Housing Segregation Research Articles

Recent Research on Racial Segregation and Poverty Concentration in Public Housing in the United States

Newly available data reveal that despite a recent decline in public sector housing segregation, the majority of black American public housing residents live in poor, racially isolated neighborhoods and white tenants typically live in less isolated neighborhoods. These patterns are influenced by overall residential segregation and public housing authority characteristics.

The Role of Governmental Policies in Promoting Residential Segregation in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area

Dennis R. Judd, Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis* This article explains how local, state, and federal governments have exacerbated or failed to take steps to reduce residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area since the District Court's 1981 decision in Liddell v. Board of Education The court ruled then that both the policies of the city school board and governmental housing policies had contributed to racial segregation in the city's schools. The author presents a comprehensive review of socioeconomic and political issues related to housing segregation in the St. Louis region, and offers five corrective actions to facilitate fair housing practices, policies, and enforcement in the region. INTRODUCTION In the 1977 Craton Liddell et al. v. the Board of Education of the City of St. Louis, Missouri et al. trial, the board of education (BOE) of the city of St. Louis argued that racial imbalance in that city's schools existed because of resegregative factors associated with governmental housing policies, and not because of school policies administered by the school board. In rejecting this argument in 1981, the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ruled that the policies of the school board contributed to racial segregation in the schools. The court also recognized that governmental housing policies had played an important contributing role, basing its conclusions in this regard primarily on the report of its independent housing expert, Gary Orfield.1 Orfield's comprehensive 153-page report, submitted on April 21, 1981, provided strong that federally assisted housing has, over time, tended to resegregate African American populations. The court subsequently ordered the state of Missouri, the United States, the city of St. Louis, and the BOE to develop a plan to ensure that housing programs would facilitate school desegregation. Though such a plan was drawn up, the state of Missouri refused to participate, and the plan was never implemented. Nearly two decades later, federally assisted housing yields the same effect, despite changes in policies at the federal level. The long-term pattern of local resistance to racial integration in the St. Louis region has continued unchanged. Governments at all levels have continued to pursue policies that have promoted racial segregation in housing, in St. Louis and elsewhere, and they have failed to enact policies that would have the effect of reducing such segregation. The effect of this governmental complicity and inaction is that the St. Louis metropolitan area remains highly segregated. The conditions of residential segregation documented in 1981 persist to this day. As in the past, segregation in housing continues to amplify school not only in St. Louis but across the nation. Because racial segregation in the schools is directly related to patterns of residential schools in the St. Louis metropolitan area, in many urban areas in the United States, remain highly segregated. In this article, I demonstrate how, local, state, and federal governments have continued to exacerbate or have failed to take steps to reduce residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area since the District Court's 1981 decision. I also present a comprehensive review of the socioeconomic and political issues related to housing in the St. Louis region, and offer five corrective actions to facilitate fair housing practices, policies, and enforcement across city and county lines. THE LIDDELL CASE In reaching its initial decision in Liddell, the District Court identified St. Louis as an example of 'severe' residential segregation, and noted that evidence of housing segregation in St. Louis is undisputed in the record (Liddell, 1981, p. 1324). The Court further expressed its view that government policies and action have been a major force in developing and maintaining housing discrimination against blacks (p. …

Review of Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 and Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961–1991

