Is Massachusetts violating the Fair Housing Act? A Supreme Court decision today may clarify that.
Massachusetts is a heavily segregated state. The Pioneer Valley (aka the Springfield Metro area, which encompasses Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties) was found to be the most segregated area in the nation by a University of Michigan research project in 2013 with respect to Latino people.
One only has to look at census figures from eastern Massachusetts to see that the pattern repeats there; the state is 75% “white alone”, 8% black, and 10% Latino. Suffolk county is 47% white alone, 25% black, and 21% Latino, yet within it, Winthrop is 89% white, 2% black, and 6% Latino. Norfolk county is 79% white alone, 7% black, 4% Latino, yet Cohasset is 96% white alone, 0.3% black, and 1.3% Latino; Dover is 86% white alone, 0.5% black, and 4% Latino.
It is obvious that there are no policies in Massachusetts that explicitly mandate segregation, however today the Supreme Court ruled that policies that segregate minorities in poor neighborhoods, even if they do so unintentionally, still violate the Fair Housing Act. This ruling piggybacks on a 2012 District Court opinion which ruled that Texas awarded federal housing tax credits in such a way that had a disparate racial impact.
Basically, the premise is that by awarding tax credits using a formula that created affordable housing only in low-income neighborhoods, this policy violated the Fair Housing Act because no affordable housing was built in higher-income neighborhoods. The policy simply cemented the segregation that had been in place for decades.
That sounds a lot like what is happening in Massachusetts, though the barriers are a bit more complex – they also include zoning. Since many communities do not have much, if any multi-family zoning, that prevents anyone from even proposing true affordable housing projects in many towns. Allowing senior housing to count towards the state’s “affordable housing goals” is another barrier, especially when it is coupled with a local resident preference to fill this housing when it is built. In other words, if you build “affordable” senior housing in a wealthy town and you give town residents first crack at it, that is a policy that promotes segregation.
After the 2012 Texas ruling, things changed in that state. Instead of building affordable housing solely in low-income neighborhoods and communities, housing was built “all across the Dallas metro area, including places where there is no affordable housing, in neighborhoods with good schools, that do not flood, have lower crime, and better access to jobs —for the first time opening up choices to families about where they live instead of continuing to concentrate almost all the affordable housing units in distressed and high crime South Dallas neighborhoods.” Gee, sounds like what we need here, doesn’t it?
Rick Perry was not happy with this, and appealed to the Supreme Court, and lo and behold, with a 5-4 decision, they ruled today that discrimination does not have to be explicit; if the policy has a discriminatory effect, the policy is discriminatory. After the 2012 ruling, Texas also enacted a policy which requires communities to put up its own money for tax credit development as a show of support – a policy which essentially allows communities to block affordable housing development. I believe Massachusetts may already have such a law in place.
Might this be the case that breaks Massachusetts segregation? Might our 40B wink-wink schemes (where developers simply threaten 40B to force compromise) violate the Fair Housing Act? Might even a law such as Proposition 2.5 be found to violate the Fair Housing Act because it aligns local incentives toward building expensive housing, not affordable housing?
Will anyone in this state try to move us in an inclusive direction? Or are the people with the juice all too happy in their 96% white, $700k housing communities, happy that they don’t have to even think of either poverty or racial issues?
…if Prop. 2.5 were somehow struck down.
There will always be some zoning and that’s good. Wanting to live in a certain environment doesn’t make someone a bad person. They may like their space, rather than fearing cooties from “those people” that you always seem to assume is the motive. The neighborhood I grew up in was all two-story houses on acre lots. I wouldn’t want such properties to alternate with multifamily units with almost no land, but if we could find a way to make the former model affordable that would be fine.
It may seem innocent enough to want to live in a certain environment, but that desire is too often convoluted with race and/or class. It doesn’t matter if your desire is simply to live in an environment without affordable housing in a race-agnostic manner; this ruling makes it clear that if the policy has the unintended effect of segregation, it violates the Fair Housing Act.
Too many communities have kept out affordable housing under the guise of “we don’t want to change the character of our town”. The fact that exceptions are sometimes made for people who pass a certain standard – in-law apartments, housing for teachers who teach within the district, senior housing with preferences for residents – only raises more questions of the true intent, and whether at least part of it is to keep “them” out.
…for people who want certain environments, but not have their motives called into question? Besides, correlation isn’t absolute. There were a few non-white families in the neighborhood I grew up in. I just don’t think attempts at mind reading are appropriate when it comes to motive and have always had a problem with effect trumping intent. Is it either your personal opinion or interpretation of this law and ruling that there should just be a free-for-all with regard to building?
If you want to live in an area where you can’t see the next house from yours, then you need to pay for enough acreage to do that.
Using the government to subsidize your environment doesn’t cut it because you are using the government against others to make up for your lack of funding to achieve what you want.
That is the point of the ruling, and it should be obvious that this is a problem. If black people are concentrated in ghettos, and they can only move up the ladder by moving out of the ghettos, then using the government’s money to make the walls in other communities higher is de facto segregation, even if it is not explicit.
