shift away from supply-side project subsidies to vouchers; reforms to the voucher program that make it a more flexible tool for deconcentrating poverty and/or promoting racial desegregation, for example, through higher rent ceilings and ''portability'' across local housing agency jurisdictions (Priemus, Kemp, and Varady 2005;Sard 2001); judicial consent decrees in which the federal government agreed, as part of racial desegregation efforts, to promote a wider array of neighborhood opportunities in particular jurisdictions (Briggs 2003;Polikoff 2006;Popkin et al 2003); and MTO, a voucher-based experiment launched by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in five metro areas in 1994. MTO aims to examine the effects of voluntary relocation from public or assisted housing in high-poverty neighborhoods to privately owned apartments in low-poverty neighborhoods.…”

Fair Housing Policy and the Abandonment of Public Housing Desegregation

“…5 Instead, remedying decades of discriminatory public housing policies required judicial intervention and interpretation through such cases as Shannon v. HUD and Hills v. Gautreaux (Roisman, 2007;Rubinowitz & Rosenbaum, 2000). These landmark decisions presaged several lawsuits spanning from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, most of which HUD settled between 1992 and 1996, although one in Baltimore went unresolved until 2012 (National Low Income Housing Coalition [NLIHC], 2012; Popkin et al, 2003). Remedies have included providing housing vouchers that, following the Gautreaux precedent, enable minority public housing residents to move to less "racially impacted" (i.e., predominantly white) neighborhoods, the establishment of housing mobility counseling programs, and in some instances the demolition of housing projects and reconstruction of replacement housing in neighborhoods with lower concentrations of minorities (Hendrickson, 2002;Popkin et al, 2003;Roisman, 2007;USDHUD, 2000).…”

“…Both HUD and the courts have used discriminatory impact, rather than requiring plaintiffs to also prove discriminatory intent, as sufficient basis for finding housing policies or practices in violation of the Fair Housing Act (Roisman & Tegeler, 1990). With respect to public housing, findings of discriminatory impact have resulted in deliberate efforts to reduce racial segregation in a number of cities since the 1970s (Popkin et al, 2003;Relman et al, 2010). The second regulation, "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," seeks to establish new oversight, guidance, and compliance mechanisms for ensuring that local Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) are adequately addressing impediments to fair housing access (USDHUD, 2013b).…”

Housing Desegregation in the Era of Deregulation

“…Instead, it acknowledged the agency's culpability in ignoring segregation and discrimination by local housing authorities, and "developed a strategy of settling the cases by supporting solutions to ensure 'fair housing' for the plaintiffs." 77 HUD also implemented the "Moving to Opportunity" demonstration project, which sought to gauge the effects of very low-income public-housing residents moving to low-poverty neighborhoods. Reflecting the delicate politics of the experiment, Congress canceled its second wave of program support-a $150 million allocation-after the first congressional allocation of $70 million in 1993.…”