Housing

Panelists:
John Calmore, Loyola Law School
Nancy Denton, SUNY-Albany
Ed Goetz, University of Minnesota
Robert Liberty, 1000 Friends of Oregon, Livable Futures Coalition
John Lukehart, Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities

Moderator:
Mike Anderson, Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing (MICAH)

Mike Anderson

The debate between mobility strategies and community development as ways to address concentrated poverty should be replaced with creative strategizing about the respective roles of each. Both strategies are important, and one should not be considered over the other. The central question is how to fundamentally address the issue of poverty.

John Calmore

In Los Angeles, we have various people of color living together: Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and others. Building better relations among these communities of color is a prerequisite to creating viable communities. A twenty-fifth anniversary report on the Watts civil disorders of 1965, which appeared before the Los Angeles disorders of 1992, indicated that both were predictable by the conditions in the communities. In the report, one person commented that there had continued to be a rage and frustration in the African-American community. The "riots" never really ended, they just became more quiet. It went on to say that even so mainstream an organization as the NAACP had an annual meeting at which police brutality against blacks was cited as the most pressing concern among the Association members. Also noted in the report was a new conflict between African Americans and Latinos.

The African-American community however, was described not as being in chaos, but as turning inward, uniting around common issues at the grassroots level. Too often, those who favor integration, almost integration at any cost, do so by deprecating the black community, by showing you a place that is unlivable, and thereby buttressing the argument that we have to disperse that community. Melvin Oliver, a sociologist at UCLA, reported one year after the Los Angeles uprising that "In spite of joblessness, poverty, and tense interethnic relations, moribund, stagnant organizations that had lost their way have been reinvigorated by the flames that engulfed their communities. New organizations have sprung up to give hope to the disenfranchised and alienated."

My quarrel with dispersal is that it tends to be tokenistic and gradualistic. Because of an intolerance for people of color in substantial numbers, it tends to maintain a white dominance: it is the incoming blacks or Latinos who have to do the adjusting in those communities. Whatever strategies we use to address poverty and further societal inclusiveness, there are several imperatives on which we can agree: (1) move the socially and economically isolated out of poverty (2) reduce injustice against people of color and (3) facilitate positive relations among people of color.

One of the most important things for us to do is to facilitate better human relations--no grand theory here, something simple that most of us take for granted. When we come together, we may disagree, but we won't shoot each other or beat each other up. There are too many places now where that cannot taken for granted. Intergroup relations are not just a problem in Los Angeles, but the problem is particularly acute there. A group called the Multicultural Collaborative is addressing the need for interethnic cooperation, collaboration, and coalition among people of color. Members are a cross-section of community service and advocacy organizations, working under seven Principles of Equity:

1. We firmly believe that no single ethnic or racial group can claim exclusive ownership of any geographic area in Los Angeles, and that equity and social justice for all groups can only be achieved by working across racial and ethnic lines.

2. We agree that improvements in intergroup relations must be linked to social justice.

3. We believe that only in reshaping the debate around issues of access to power, resources, and economic well- being will multicultural cooperation be possible.

4. We believe that positive relations between racial, ethnic, and religious groups must be achieved through coalition building and collaboration.

5. We agree that bold, progressive models of human relations must be asserted forcefully and enacted aggressively by all sectors of society.

6. We affirm the need to develop indigenous community leadership while promoting both intra and intergroup organizing and empowerment.

7. We reject methods of organizing which scapegoat other groups and use ethnocentrism and xenophobia as a basis for action.

In places not as diverse as Los Angeles, these principles might apply for having blacks and whites get along. Finally, I certainly believe in integration; I just wonder what you do in the meantime on behalf of those left behind before we get there.

Ed Goetz

The choice between gilding the ghetto and deconcentrating is a false one. The debate is counter-productive because both initiatives are needed, and both have successes. We need to emphasize the successes of each. Deconcentration is a policy being promoted in the Twin Cities, but it must not be the sole solution, because it ignores the aging housing stock in the center cities. Increases in affordable housing in the suburbs can be entirely absorbed by people already living there. The discourse around deconcentration provides an out for public officials and neighborhood groups within the central cities who can say they have done their fair share and that the suburbs should do more.