Zoning is a huge factor here. It is market distorting. If Wellesley’s schools are so good, the market would move to put more housing units in Wellesley. If the schools can only be good because the government is creating the scarcity, then that is not “the market” at all. That is government meddling.
This wouldn’t be such a big issue if communities didn’t push it so far. Property values in Massachusetts are so high because of artificial scarcity.
The one-acre lots in my neighborhood were paid for by their respective owners (which hardly means we can’t see our neighbors). Now you are confusing me, though. Before it sounded like you were saying how dare people who can afford it live in areas they can in fact afford. Now you are saying they better pay for it themselves. Anyone in a ghetto who gets ahead is likewise free to move out and settle in a more expensive area too, right?
You are being subsidized because you not only want to live on a 1-acre lot, but you don’t want an apartment complex on the 1-acre lot next door. Your town is using zoning to prevent people from using the 1-acre lots that they paid for in the way they may want to use them. That’s the subsidy – if you don’t want to live near other people, then you need to not only buy your lot, but all the lots around you.
The problem with Massachusetts housing – really, housing across the country, as is evidenced by this Texas case – is that there is a huge chasm between “ghetto” and “middle class”. The ghetto does not allow very many people to get ahead. Concentrating poor people in certain areas makes their problems exponentially worse.
Texas was pursuing a policy which seemed innocent enough – it would allocate low income tax credits solely to poor neighborhoods, basically to develop housing for the poor people there. The court ruled that even though there may not have been discriminatory intent there, the effect was that this violated the Fair Housing Act because it did not allow low-income housing to be developed outside of the ghettos. The state and federal governments were solidifying the segregation.
If I want to buy a 1-acre lot in Dover and then use low-income tax credits to build some low-income housing there, I would simply not be able to do it. Dover does not have multi-family zoning. So despite its sky-high property values, and despite its large lot requirements, they go even further – sorry, no dense affordable housing. And even if I managed to get through all that, I think that Massachusetts requires local buy-in for these tax credit programs, so Dover could simply decline to throw its support behind the project.
Same situation as in Texas, and same results – massive segregation, done under the guise of “well, I just like the character of my community, and that character would change if we let in anyone other than people who can afford a $700k house”.
…there is no legitimate way to choose your neighborhood asthetics beyond the lines of your personal property? If so, I would respectfully but emphatically disagree. This is why I so disagree with the idea of statistical impact beyond intent. It would be perfectly fine with me (and most people I know) if a non-white family moved into the two-story single-family house on the one acre next door to mine. The only real problem in my mind would be if non-white families were outright told, “Thou SHALT NOT liver here.”
“Thou SHALT NOT live here.”
Langlois v. Abington Housing Authority, 2002.
The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, several minority individuals who had applied for federally funded rental subsidies (called Section 8 vouchers) at eight housing authorities near Brockton. Those authorities were located in mostly white communities, although Brockton and the surrounding metro area had a substantially higher share of minorities eligible for the housing program. The authorities each gave preference for vouchers to their own local (and mostly white) applicants. As a result of the preference, non-local, disproportionately minority applicants, were placed lower down on the list – and would have to wait years longer for the housing vouchers. In other words, they were disparately impacted by a seemingly neutral residency preference policy.
Requiring evidence of intentional discrimination by the housing authorities certainly would have resulted in a different outcome.
…if for no other reason than discriminating against non-residents would be wrong. I would put that practice in the same category as the original grandfather clause, whereby only those whose grandfathers voted could vote themselves, which OF COURSE meant that no grandchildren of slaves (ie almost all black people) could vote and everyone knew that was precisely the intent.
I don’t think there is an absolute right to use the government to help you “keep your neighborhood the way you chose it”, particularly when it comes to residential usage. This has pretty obviously led to racial segregation, and this problem in Massachusetts is not a trivial one. Our housing polices are pretty clearly aligned to create and perpetuate this, and a lot of our citizens want it exactly that way. That is why the claim for desire of “keeping my community the way I want it” should be something that promotes a more general benefit and someone making that argument should have to affirmatively prove that the proposed change would hurt everyone generally.
The big problem is that the communities into which non-white people have been segregated are struggling, and this is causing people living in those ghettos to not be able to move up the ladder. Yes, a handful of people brought up in the ghetto manage to escape, but the vast majority do not. They don’t have the same opportunities as those who live elsewhere – their environment is holding them back. And the impedance is very highly correlated with race – we don’t generally have white ghettos in this state because, like it or not, white skin color opens more doors than dark skin color due to default assumptions – a white person doesn’t have to prove himself the way a black person does.
So by building communities that have a wealth of opportunity within them, and then using government policies to keep others out, that is just wrong, and when it is so closely tied to race, that makes it de-facto racist even though the racism is not explicit.
There is no defense for a community to have zero family (not senior) affordable units. None. Especially when they have senior units – which disproves that the community can’t support dense development. Steering affordable development to only poor communities should be viewed as a violation of the Fair Housing Law, and the Supreme Court just said that.
…I DO think that as we are supposed to be a Commonwealth that even some communities don’t have denser zoning that the state should be paying for services that come from the tax dollars of all of our residents.