Review of Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 and Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991 Elizabeth Garrett On a cold day in January 1992, nearly 2,000 people lined the streets ofCapitol Hill, waiting to enterthe imposing Great Hall ofthe Supreme Court building. As they filed past the coffin and official portrait of Justice Thurgood Marshall, some were silent, but many parents whispered to their children, telling them about Thurgood Marshall, sharing how his work had changed America and their lives, and describ­ ing opportunities open to them that he helped to establish and institutionalize. Many leftflow­ ers or other items before the portrait; one re­ membrance particularly captured the somewhat contradictory feelings of loss and hope that could be seen on the faces during the twelvehour vigil. One mourner left behind a copy of the petitioners’ briefin Brown v. Board ofEdu­ cation with the following inscription at the top: “We will always remember.” Two recent books by Mark V. Tushnet, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitu­ tional Law at Georgetown University Law School, ensure that we will continue to learn from Marshall’s work, both as an advocate and ajurist. In the first, and more substantial, book, Making Civil Rights Law, ProfessorTushnet, a law clerk of Justice Marshall during the Su­ preme Court’s 1972Term, focuses on Marshall’s years as the lead civil rights lawyer for the Na­ tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The second vol­ ume, Making ConstitutionalLaw, describes the development of several constitutional issues during the nearly twenty-four years Thurgood Marshall served as the first African-American Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Neither of these books is a bi­ ography of Justice Marshall; rather, they both TUSHNETONTHURGOODMARSHALL 141 At a 1945 conference convened by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP devised a strategy for attacking racially restrictive covenants and housing segregation ordinances. They also hoped to educate the public about the problem and force legislative change. deal with the public policies, litigation strate­ gies, and legal principles that Marshall shaped as attorney and judge. As Tushnet writes in the preface to his first volume, “Thurgood Marshall’s work as a civil rights lawyer pro­ vides the main line of my discussion, but I also deal with litigation that did not involve Marshall directly. Marshall’s career, though, shows what the work of civil rights litigation was, and the length and depth of his involvement in civil rights litigation provides an opportunity to ex­ plore the ambiguities that characterized the ef­ fort to transform civil rights through litigation.”1 In short, Marshall is the unifying theme of the books, but his life and character are not their sole, or even primary, focus. Making Civil Rights Law describes and analyzes modern public interest litigation (or litigation aimed at reforming major social and political institutions) as the practice was devel­ oped by Marshall and others at the NAACP who “constructed the job of [the] civil rights lawyer.”2 Unlike other books on civil rights litigation, notably Richard Kluger’s excellent Simple Justice,3 Tushnet does not deal only with the education cases, but he tries instead to give an in-depth picture of the varied caseload of the NAACP and the relationships among the many issues Marshall and the group tackled. Although a study of the education cases—beginning with those attacking inequi­ table teacher salaries, continuing through those seeking to eliminate segregation in higher edu­ cation, and culminating with Brown and its im­ mediate aftermath—involves more than halfof the first volume, Tushnet also discusses the NAACP’s involvement in defending blacks in criminal cases, attacking restrictive covenants and other discriminatory housing policies, and dismantling white political primaries and other 142 JOURNAL 1997,VOL. D schemes used to deprive African-Americans of their right to vote. His objective is to give readers an understanding of the breadth of the civil rights agenda and ofthe difficulties inher­ ent in such wide-ranging litigation, a goal that he ably meets. His topical organization contributes to this achievement, but it can obscure the fact that cases in all these...

The anti-apartment movement in the U.S. and the role of land use regulations in creating housing segregation

In the U.S., typically, poor and minority households are concentrated in central cities, which are ringed by middle class suburbs which contain a majority of the population of the metropolitan area. The resulting segregation is largely the outcome of public policy and institutional arrangements, rather than the excesses of a free market.

Race Still Matters

Two techniques are used to examine the extent to which racial housing segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area in 1990 is attributable to income and housing cost differences between African-Americans and whites. Measurement of segregation within household-income categories revealed that, at all income levels, African-Americans and whites with similar incomes are about as segregated as African-Americans and whites overall. Indirect standardizations based on housing cost and tenure reveal that if those were the only causes of segregation, African-Americans and whites would be far less segregated than they are. The proportion of segregation attributable to such differences is even lower in 1990 than in past censuses.

Housing and the Justification of School Segregation

The intense attack on court-ordered busing rests largely on the public belief that the courts are artificially interfering with normal neighborhoods and communities. A central premise in the early Supreme Court decisions was, however, that the courts were attempting to correct violations with deep roots in both school and housing discrimination. When the Court later decided to limit and then to permit termination of desegregation, however, fundamentally different conclusions about housing were relied on-that housing segregation simply happened for some unknowable reason or that it was a natural force, separate from schools, that courts could do nothing about. The changing conception of housing, often reached with little or no empirical basis, has provided a principal grounds for judicial acceptance of segregated education. To determine whether or not court-ordered desegregation in urban areas is needed, justifiable, and feasible, courts must reach decisions about urban residential segregation and its relationship to schools. The radical change in the Supreme Court's understanding of the relationship between school and housing segregation between the early 1970s and the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley' decision, which brought an end to significant increases in desegregation and locked in the isolation of minority students in the metropolitan North, provided a key element in the justification of a constitutional policy that made desegregation a right without a remedy in the metropolitan North, where virtually all major cities have large majorities of nonwhite students who attend segregated and inferior schools. The Milliken decision, blocking desegregation in the North, and the 1991 and 1992 decisions, Board of Education v. Dowell2 and Freeman v. Pitts,3 permitting resegregation of southern school districts, rest to a considerable degree on court findings about housing segregation, theories that changed drastically as the courts moved from requiring all-out urban desegregation within school

Living conditions and health. A population-based study of labour migrants and Latin American refugees in Sweden and those who were repatriated.