Focusing on deconcentration as a policy objective delegitimizes the work of community development corporations in the central cities. It links unhealthy communities and subsidized housing in people's minds. It puts forth the idea of exporting the problem to the suburbs, which is the opposite of the community development model. It undermines CDC efforts and feeds suburban opposition. We need to be very careful when we make claims about the effects of deconcentration and community development. Programs for deconcentration have not been evaluated for their impact on Chicago neighborhoods. There have not been studies to look at whether Gautreaux has made city neighborhoods better. The studies of Gautreaux have focused on the impact it has had on individual families.

The debate and discourse should be around housing rights and housing choice, not about healthy communities. Looking at these rights gets past the false debate between deconcentration and community development and alters the terms of the regional debate about fair share housing away from community impacts and the fears of suburban areas, and toward rights and the obligations of a just society.

John Lukehart

The Leadership Council has been doing practical work in fair housing--expanding housing opportunities--since the mid-'60s. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Chicago in 1966 and focused on housing because of a history of discrimination and segregation in the city. There were marches in neighborhoods that were hostile or closed to blacks and protests at realty offices. The religious community convened meetings with business and political leadership and formed the Leadership Council, with a mission of promoting open housing and ending the slums. The legal action program at the Council works with 200 cases per year, and has handled over 1500 cases in its history. The Council also conducts testing and brings violations to the federal court to remedy the rights of individuals and send a message to realtors and bankers that these offenses can be expensive. There is also a Fair Housing Center for blacks and Latinos who have the financial resources to have considerable choice, to provide information to help them exercise that choice. Choice is the underlying motivation for the Center, which sees 1700 clients per year.

The issue of mobility is important to the Council, which has operated the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program for about twenty years. The program came out of a suit against the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), which showed that tenant and site selection was racially discriminatory and segregative. Part of the relief is that the CHA can only build scattered site housing. Additionally, public housing residents are given Section 8 vouchers to use in non-segregated areas. Over 6500 families have moved through the program, and it has documented many positive experiences.

Although Gautreaux has had success, as reported most notably by researchers from Northwestern University, other mobility programs have reported problems in implementation. Moving to Opportunity, designed as a research project, is based on poverty rather than race, and it has had many problems. It is driven by evaluators and researchers and requires that control groups be left out of the program to monitor impact. The Council has ethical problems with deliberately not helping some people. Another problem is that the Chicago Housing Authority has not been cooperative.

Nancy Denton

The false dichotomy between community development and deconcentration initiatives emerges because advocates are competing for scarce resources available for poor people. A mobility component is, however, crucial to whatever policy is proposed. These projects may be regarded as tokenism, and Gautreaux was not funded to a level at which it could have affected the extremely high poverty neighborhoods in the central city; but CDCs can also be criticized for tokenism. They do not have enough impact to turn around neighborhoods and must work very hard to achieve what the middle-class take for granted, as described in the book, Streets of Hope. The book chronicles two years of the work of a Boston CDC, in which, while the group does valuable community development, it does not develop any new housing.

Our fundamental goal remains to help poor people, particularly people of color, have better living conditions and free choice. It can sound as if the goal is to force people to the suburbs, but the Gautreaux program receives 10,000 calls per year, while it can only even screen 2000 people per year into the program. There is high demand for these mobility programs, and it is just as real as the demand of other people not to move. Mobility programs have also led to several outcomes which community development might not be able to have. They increase contact and dialogue between people of different backgrounds, who may have very little information on which to make preference decisions. We are currently asking people their preferences in a real estate market that is highly segregated. Mobility also helps in the ultimate goal of decreasing the number of places to which people can flee. The extent to which people volunteer to participate in mobility, and every community has some diversity creates a long-term strategy to break up the current situation.

There are three ways to revitalize central cities: some of the poor can leave, some of the poor can become not poor, or people who are not poor can move in. The interaction that mobility programs foster will better prepare people to move in. In regard to choice, we need to decide if people have a right to live wherever they would like to and can afford to live. If we value choice, then anyone can live next door to anyone else. The presence of segregated communities now does point up inequality of resources, but solving the problems of segregated neighborhoods is more than a question of equity of resources within neighborhoods. It is also a question of how resources are allocated and how the social structure is set up in the larger society. Integration is probably a prerequisite to changing these.