As long as it’s not by choice? Because our de facto segregation is due to history and policy. To choose is to decide. And not to decide is to decide. Presented with a problem, you can try either to solve it or not. Either way, you’ve made a decision. Following your logic, it’s okay if people of color are discriminated against as long as it’s not by conscious choice.
I live in Granby, one of those very white communities (the issue has much more to do with poverty than race). We have had 51 affordable housing for the elderly and some handicapped for about 40 years. In the last 5 years, we finally got 12 units of housing units that we asked for. It took 20 years for that to happen. It’s hard to develop in Granby because all but a smidgen of town has sewer or water. It’s very hard to accommodate development with septic tanks and well-water. Our 51 units, however, did so for 30 years. We would love to expand sewer, but can’t afford it. Many of the “white towns” in Western Mass won’t see affordable housing without this infrastructure. Some will never see this kind of infrastructure.
With Springfield and other cities, we’re living with the effects of an industrial history that we lack the collective will to address. Multi-family dwellings were an advantage when people lived in the city or town where they worked. This existing housing is now a disadvantage because it segregates people by income (by rent, rather than ownership). Palmer and Ware, both of which are relatively rural, have a lot of such rental property and the attendant problems.
The ultimate problem has less to do with race than poverty. Housing exacerbates it. Poverty is ugly, costly, and often violent. People don’t want to be around it. People don’t want their kids educated in its midst. The vast majority of people in our predominantly white communities have no problem with the ethnic minorities who live their communities because those minorities are not poor.
Certainly not me. We need to get to where there is equality, or at least a high floor, for all families regardless of where they live. Schools need to be excellent in the cities and in the suburbs. Gutting Prop. 2.5 and/or delinking this and other services from the property tax will go a long way toward that goal. Discrimination is an action which by definition is by conscious choice.
But you must recognize there is a correlation between it’s adoption and the communities that supported it. Anti-tax advocates are not against government services, for themselves, but they are against programs that benefit or are perceived to benefit the poor and communities of color. Freedom of movement and equality if opportunity is still theoretical for the working poor in this state.
After rent control was overturned in Cambridge my sister and nephew moved in with us for three months, then she moved into the housing project down the street. She spent another decade there before bouncing around section 8 units in Cambridge and Chelsea before finally finding some units in Marlboro. I doubt my niece would have received a nearly full ride merit scholarship to Regis this spring had she not gotten the support of a good school system in Marlboro. She floundered and suffered in Chelsea. It’s not just a question of making Chelsea better-we can, but we also have to ensure that every community is welcome to every family in the commonwealth. That’s not the reality right now , and zoning is a deliberate way of maintaining the status quo.
caused by geography. The lack of affordable housing in the suburbs prevents poor people from moving there. You wrote, “The only real problem in my mind would be if non-white families were outright told, “Thou SHALT NOT live here.” Your argument is a perfect example of “separate but equal” applied to housing. Everyone should have equal schools, etc. Well, if they don’t, that’s not a segregation problem, it’s an equality problem. We need to make sure they have equality. Brown v. Education came about because saying everything should be equal (though separate) didn’t work. The status quo doesn’t work for the segregated folks.
…also came about precisely because black kids WERE outright told, “Thou shalt not enroll here.” That is exactly what I am saying would be the problem. It is absolutely not separate but equal UNLESS the separate part were deliberately enforced. We also all know quite well that they weren’t equal by design.
For example, the EEOC says,
For example, ” a �no-beard� employment policy may discriminate against African-American men who have a predisposition to pseudofolliculitis barbae (severe shaving bumps) unless the policy is job-related and consistent with business necessity.” Same with Abercrombie & Fitch, which has a “look” policy, and people who wear hijabs.
In northeast cities, black children were not exactly told that they couldn’t attend certain schools; they weren’t prohibited by law from living in certain neighborhoods. There was de facto segregation which assigned the black neighborhoods to certain schools and white neighborhoods to other schools. It wasn’t hard to do because the housing patterns already largely had the same segregation. The schools weren’t exclusively black either; they were in neighborhoods that had traditionally been the “immigrant” neighborhoods, the lowest level on the ladder where people got their start. Black people had the unfortunate problem of moving in just as industry left, so they were not able to move up the way that the other migrants did.
There was also a “separate but equal” doctrine in place which people at the time felt was fair. If you were black, you perhaps couldn’t move to a white neighborhood because you couldn’t get a loan from a private entity, or because you didn’t have the money to do so. You were free to do so, and some did, but most did not because they didn’t have the resources to do so.
The remedy of that segregation was busing – which didn’t work because it just caused white people to pull their kids out of the public schools. At first they used Catholic schools as their repository, but eventually learned to just move across town lines. They couldn’t be touched there because in 1974, Milliken v. Bradley was handed down by the supreme court, and that stated that kids could not be bused across town lines. Moving out of the city made you “safe”, and ushered in a new era of suburban prosperity.
With almost no rental housing in the suburbs, there was no opportunity for black kids to move out of the cities. The cities became more and more segregated as compared to the suburbs. Internally, they were diverse, but to the outside, segregated. The bar was high enough to “keep the character” of the suburbs.