To examine whether there are differences in living conditions and self-rated health between South European labour migrants and Latin American refugees and those who were repatriated to Latin America. Analysis of data from a survey (face-to-face interviews) in 1991 of 338 Latin American refugees and 60 repatriated refugees. A random sample of 161 South European and 396 Finnish labour migrants from the Swedish Annual Level-of-Living Surveys 1980-1981 and 1988-89 was analysed. A random sample of 1,159 age-, sex- and education-matched Swedes served as controls. Lund, a medium-sized town in southern Sweden, Santiago and Montevideo, capitals of Chile and Uruguay, respectively, and Sweden. Labour migrants and refugees in particular lived in rented flats while Swedes lived in privately-owned one-family homes. All immigrants and in particular repatriated Latin Americans had low material standard and meagre economic resources compared with Swedes. Being a Latin American refugee, a South European or Finnish labour migrant were independent risk indicators of self-rated poor health in logistic regression (multivariate analyses). Not feeling secure in everyday life and poor leisure opportunities were independent risk factors for poor health with an estimated odds ratio of 3.13(2.09-4.45) and 1.57(1.22-2.00), respectively. This study shows a clear ethnic segregation in housing and other living conditions between Swedes and immigrants, where Latin American refugees and repatriated Latin Americans were most vulnerable. All immigrants had increased self-rated poor health compared with Swedes. Being an immigrant was a risk factor for poor health of equal importance to more traditional risk factors such as lifestyle factors.

Social Rented Housing: Valuable Asset or Unsustainable Burden?

The Netherlands has maintained a high degree of intervention in the housing market through the 1980s. It also has a very large social rented sector which comprises 40 per cent of the total housing stock. The housing market regulation and the construction of large quantities of non-profit housing have created a stable level of production of new dwellings and an affordable housing stock. The large social rented sector offers shelter to a large population of low-income households; but it also accommodates many median and high-income groups, thereby avoiding extreme forms of housing segregation. Housing subsidies are a heavy burden on the national budget. A process of financial disengagement of the national government and the housing associations has been started. This will increase the independence of the non-profit housing sector from the political process, but will also lead to higher financial risks for the associations and more instability in this sector.

The social complexity of the public housing sector in Swedish metropolitan areas

Like many other European and North American countries, concern has been expressed recently in Sweden about the physical deterioration and social segregation of public housing, especially flats built during the Million Programme of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The major objectives of this study were to identify the specific nature of public sector bousing differentiation in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo, to determine groups of similar housing areas and to evaluate the results in the context of hypotheses that have been advanced for explaining social segregation within public sector housing. The major data source was the 1985 Swedish census. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were used to evaluate social differentiation within the public housing stock. The results indicated a high level of social segmentation in the public rental sector. Based on these results, it was possible to develop a composite spatial model of the social mosaic of public sector housing. The constrained choice hypothesis was jud...

Towards the comparative exploration of public housing segregation in England and the United States

Abstract This paper is an exploration of the treatment of racial minorities by public sector housing agencies in Britain and the United States over the last several decades, with the objective of describing empirical and policy differences and similarities. Public housing programmes in each country have been, at differing points in time, important cornerstone's of the welfare state but each has become a residualised sector of the housing delivery system. In the context of such residualisation, the key issue to consider is whether British council housing is likely to reproduce the patterns of racial segregation, impoverishment, and discrimination which are endemic in the American public housing system. A variety of administrative agency reports and data, court cases, as well as case studies of race and public housing policies in the US and England have been used in this paper (Smith and Whalley, 1975; Commission for Racial Equality seriatim; Hirsch, 1983; Bauman, 1987; Department of the Environment; Smith,...