Robert Liberty

Portland is not a utopia. There exists high segregation with respect to African Americans and Latinos, and it is a poorer metropolitan region than the Twin Cities; but it has progressive politics and a pragmatic outlook. The Portland area has a housing choice/mobility strategy mandated by nineteen state land-use planning goals, which must be implemented through all local land-use plans. Goal 10 refers to housing under the law and states that cities must provide for housing needs, and that local plans must allow flexibility of housing location, type, and density, and clear and objective housing regulations which do not have the effect of discouraging needed housing. Needed housing is defined as single and multifamily housing, and government assisted housing. Cities and counties cannot amend their charters to override the state law and the law is enforceable. "Local control" is not sacrosanct. The City of Hillsboro tried to hide behind its charter, but the effort failed in court. Metropolitan Portland has density targets for its housing (six, eight, or ten units per buildable acre; 50 percent being attached single or multi-family). Goal 10 is anti-exclusionary. It does not address financing for assisted housing. Between 1979 and 1982, there was massive rezoning of all the cities in the Metro area. In 1979, the maximum number of residential units zoned was 129,000. In 1982, it was 301,000, an increase of 350 percent in three years. The minimum lot size decreased from 12,800 to 8200 square feet. Almost all of the cities hit their 50 percent multi-family housing targets. We were told it couldn't be done, but it was done.

Housing costs were low until the early 1990s. Portland now has the sixth least affordable housing market. Housing is still less expensive than in Seattle and San Francisco, but the incomes in the area are also lower, so the housing is less affordable. The affordable housing issue is growing. Portland's Metro Council is putting together a regional urban growth goal, and objectives for affordable housing types and their costs, as part of our effort to contain Portland's growth over the next twenty years to within our current urban growth boundary.

There is indirect urban revitalization taking place in Portland because of its fixed urban growth boundary. There is consensus not to expand the boundary through the year 2020 and downtown is expected to gain jobs. It is gaining jobs now, even compared with the outer areas, which is happening in only one other city in the country. However, with this redevelopment is coming rising housing costs and gentrification.

Question and Answer Session

Question: Isn't it unfair to criticize Gautreaux as not impacting the community when it was meant to be people focused, not place focused?

Goetz: Yes, but people do tend to hold community development to that standard. CDCs are expected to reverse regional economic trends or be called failures. That seems equally unfair.

Lukehart: Gautreaux may be a Frankenstein. The Clinton administration has moved its assisted housing efforts to certificates and vouchers, based in part on that experience. We have developed projections of the number of vouchers needed, and the private market will not meet the need. Housing development is also needed, particularly in high job-growth areas. We are doing advocacy of economically and racially inclusive redevelopment in city neighborhoods, as part of the work that's needed.

Question: Assisted housing was built incorrectly. We should look at townhouses like those in Scandinavia.

Lukehart: That is certainly right. There were people at the time who said these big complexes were a mistake.

Denton: The European model is a good comparison. Also, in relation to neighborhood effects of Gautreaux, it can be hard to gauge positive impact on a community that is composed almost entirely of huge housing complexes filled, by definition, with very low-income people.

Question: The dominant paradigm has to do with an individual-based process, which is troubling because of the issues it raises about the cultural appropriateness of the model. We are not treated as individuals; we are treated as a group. The socialization process an individual might have gone through must be taken into account. I'm concerned about the way the dominant paradigm is being used to control the rate and pace of change.

Denton: We have not spent enough time talking about culture and community. We have developed different cultures partly because of segregation. We are also working from an outmoded idea of community, which is not now as small as it once was. One's immediate surroundings must be free of crime and drugs, and there must be good schools and a good environment, yet one's community might otherwise be conceived of as the whole metropolitan region.

Gary Orfield: Preferences can be deceptive, because the preferences one expresses at the beginning of a Gautreaux-type program are probably not the same as at the end. In the South, when school desegregation began, 15 percent of whites supported it. Now, 85 percent of whites support it. It was the change in reality that changed the attitudes. There are lots of signs that support for these changes is potentially large. We have been in an extremely structured set of choices up until now, and there are possibilities for major changes with different policies.

Lukehart: It is clear that the issue of choice is complex. We need to build in an affirmative component providing information about choices.

Question: If you break up black neighborhoods through deconcentration initiatives, what happens to black political power?

Denton: Unless the program breaks up the neighborhood tremendously overnight, it does not break up the power. It could increase the power by having more blacks elected in multiracial areas. It only takes a simple majority to elect someone. Blacks now have only 3 percent representation, while making up 12 percent of the population. The reason is that segregation concentrates those votes in a few places.

Anderson: John Calmore, you're shaking your head. Would you like to add something?

Calmore: I guess I'll just leave it at that.