When you write “Discrimination is an action which by definition is by conscious choice”, you repeat a canard of the racist right that has been used to oppress minorities for decades. You also ignore decades of statistical, social, political, and legal evidence to the contrary.
The fact that you, or any other proponents of such policies, don’t “feel” racist speaks to your blindness rather than to the correctness of your pronouncement. Discrimination is not just an input or motivation to a policy. It is instead an outcome of a policy.
The American Swastika still flies on government-owned property in several states. Income and wealth disparity still harms minority children disproportionally. The horrific impacts of gun violence are felt primarily by black men, women, and children. The trauma of police abuse is felt primarily by black men, women, and children. The proportion of black children in Massachusetts who are suspended or expelled from public schools in Massachusetts is still four to five times greater than their proportion in the public school system. The proportion of black males who have been imprisoned in Massachusetts similarly exceeds the proportion of black males in the state population.
Some make the argument that black children somehow inherently misbehave. Some make the argument that blacks are somehow inherently less able to compete in the US economy, or are somehow inherently less able to obey the law. Some make the argument that blacks are inherently more violent, and therefore that black-on-black gun violence is an issue only for the black community. Some of us reject these arguments as inherently racist.
If we reject these arguments, then we can only conclude that these disproportionate negative impacts are NOT the result of individual choices made by the victims, and are instead symptoms of a deeply racist society.
Progressive Americans rightly rejected your definition of racism (” Discrimination is an action which by definition is by conscious choice”) decades ago. I similarly reject your definition here.
Your proposed definition is, in fact, racist. It is racist because it enables, perpetuates, and strengthens the pervasive racism that already creates so much pain and suffering of black men, women, and children.
I think we’ve well established that we disagree on the definitions of racism and discrimination, but I absolutely stand by mine. I too reject the profoundly racist assumptions mentioned in your fourth paragraph, but to somehow make this my fault does not advance civil discourse.
Let’s try an exercise of finding another word for it, then. I’ll start with a place-holder: “Foobarism”.
“Foobarism” is defined as a property of a society, entity, government, legal system, and so on that causes wealth, benefits, and power to be transferred from black men, women, and children to non-black men, women, and children. A legal system where black men are incarcerated at many times the rate of white men is said to be “Foobarist”. A school system where black children who represent 8% of the school-age population and constitute 35-50% of expulsions and out-of-school suspensions is said to be “Foobarist”. A society in which swaths of geography, both urban and rural, are filled with poor black families while nearby neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities enjoy first-in-the-nation prosperity is said to be “Foobarist”.
Let me also explicitly state that “Foobarism” is NOT the “fault” of any individual. It is a property of a group of individuals or a property of a legal system constructed by a society. An ideal gas enclosed by a container exerts a measurable force on that container called “pressure”. No single gas molecule has any corresponding characteristic — “pressure” results from the random motion of the molecules taken together. Molecules not in contact with the container still participate in exerting pressure because of their interaction (direct or indirect) with the molecules that do contact the container wall. Similarly, no individual within a Foobarist group or system is themselves necessarily Foobarist. Taken together, a group of non-Foobarist individuals can still exhibit Foobarism in the same way that a collection of gas molecules exhibits pressure.
Given this definition of “Foobarism”, I’d like to pose several questions:
1. Do you agree that Foobarism, as defined here, is wrong and should be corrected?
2. Do you agree that when a specific law, policy, or program is shown to have Foobarist outcomes, the negative Foobarist consequences of that law policy or programs should at a minimum be explicitly acknowledged and balanced against the promised benefits?
3. Suppose a specific law, policy, or program is shown to have Foobarist outcomes, and that no measurable gains result from the program except the continued transfer of wealth, benefits and power from blacks to non-blacks. Do you agree that a person, party, or organization that continues to promote said law are themselves “Foobarist”, even though that person, party, organization has no intentional animosity towards blacks?
It seems to me that if we agree that “Foobarism” is wrong, then we might in fact be able to advance civil discourse by avoiding loaded words like “racism” and “discrimination”. Perhaps the first step is to agree that we share a desire to avoid “Foobarism” — we can then perhaps find a more appropriate word to replace “Foobarism” with.
I think you two are going to continue arguing in circles and there is no reason we can’t all be on the same page. I think Christopher is not racist, I do think he is favoring a variation of color blindness that is well intentioned but ultimatley naive. It is a less extreme form than the kind practices by Justice Roberts, but of the same variation. It’s an attitude Colbert brilliantly parodies with his deadpan “I don’t see race, you say are black” whenever a black guest was on his show, or Carlin’s classic ‘happen to be black’ routine.
When I first got involved in community organizing back in high school for BYOP, I was confronted for the first time by students from communities of color in inner city Boston and their experience was drastically different from the Cambridge idyll I had been exposed to. They lived in neighborhoods that were 90% black, schools that were 95% black with appalling graduation rates and violence. And it is there my suburbanite liberal perceptions of a color blind society, basically a naive assumption that we must not treat blacks differently but equally to white, as in, they don’t deserve reparations or affirmative action because overt discrimination is now illegal. I was quickly taught how wrong this is, and encouraged to adopt color consciousness.
