The One-Way Street of Integration

Abstract

The book examines two contrasting housing policy approaches to achieving racial justice. Integration initiatives and community development efforts have for decades constituted contrasting means of achieving racial equity through housing policy. The book traces the tensions between these two approaches as they have been manifest in different ways since the 1940s. The core argument is that fair housing advocates have adopted a spatial strategy of advocacy that has increasingly brought it into conflict with community development efforts. The book presents a critique of integration efforts of fair housing for targeting settlement patterns while ignoring underlying racism and issues of economic and political power. In the pursuit of regional equity and racial justice, causes that both sides of the integration / community development dispute claim as important, it is the community development movement that has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and social justice efforts.