Racial and Income Segregation in Low-Income Housing: 1934-1992

Racial and Income Segregation in Low-Income Housing: 1934-1992

The Fractured Metropolis: Political Fragmentation and Metropolitan Segregation. Gregory R. Weiher;Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States. Elizabeth Huttman, editor, Juliet Saltman and Wim Blauw, co-editors

(1993). The Fractured Metropolis: Political Fragmentation and Metropolitan Segregation. Gregory R. Weiher; Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States. Elizabeth Huttman, editor, Juliet Saltman and Wim Blauw, co-editors. Urban Geography: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 108-110.

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States.Elizabeth D. Huttman , Wim Blauw , Juliet Saltman

<i>Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States.</i>Elizabeth D. Huttman , Wim Blauw , Juliet Saltman

Book Review: Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States

Book Review: Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States.

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States.

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States. Edited by Elizabeth Huttman, Juliet Saltman, and Wim Blauw. Duke University Press, 1991. 431 pp. $59.95

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States. Edited by Elizabeth Huttman, Juliet Saltman, and Wim Blauw. Duke University Press, 1991. 431 pp. $59.95

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States.

This book provides an expert examination and comparison of housing segregation in major population centers in the United States and Western Europe and analyzes successes and failures of government policies and desegregation programs in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and West Germany. The collection begins with a review of the historical development of housing segregation in these countries, describing current housing conditions, concentration of housing in each country's leading cities, minority populations and the housing they occupy-specifically public, nonprofit, and owner-occupied dwellings. When focusing on the United States, the contributors assess housing segregation, antisegregation measures, and institutional racism toward blacks in the Midwest and South, and toward Mexican-Americans throughout American cities. Chapters dealing with Western Europe include housing segregation of South Asian and West Indian immigrants in Britain, immigrants in Sweden, Turkish, and Yugoslav guest workers in West Germany, and Algerian and other Arab groups in France. The book concludes with discussions of public housing policies; suburban desegregation, resegregation, and integration maintenance programs; specific integration stabilization programs; and desegregation efforts in one specific place. Contributors. Elizabeth Huttman, Michal Arend, Cihan Arin, Maurice Blanc, Wim Blauw, Ger Mik, Clyde McDaniels, Jurgen Friedrichs, Hannes Alpheis, John M. Goering, Len Gordon, Albert Mayer, Rosemary Helper, Barry V. Johnston, Terry Jones, Valerie Karn, Goran Lindberg, Anna Lisa Linden, Deborah Phillips, Dennis Keating, Juliet Saltman, Alan Murie

Handbook of Housing and Built Environment in the United States. Elizabeth Huttman and Willem van Vliet, editors, andGovernment and Housing: Developments in Seven Countries. Willem van Vliet and Jan van Weesep, editors, andAffordable Housing and the Homeless. Jurgen Friedrichs, editor,Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World. Jorge E. Hardoy and David Satterthwaite;People, Power and Place: Perspectives on Anglo-American Politics.

<i>Handbook of Housing and Built Environment in the United States</i>. Elizabeth Huttman and Willem van Vliet, editors, and<i>Government and Housing: Developments in Seven Countries</i>. Willem van Vliet and Jan van Weesep, editors, and<i>Affordable Housing and the Homeless</i>. Jurgen Friedrichs, editor,<i>Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World</i>. Jorge E. Hardoy and David Satterthwaite;<i>People, Power and Place: Perspectives on Anglo-American Politics</i>.

Public housing desegregation: What are the options?

Abstract This paper examines policy and programmatic options for the desegregation of low‐income public housing. Desegregation is a strategy for relocating public housing residents or units to communities that offer a better quality of life. This paper considers the likelihood of achieving desegregation, given the factors that created segregation, by exploring the role of past and present policies and programs in producing segregation and the effects of efforts to ameliorate it. The major finding is that public housing segregation is firmly entrenched in many major cities, and attempts to reverse it have produced marginal changes. Although the federal government has ceased to play a major role in perpetuating racial segregation, it has not taken a strong, consistent, and clear stand on desegregation policy. Some innovative desegregation programs with promising outcomes are currently under way, but it is unlikely that public housing segregation will be abated in the future.

Urban housing segregation of minorities in Western Europe and the United States

Urban housing segregation of minorities in Western Europe and the United States