We must recognize that racial differences and disparities still exist in profound ways, some obvious, some subtle. From the easy outrages like the Confederate flag or the racialized policing in Ferguson to the subtle ones. Like the experience of black students in Carlisle, or as the President deftly put it, why we interview Johnny but not Jamal. Or why some communities are 95% white while others are majority-minority. Racial segregation is not a symptom of income inequality, it was in fact, designed by our government via federal housing laws. And it will take that same government enforcing the laws we passed to rectify that, to finally integrate America.
Just a theoretical:
You (jconway) are older. You got a great job. You saved a few bucks. You decided to buy in Belmont. You paid a crazy amount of money for a small house. You have kids.
A large piece of property becomes available in Belmont. All zoning is suspended and they build 500 units of 2 and 3 bedroom apartments. They’re pricey but two hundred plus kids move in.
The schools are swamped. There’s no additional money so services are cut across town. The quality in the schools goes down. Your kids are lost in the mix because they’re okay and many of their classmates need more attention. Your pricey home is not as desirable.
I’m not arguing against the goals put forth on this thread. I just think it’s crazy to discuss these blender type solutions because anyone who is going to lose money is going to be opposed and the unintended consequences are many.
It’s what we call a collective action problem. It’s a big reason why the social contract is broken and America can’t have nice things anymore. Back in my grandfather’s day, if your neighbor got laid off, everyone pitched in to help. Now, you’re expected to bitch that he is collecting while ‘us working stiffs are stuck working’, I hear these complaints all the time on the Metra commuter train from Chicago to the suburb where I now live. And it’s a common refrain about liberal elites, that they send their precious little darlings to private school while performing social experiments in the public school.
In many respects, it’s those liberals I am most angry at. Concord and Weston are not bastions of ultra conservatism, yet they are some of the whitest and most affluent communities in the state, and some of the most opposed to affordable housing remedies. The literal definition of NIMBYism. But the hipsters and yuppies who think inner cities are cool are making it harder for folks like me to move back to our hometown, harder for people of color to stay in their neighborhoods, and harder for older working class whites like my folks to downsize and retire in their communities as well. And yet, many other families of color would want the safer communities, better schools, and open spaces of the suburbs.
Everyone should have the opportunity to live, work, and go to school in the community of their choice. That is the American dream in a nutshell. What the folks who built Levittowns sold to the returning GIs (except the black ones who weren’t allowed in). But right now the status quo makes it an us vs them dichotomy, when it should be everybody does better when everyone does better. Housing is a way to fix this, and mitigate against these costs.
There’s always been inequality in America. The American Revolution was less about the common man’s quest for freedom than colonial elites quest for the ability to maximize profits (my opinion). There were already the very rich in those days.
I think what is missing today is the inability for most to improve their lot. Those in disadvantaged areas don’t have to be able to move to Concord or Weston, but they can’t even move to Medford or Waltham. Once Boston is completely gentrified Boston will not be an option- it’s off to Brockton, New Bedford or Lawrence.
On the job front it’s even worse. There is no opportunity. But you can see why those that have a spot don’t want to open up to those that are different. It’s a cold world out there.
of which there is almost none, it would be still be impossible to completely integrate cities and suburbs. We could, however, increase the amount of affordable housing in more affluent communities.
Amherst is one of the more expensive communities in my area, but it also has a good amount of affordable housing. Former apartments for college students in Amherst now also serve as affordable housing. Amherst also has a thriving, free bus service to all five colleges, which allows access to a lot of shopping. My town has 12 units of non-elderly affordable housing. We could easily double or triple that, though we don’t have public transportation or walkable shopping (unless you count CVS, Cumberland Farms, and Dunkin Donuts).
When your town makes this connection:
More affordable housing= more children in the schools=more costs without corresponding increases in tax revenue, then it’s always going in their best interest to block it.
Even if the selectmen decided it was the right idea, then they’d be voted out the next chance the people got. There are people in my town that are solid D who still lined up against the building of apartment complexes.
If you got some increased funding for it then maybe more people would support it.
You’re right – money is the issue and could go a long way toward solving this. When I see denser housing go up I admit my first thought is which school will take the brunt of this.
Springfield, as No Politician, has said has reached its levy ceiling. But should the taxpayers of Springfield carry a larger burden for the poor than Weston? Property taxes are regressive.
…which is why ideally we would delink municipal services from property taxes. However, I have always supported overrides and debt exclusions (including chairing a successful campaign several years ago for debt exclusions for a new library and police station, the first time my town had ever tweaked that law and a highlight of what passes for my political career) for the same reason the bandit told the police why he robbed the bank – that’s where the money is.
in your town that are against apartment complexes. Bigotry against the poor is non-partisan, and we all have morals that are too hard to live up to. Also, don’t you live in Andover? Must have a lot of latte sippers there. (My friend grew up on Haggetts Pond road. The number of McMansions that sprung up between our 20s and 30s was astounding).
My town is so small, and the development of non-elderly public housing took so long, we had very little backlash. It’s also state, rather than federal, housing. Section 8 housing has been used as a populist bogey man, but since we lack infrastructure, it’s not going to happen.
Poverty is a factor in Chapter 70 aid. It’s also a factor when building schools. We are trying to build a school now. We’ll get a reimbursement of 64% on the renovation part. Chicopee will get 90%. Chicopee is an odd city. It has plenty of poor people, but also lots of people continue to grow up and live there. Unlike Holyoke, they have a pretty good balance and thus end up with a pretty healthy fiscal picture.
This is exactly what I want our policies to start mitigating against, and to start alleviating for. And I think actually enforcing and providing Fair Housing is a component of that along with increasing affordable housing stock more broadly. There are certainly many white people living on the edge of poverty, my sister among them, who have benefited or could benefit from expanded affordable housing access. So it’s not entirely a ‘racial blending’ goal, although that’s an ancillary benefit, but I would propose this policy and sell it on the basis of making the state more affordable and giving working class families of any background expanded opportunity to live near better schools and safer neighborhoods.
But I have seen the stigma of Section 8 even in her former community take it’s toll. And like you said, these people opposing expansion aren’t intrinsically racist. They just fear crime, lower property values, and poorer schools will be brought in-even if those are the things that families like my sister were fleeing to the burbs to escape in the first place!
And making these decisions more of a dialogue is just one small way of making these changes easier. I definitely do not want to dictate integration by fiat, we can look at the busing crisis and see how easily that spirals out of control into chaos and violence. But we can have policies like Cambridge’s controlled choice model for schools, and expand it to housing. This policy wasn’t court ordered but was carefully considered and gradually implemented over a decade and passed by elective bodies like the School Committee and City Council. Cambridge is unique for it’s diversity and the model is difficult to replicate, but it’s a best practice to look into when considering future changes.
Yes, that is how the system works now – it is set up to keep the rich and the poor separate. The fact that some people will lose is not a justification to perpetuate these conditions.
The state could alleviate the impact by shifting education from local to state dollars. The barrier there is that no one wants to pay more income tax to do this; secondarily, many people like things just the way they are, they don’t want to pay $2k more in income tax and get $1.5k in property tax reduction because they see this as “now I’m paying for _those_ people to get an education, why can’t they just get their act together and do what I did and make as much as I did so they can buy a house in my community (but of course, I won’t let more houses be built in my community…)”?
The state’s education formula is somewhat progressive in that it computes additional money in a foundation budget for a student who is either ESL or low-income. Do you know how much more the state allocates? 50% more. That’s it. It sounds like a lot, but think of it this way; a grade of 25 kids has about $10k spent on each, so the grade “costs” $250k. Replace 10 of those kids with low-income/ESL and that grade now “costs” $300k. The presumption is that with the $50k extra, you can bring 10 low-income/ESL kids to the same level of proficiency as the 10 upper middle class kids you lost. That seems like a tall order. Towns understand these economics very well, and obviously you do too.
We are on a rat race that is hurting our state. We are segregating our population in order to ration our education dollars. That means we are turning out thousands of kids per year who do not get a good education experience. Likewise we are wasting the potential of many communities which were built to house a lot of people and putting incredible development pressure on communities that are smaller and more remote – all in the name of “keeping property values high”. That’s a little preposterous – we actually want people to pay a lot for their housing for no reason other than “it is a good separation mechanism”. Meanwhile the bankers rub their hands and laugh.
My goal in suggesting a different word is to seek a common ground with Christopher about the existence and gravity of the problem, independently from what we name it.
Whatever we name it, it seems to me that there is a clear problem (or set of problems). It seems to me that we simply must acknowledge that a very specific racial group (blacks) suffers from the inequalities of our society far more than any other group (though Latinos and Hispanics also have a difficult time).
In response to the observation by merrimackguy that there has always been inequality in America, I entirely agree. The issue, however, is the way this inequality is so specifically focused on blacks.
I further suggest that it is NEVER “easy” to put these views into practice when you are part of the privileged class. I’m older. I own property. I pay taxes. So what.
The fundamental issue that drove Southern aristocracy to fight the civil war was economic. That aristocracy had created enormous wealth, power, and prestige by building an economic engine based on slave labor. They correctly perceived the abolitionist movement as an assault on that economic engine. Many of those aristocrats asserted, we can only assume sincerely, that they in fact loved their slaves and treated them well. They argued that they were defending their wealth, their freedom, and their constitutional rights. Most of us now, in hindsight, view slavery as immoral. Perhaps there is another word besides “racist” to describe their posture — by Christopher’s proposed definition many of those slave-owners were not “racist”. Whatever word we choose, surely the result was still morally repugnant.
It’s all too easy to mouth platitudes about race, equality, freedom, and so on when you ensure that nothing is actually DONE to address them. If we mean we what we profess about all this, then SOMEBODY has to give up at least some wealth and power. Poverty — by construction the absence of wealth — is only going to be solved by providing wealth to the impoverished. That wealth must come from somewhere. Whatever name we apply to the constellation of problems, the RESULT is that our extreme wealth inequality is very specifically targeted at a very specific racial minority.
Until we can agree that this reality exists and is a problem, we will never solve it. The moral evil of slavery, and its deep and pervasive infection of our culture and society, did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 or the Union’s subsequent victory in the Civil War.
Whatever we call it, I argue it is pervasive today.
There is no way you can own other people who are there because of their race, and which by the fact of your ownership you clearly believe is OK, and pretend you’re not racist. The only way one could prove he’s not racist is to free them.
A slaveowner who believes he treats his slaves well could argue that he feels no animosity towards them and in fact provides them with a better lifestyle then they left behind — either from their nation of origin or from their prior owner. That slaveowner would, I think, challenge your statement that “Of course slaveowners were racist”, using very similar logic to the logic you use when you argue that because you do not make a conscious choice to discriminate, you are not racist.
My point is that although both of us view the posture of the slaveowner as racist, we do so because we share a different worldview and culture. One particularly repugnant aspect of slavery is that slaveowners viewed slaves as literally sub-human (hence the infamous subsequent 3/5 “compromise”). Most of us do not view a person who buys, sells, breeds, and uses cattle as “Animalist”. If we someday learn that Dolphins are in fact intelligent and conscious, does that make us “Dolphinist” because we bought, sold, and bred them in order to perform in shows?
It seems to me that the best way out of this thicket is to avoid examining the state of mind of the participants and instead focus on the results.
Whatever we call it, a system that heaps inequity on a particular minority based on their race (or their stature, or their gender, or their gender preference) is, in my view, a system that must be changed — whatever name we choose to label that system.
…needs to be undesigned pronto. I was in fact under the impression that kind of thing was illegal now. My ultimate goal IS a colorblind society, maybe it means leaving names off applications though the hiring manager IS demonstrating individual prejudice if the name is the only reason to call one and not the other. We will never get there, though, if we are forced to be color-conscious. White people made this mess so white people need to clean it up – the best method for which IMO is to quit racism and color-consciousness cold turkey.
White people who unconsciously discriminate against black people will continue to do so as long as they are allowed to. Few jobs are given without face-to-face job interviews. The primary impact of your “cold turkey” approach is to cement today’s systemic racism in place.
…I would be open to looking into why that is. I’m loathe to second-guess why a given student was suspended or expelled. I would need to see the discipline records of the school as a whole and see if there were clear differences in consequences for the same violation. I am not going to get outraged (though maybe curious) about stats without this kind of context. Any policy designed to segregate or leave some worse off than others should be reversed. In a lot of cases, however, I think we should be focused on class irrespective of race. Of your three points I’m pretty sure I outright disagree with number three.
The problem is a combination of race and socio-economic position.
Underlying that is that, for a very long time, government policy deliberately reinforced the conflation of those two things. Like, say, the early government backed loans that allowed WWII vets to buy homes in the new suburbs like Levittown, but were specifically denied to black vets. Then, decades later, after the civil rights movement and after the government no longer enforces such policies, those homes have appreciated massively, and have accumulated an awful lot of wealth to families that are not black. Every family in there bought at market rates, paid their mortgage, and none feel like they were simply “given” anything, and rebel at the notion that, decades later, someone wants to whack them for money. And yet..
That’s what makes this such a tough problem to solve, politically.
…as opposed to assuming correlation with race, both practically and politically makes the most sense. To the extent that such alleviates the issues of racial disparity in this country that’s great too.
We aren’t assuming correlation with race, the data and history clearly points us in that direction. It also does not automatically follow that lifting the masses out of poverty will necessarily have a trickle down effect on the particular and specific disadvantages experienced by African Americans. Need I remind us that large swaths of the New Deal were explicitly sealed off from African American participation from Social Security to the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Many liberals at the time argued that it was better to pass anti-poverty programs the Dixiecrats could vote for and help poor whites rather than help no one at all. Hard to argue with the political reality of the age, but I often wonder if anyone had the political capital and charisma to truly change the conversation it was Roosevelt and he didn’t. Like Reconstruction, another policy road not traveled we are still paying off today.
Coal country has strikingly similar rates of out of wedlock births, crime, familial instability, government dependence, low graduation rates, low literacy rates, and poorer health outcomes as the black ghetto. One is nearly all white, the other nearly all black. Yet, concentrated poverty in the black ghetto is a direct result of racist policies long supported by the government and continued to this very day, while coal country is suffering from economic irrelevancy. Both are problems that require a federal fix, but one was caused by racially directed malevolence from the government while the other was caused by the free market. And the origin of the problem does effect how we go about solving it.
It would then expand the constituency for public transit, expand the constituency for public health care and community health clinics, expand the constituency for equitable public education, and make our legislature more representative instead of bundling minorities in urban districts. It would encourage smart growth by ending the sprawl subsidy and ending communities that insist on a car dependent model of single family, low density housing and commercial zoning rather than mixed development. Mixing incomes, mixing races, and mixing development would accomplish so many important policy goals for the progressive movement. This is a critical component of leaving no family behind in Massachusetts and I fully support it.
I still say it’s OK to have neighborhoods like the one I grew up in or even towns like Carlisle that are almost entirely open. Open space is an appropriate, and I would argue progressive, value from a quality of life standpoint. In my mind public transit would be more valuable to less dense communities to help you get to where commercial and other needs are. The Carlisles of the state should be expected to contribute to the funding of needs throughout the state, however.
Danehy Park is a 50 acre public park built on a reclaimed garbage dump in between three affordable housing developments. I don’t see open space and affordable housing as mutually exclusive. I am against using ordinances in zoning against multi family homes as a back door method of maintaining housing segregation. Maybe keep single family character in the zoning, but mandate that every community take 10-20% of it’s housing stock designated to affordable housing. But the days when Carlisle can continue to be majority white and majority affluent as a matter of policy must end.
The issue is that people are not trying to keep just their neighborhood as a low-density community, they are trying to keep affordable housing out of their entire town. So although maybe it does make some sense to have an area of the town devoted to sprawling acreage, doing it for the entire town has the direct impact of shutting people out completely – people who are predominately poor and not white.
…we are trying to manage the symptoms without curing the disease? Rather than try to regulate where people live or focus so much on race since there is some correlation with class, shouldn’t we be advancing policies reduce both the race/class correlation and poverty altogether?
We simply do not have any more room in the cities for more affordable housing, we have to make room in the suburbs. We also are concentrating poverty in the inner cities and gateway cities, and this is a means to alleviating that poverty. Simulatenously making it easier for working people to afford to live in places that have better school districts, safer neighborhoods, and better housing stock while encouraging those with means to gentrify the impoverished areas. We are definitely doing a decent job on the latter in Massachusetts, just like at the millionaires row shaping up in Somerville. But we are not doing the former, and it will create concentrated poverty in formerly suburban areas like Brockton and Randolph that are now getting the bulk of the poor pushed out of the city, just as it has in our failed cities like Springfield and Lawrence.
All of these issues are interconnected, and I don’t see how we fix one without fixing the other. I don’t see how we end voter apathy towards transit, increased revenue, and redistribution without redistributing the voters to every community and breaking down the barriers between white towns and communities of color and affluent towns and struggling cities. In many respects, class and race are connected that way, as is housing. There is a reason those black girls assaulted in Texas were told to go ‘back to Section 8 where you belong’. And I say this knowing my white sister depended on section 8 to finally get to a decent school district and safe community, by no means is this exclusively a black and white issue, but it’s all connected. We frankly can’t overcome if we still insist on living separate and unequal lives.
…about the consequences of gentrification? I’ve often heard objections to that from minority communities. My understanding is the objection is based on a fear that wealthy, usually white, people move in, drive up property values, and price the previous minority population out of their own neighborhoods. Then we are back where we started. Georgetown, DC is I believe an example of this phenomenon. How do we guard against that?
I understand that complaint, but when you have urban areas with schools that have 80%+ poverty rates, with median incomes that are 1/3 the state average, I don’t think that should be a primary concern. We shouldn’t be trying to protect pockets of poverty for the sake of poor people.
Gentrification most likely opens up far more opportunities for people in poor neighborhoods, as the people with money can then spend it on services provided by the people living there. It is more important to balance out the income levels than it is to guard against gentrification.
way to complete gentrification.
Holyoke and Springfield, not so much.
Boston, when I moved here in the 1970s, was filled with crumbling and decaying buildings. Arson was rampant. In some neighborhoods, whole blocks were empty. I see the same thing in parts of Baltimore today (and have since the 1970s). Harlem was like that in the late 1970s. Large segments of Connecticut cities were like that. Perhaps Holyoke and Springfield are like that today (I don’t know either city well enough to say).
I agree that Boston is well on its way to complete gentrification. I’m not sure I see that as a bad thing, at least in comparison to the Boston I moved to in 1974.
As I observed upthread, it seems to me that issue that remains is the disproportionate impact of this gentrification on minority communities.
Chicago demolished its public housing and put up mixed income neighborhoods and gentrified many of it’s slums. The problem is, those displaced by these changes moved to many lower income suburbs that could not handle them and had fewer services. Gentrifying cities accompanied by suburban poverty is becoming a more and more common place phenomenon. These smaller cities like Dolton, Harvey, or Maywood have become failed states.
Once predominately white communities like Randolph, Brockton, and to a lesser extent Waltham, Quincy and Braintree are also seeing the early signs of the effects this kind of exodus has. Ferguson and it’s issues are largely an extreme microcosm of this effect when a formerly white suburb takes on a more impovershed and minority composed population. And Merrimackguy is exactly right to point out that integration that is too swift or sudden will lead to white flight, property devaluation, and school decline.
All the more reason to spread affordable housing in many communities, reform our school funding so it’s less reliant on property taxes, and repeal Prop 2 1/2. If anything, affordable housing and zoning reform can channel some free market energies and use them to effect positive social and economic changes while mitigating against displacement and increasing affordability.
are not almost entirely open. They are segregated by class. The enforcement mechanism is what kind of housing there is available.